The drawback to traditional forms of on page website advertising is that they either quickly became bypassed by website visitors because they were easily recognizable as ads, or they were too “in your face” and downright annoying, which engendered the opposite to the desired effect, and could actually send people away from your website.

A second generation of popups  post free classified ads came along referred to as dhtml popups. These do not open a new window, but rather overlay either an image (for note popups) or a dynamic HTML frame over the existing browser session. Most of these cannot be blocked, but some people are still put off by the intrusive nature of something flying in or appearing over the text that they are trying to read.

Corporations with large advertising budgets started experimenting with a new form of on page advertising known as “peel pages” or “page peel ads”. Originally these were created by advertising agencies and were only seen on high profile websites which were expensive to advertise on. But in 2007, this technology became affordable even for home based webmasters with the apparition of a handful of do-it-yourself peel page ad packages priced below the $100 mark.

Page peel ads are now appearing on many websites for the simple reason that they work. Unlike a popup, they are not “in your face” and do not block or detract from the rest of the content on a webpage. They display a small animated peel ad in either the top left or right corner of a webpage. This arouses curiosity for web visitors. A high percentage are intrigued enough to hover their mouse pointer over the peel, which then folds the page back to reveal the full ad or message that the webmaster most wants the visitor to see. A high percentage who do this will also go on to click the peel away ad because they are intrigued to see what is behind the image. Those that don’t need only move their mouse pointer away to another part of the webpage, and the peel away ad will roll back to its original small curl position in the corner of the page, leaving the visitor free to continue browsing the page they are on.

Peel ads are actually flash animations, but most of the off-the-shelf packages available don’t require you to have any knowledge of flash to implement peel pages on your website. There are generally step-by-step instructional videos included with these packages that will show you which files to upload to your server, and all that is required to add to the webpage itself is a small snippet of java code at the bottom of your page.

You can have the page curl appear in any one of the four corners on your webpage, although usually the top left of right corner will bring the best results because it is “above the fold”, which refers to the area of a webpage that a visitor sees without having to scroll down. Many visitors will in fact leave a webpage before scrolling down below the fold, which is why above the fold advertising is the most effective position.

Further, some of the peel ad scripts allow you to rotate the ads that you display. This will enable you to track and test which ad or graphic is converting best for you. Alternatively, if you are displaying paid advertising, this will allow you to display several advertisers’ ads concurrently.

You can learn more about the three generations of onsite advertising technology, and about peel page technology in particular, in our onsite article about Peel Away Ads [http://www.peelawayads.net/peel-pages.html]. You will also be able to see a sample peel ad on that page.