The display advertising portion of online advertising is increasingly dominated by rich media, generally using Adobe Flash. Rich media advertising techniques make overt use of color, imagery, page layout, and other elements in order to attract the reader’s attention. Some users might consider these ads as intrusive or obnoxious, because they can distract from the desired content of a webpage. Some examples of common rich media formats and the terms of art used within the industry to describe them:

• Interstitial or Expanding ad: The display of a page of ads before the requested content.
• Floating ad: An ad which moves across the user’s screen or floats above the content.
• Expanding ad: An ad which changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage.
• Polite ad or Polite download: A method by which a large ad will be downloaded in smaller pieces to minimize the disruption of the content being viewed
• Wallpaper ad: An ad which changes the background of the page being viewed.

In addition, ads containing streaming video or streaming audio are becoming very popular with advertisers.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.