Display ads for programmatic placement

What each size is for, and where it actually appears.

These are the sizes our programmatic buying platform accepts for static display. The list comes from that platform’s own content guidelines rather than from us, which is why it is not negotiable and why it does not include several sizes you may have been sent before — a 160×600 skyscraper or a 300×50, for instance, are perfectly good banners and cannot be bought here.

Every accepted display size, with the name the trade uses, the screen it is bought on, and where on a page it appears.
Size	Called	Screen	Where it runs
320x50	Mobile banner	Phone	Stuck to the bottom of a phone screen, above the browser chrome. It is on screen the whole time somebody reads, which is why it is bought so heavily and why it can hold about four words.
320x100	Large mobile banner	Phone	The same slot at twice the height. Twice the space is the difference between a logo and a logo plus what you actually sell.
300x250	Medium rectangle	Both	The most widely traded slot on the web, and the one that appears on both desktop and phone. Sits inside the article text, a few paragraphs down, where a reader is already stopped.
336x280	Large rectangle	Desktop	The same in-article slot on publishers who allow the wider one. Thirty-six pixels of width does not sound like much and it is the difference between two lines of headline and three.
300x600	Half page	Desktop	The desktop sidebar, beside the article rather than inside it, and it usually stays put while the page scrolls. The only size with room for a list.
728x90	Leaderboard	Desktop	Across the top of a desktop page, above or just under the masthead. Wide and short: a headline and a proof point, nothing stacked.
970x250	Billboard	Desktop	The full-width slot at the top of a wide desktop page. The most room any of these gives you, and the one a reader is most likely to scroll straight past.

Static image only on this page — JPEG, PNG or WebP. The heaviest file in the set below is 99 KB at 970x250. The per-file weight ceiling and the rules for animated formats come from the platform’s guidelines and are confirmed per campaign before build. PLACEHOLDER: confirm

The same set, running in a page.

Country Boy Hardware · Cato, New York

Switch between the desktop and the phone and watch what leaves the page. Four of the seven sizes are not bought on a phone at all, and the two that only run there are the two that look least impressive on a contact sheet. That is the argument for building all seven.

Outline the ads and name the slots

5 of the seven run on a desktop page: 970x250, 728x90, 336x280, 300x250, 300x600. The two mobile banners are not bought here.

The Cayuga Almanac

Billboard970x250 · JPEG · 99 KB

Billboard advertisement, 970 by 250 pixels

Land & Season

When to pull the last cut, and what the forecast is doing to it

By the Almanac desk · Fourth week of September

The second half of the month has run four degrees warm and about an inch dry, which has pushed the last cut later than most people planned for. That is not, on its own, a problem. It becomes one the week the nights go and nobody has the ground ready.

Leaderboard728x90 · WebP · 40 KB

Leaderboard advertisement, 728 by 90 pixels

Growers working the flats either side of the county line have been splitting the difference — taking what is ready, leaving the rest, and watching the ten-day rather than the calendar. It is the correct answer and it is an expensive one, because it means going over the same ground twice.

Large rectangle336x280 · WebP · 61 KB

Large rectangle advertisement, 336 by 280 pixels

The equipment question is the one that decides it. A shop that can turn a repair around in two days makes the wait-and-see approach possible; a fortnight in a queue does not, and the people who found that out in August are the ones who cut early this month whatever the forecast said.

What follows is the usual list, with the usual caveat that it is written for a normal year and this is not one.

The Cayuga Almanac is invented and so is everything written in it. It exists to put the creatives at their real size next to text they have to compete with — the ads themselves are the delivered files, served at the exact pixel dimensions an exchange would serve them, with nothing scaled to make them look better.

Every creative, at the size it will actually be served.

Nothing below is scaled. A gallery that made all seven the same width would hide the only thing worth seeing — that the mobile banner is a sliver and the half page is a column — and that is exactly how a headline gets approved that does not fit.

7 creatives, every one shown at its real size

320x50
Mobile banner
Country Boy Hardware · WebP · 17 KB
JPEG WebP
320x100
Large mobile banner
Country Boy Hardware · WebP · 27 KB
JPEG WebP
300x250
Medium rectangle
Country Boy Hardware · WebP · 53 KB
JPEG WebP
336x280
Large rectangle
Country Boy Hardware · WebP · 61 KB
JPEG WebP
300x600
Half page
Country Boy Hardware · JPEG · 80 KB
The WebP is 106 KB here — larger than the JPEG, so the JPEG is what ships.
JPEG WebP
728x90
Leaderboard
Country Boy Hardware · WebP · 40 KB
JPEG WebP
970x250
Billboard
Country Boy Hardware · JPEG · 99 KB
The WebP is 130 KB here — larger than the JPEG, so the JPEG is what ships.
JPEG WebP

How this set was put together.

Autumn 2026 — the run into harvest and the first cold week.

Designed — Laid out by a designer, size by size. Every one of the seven is composed for its own shape rather than cropped out of a master — which is why the wide ones read left to right and the tall one stacks.

What it has to say: Three departments named on every size, so the ad answers “what do they sell” before it asks for a click. The BBB accreditation is shown because the client holds it; no rating is claimed anywhere, because a letter grade moves on its own and a hard-coded one goes stale.
Why seven files rather than one resized: A 970×250 and a 300×600 are not the same picture at different scales — one is a strip and the other is a column, and the same layout cannot work in both. Every size here is composed for its own shape: the wide ones put the offer beside the headline, the tall one stacks it underneath, and the two mobile banners drop everything except the name and one line.
Two formats, and the smaller one ships: Each size is exported as JPEG and as WebP, and the page serves whichever is genuinely smaller per file. WebP wins on five of the seven — by up to 60% on the leaderboard — and loses on 300x600 and 970x250, where it comes out about a quarter heavier. Preferring a format instead of measuring would have shipped the bigger file twice.
The whole set weighs less than one photograph: 7 creatives, 377 KB in total taking the smaller encoding of each. That matters because a display ad is downloaded before anybody has decided to look at it, and a slow creative is one that gets billed as an impression nobody saw.
What is claimed, and what is not: The BBB accreditation appears because the client holds it. No letter rating is shown anywhere — that is a separate claim which moves on its own, and a hard-coded grade goes quietly stale. The same rule we hold ourselves to in our own footer.