Banner ad file sizes

[steve0]

I have clients that need banner ads made for their advertising plans.

After soliciting some bids, I got quite a few responses..
but when I ask to see examples..
I am getting 468x60 gif banners that are over 100k in file size. (from multiple designers) with the largest being 235K!

I may be old school, but I thought anything over 20k for a non-rich media ad was deemed very big.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

[iwebgeek]

Since almost everyone uses DSL/Cable now.. I would say that 20-30k is a reasonable size. There's still dialup users.. but if your target audience doesn't have a lot of dial-up users, I'd go with 20-30.

[gowilkes]

My guess is that people are sending you uncompressed images, animation, or that they don't grasp the difference between a JPG and a GIF.

For ads, don't use BMP, TIF, or PNG files, only use JPG and GIF. If the image has a lot of solid colors (like a solid blue background), save it as a GIF; if it is more like a photo, with a lot of different colors that are spread out, save it as a JPG.

I use Paint Shop Pro 4.12 (old school, but still my favorite), and save my JPG files with 20% compression. It makes the file size a lot smaller, but you can barely tell the difference.

If you allow animation, it's going to be a bigger file size by default. I don't generally accept animated ads on my site, but have made a few exceptions with long-term advertisers.

For the most part, my ads are either 486x68 or 120x120 (depending on the section of the site), and none exceed 20kb except for the few animated ads.

[Stevie4CB]

Also, maybe they are just samples? I would ask them straight up if the final image is going to be that big.

25k is a good banner size in my opinion.

[bj]

I would *carefully* ask the question- "Are these ads the same format and quality you would make for me?" The idea being is if the person knows what they're doing they'e going to answer, "No, these are uncompressed images that have not yet been optimized." I would then ask to see web quality images and see how they handle them. I've found that a lot of people simply do not know how to use their graphics programs for web, especially if they were trained in an art school that cranks out print design weenies.

I would also check to see if the solid block color images are saved out as gif or as png indexed, and if the gradient or photographic ones are saved out as jpgs.

[lacantina]

You're right, anything non-rich media should be less than 39Kb max...if it's more, it'll cost more to serve (so less impressions for your client) as the ad will have to be served through a rich media platform.

Just ask them to reduce the file size, if they can't do it...I wouldn't give them the job in the first place!

In my experience working at an online media agency, graphic designers have never had a problem doing this...

[DrTandem1]

Banner ads are usually designed by someone other than a webmaster. Even if they are designed by a webmaster and are destined for other sites, the file size is of little consequence to the designer.

Now, if you're a webmaster receiving a banner ad for your client's site, then file size is extremely important. Unless the banner ad is the focal point of the page, I would not want one with a file size over 10kb. That is just a guideline. Regardless of whether it's broadband or dial-up, with all else being equal, the faster page wins in ecommerce.

Some sites exchange banners with other sites as a form of reciprocal linking. If you get several large banners, the page loading becomes excruciatingly long regardless of connection speed. In those cases, I would highly recommend compressing the image as much as possible while still retaining some visual quality. Also, I would only use one frame of an animated GIF for such a banner.

[minorgod]

The max file size for a Google "Image Ad" is 50k. I'd read up on the specs for whichever advertising network you will be distributing on and use their specs as your guidelines. Ideally, your ad should be as small as possible, but 50k should probably be your upper limit. When I first started doing banner ads back in the late 90's, we shot for 10k. But people expect more from a banner ad these days and if you gave most advertisers a 10k ad, they would probably complain that it's not flashy enough. It's possible to find a designer that understands how to design a good looking ad with a small file size, but most feel pressured to produce more complicated ads with animation or too many colors to compress well. You can sometimes get around this problem using Flash (Google does allow flash animated banners) but most people prefer to go with a small GIF for maximum usability with different advertising networks. You can see some examples of some bandwidth-friendly ads I did for our real estate school here if you're interested...there's both Flash and GIF and they conform to Google's "Image Ads" guidelines.

[noel_x99]

I get beautiful banner ad designs from designers (print designers) that can't just don't work on the web. Print designers who save as a JPG or GIF think they are designing "for the web".

I agree with what was said above - keep your audience in mind (especially dialup) and learn the specs of the ad network.

[texxs]

There's no reason you can't get standard animated gif's less than 30k. Even if this advert is in FLash.

Look at the ads on the pages at flashkit.com or my.yahoo, or anywhere. . . You'll see they are all less than 30k and animated (most of them).

These guys are probably print designers, and if they are they pronbably just don't understand the care that has to be taken, nor the tricks used to make animated gif's of the right file size. you can only compress an image so much. So that's probably not the issue. The issues are probably things they don't even have a clue about, like the number of colors and other things (for instance vertical stripes make for a waaay heavier file in a gif than do horizontal stripes).