Flash banners are becoming more and more popular in the promotion of online marketing. As Macromedia Flash, comparatively a simple tool, can produce much complicated animation effects of very fine quality, website owners make use of flash banners very often for their online campaigns. These banners are very attractive and are able to catch the attention of the viewers’ attention quite easily. Visitors find interest in the bright colors and the moving text and images of the flash banners. The click through rate of such banners is much higher than the ordinary static banners. But it has been shown that though this type of banner enjoys a number of advantages, it has several drawbacks as well.

In the first place, leading browsers hesitate to support Flash initially since extra plug-ins is needed to view it.  And also, sometimes it happens that newer plug-ins is required to download latest versions of flash banners generated. According to statistics, majority of the users feature Microsoft Internet Explorer and most of them have only basic skills and are less likely to go for any upgrades.  I

In Macromedia Flash animated banners there is a delay set between the frames. This can be a nuisance for a visitor, especially if he/she uses not a very advanced machine. It is possible that while the web page is loading the banner also will be loading slowly denying the user to get the important information from it, because he/she may not have the patience to wait for the next frame to appear. The user will click to another page or site.

Yet another disadvantage, not only with flash banners, but with flash web site also, is that if right-clicked on a banner or on the link it does not offer a possibility to open it in another window or in the same window. This is usually a cause for annoyance, particularly when nearly around 10 or 15 windows are already opened-a new window will increase CPU usage.

But Flash banner does have certain definite advantages over the animated gif banners. Since flash banners use vector animation a large size banner occupies less memory when compared to an ordinary banner of the same size. Strictly speaking, gif animation can be successfully used only for small banners having two or three frames.

The most important favorable factor regarding flash banner is the availability of a wide range of colors it can offer. While gif format offers a very limited range of only 256 colors, too small for a decent banner, flash provides palette of much larger selection of colors, this will automatically improve the quality of the banners to the highest degree.

Finally a word, it is advisable to use flash for large size banners, such as 468x60 pixels and for pop up banners where the quality really matters. But for small animated button banners, say, 88x31 pixels, if flash is used it will have disastrous consequences.