In today’s day and age, the brands and publishers have a lot of different ads to choose from to fulfill their goals. But since the majority of advertisers are debating over display and native ads, you would want to select the right type of ad format as a publisher to maximize your ad revenue.

In this article, we’re going to discuss what native and display advertisements are and which one you should be choosing as a publisher.

Let’s dig in…

What Are Display Ads?

When you surf through the internet and go through different websites, you must have seen a lot of visual ads as if they’re a banner with a single image or animation. Well, that’s what a display ad is. The display ads can have many different sizes and designs and brands use them to promote the products that they’re trying to sell to the consumers.

And usually, these types of ads are served in the website spaces and advertisers and publishers try their best to show ads as similar as the niche of the website as possible.

It started in 1994 when AT & T used a banner space in the website of HotWired for the first time and started a display ad revolution. And many brands including most of the Fortune 500 brands are using display ads to increase their brand awareness and make sales.

What Are Native Ads?

Have you ever come across sponsored content while scrolling through a blog post or your news feed? Well, that’s a good example of the native ads. Native ads are usually adapted to the website or the app they’re commercialized in to look like normal content of the website or app. And the sponsored native ads even match the topic of the webpage or the app to increase engagement.

And this makes it a win-win situation for both advertisers and publishers. Coming to the scene through social media first in 2011, native ads are now a widely accepted form of digital marketing.

Native Ads Vs. Display Ads

In this ever-growing economy of this technological era, digital ads are irreplaceable. Sure, online advertisement has faced many harsh criticism every once in a while for their intruding nature, it’s still one of the most effective ways of digital marketing that brings real results for the brands and revenue for the publishers.

However, the attention span of the readers has significantly decreased over the last decade. So, in order to gain the interest of the audience, your ads need to stand out. Some brands like adobe use display ads for this while publishers like Buzzfeed or ListVerse use native ads to achieve the same results.

Of course, it would be quite difficult to choose one between these two ad types since both have their own set of pros and cons. But comparing the features and specifications of both of those ads is the only way to figure out what will work best for you as a publisher and your client or the advertiser.

Let’s see how both of them fare against each other:

Criteria	Display Ads	Native Ads
The pricing	Usually quite cheaper than native ads.	More expensive than the display ads.
The level of competition	High	Low
The Appearance	Can be distinguished from the main content of the web page.	Blends itself right within the web page.
General Placement	Top and the sidebars of the page.	Within the content copy.
CTR	Quite low since most readers usually ignore the display ads.	High since they usually match with the content of the web page.
Viewability	High if placed right.	Higher than display ads.
Purpose	Remarketing campaigns.	Driving people to product or service landing pages.

So, Which One Is Better For Your Business?

As a publisher, your goal must be to monetize your websites using the ads. And in the end, to monetize your website in the right way and maximize your revenue, you should plan on how to use different types of ad instead of deciding on just one type of advertisement model.

Use the both types of ads the right way to fill out the gaps of each kind of ads. This way, you can maximize your revenue without annoying your customers.