Interestingly, the number of the advertisement boxes does not seem to directly affect
usability. This was demonstrated through a comparison of Google Maps, which does not
display graphical advertisements, with Multimap, which includes several advertisement
boxes. According to Figure 2, Google Maps appears to be more usable for only 1% compared
with Multimap, which means that users ignore the advertisements (Nielsen, 2004). However,
many users underlined that advertisements and especially the interactive, were very disturbing
while they were trying to interpret the map. It should be also taken into consideration that a
high number of advertisement boxes can easily increase the web site’s size and therefore
increase its download time, which, in turn, increases the frustration of users while waiting a
new map tile to be downloaded.