Banner Ads

Do banner ads still work? Has anyone had
success with them?

Should I direct people to my landing page
or directly to the offer?

It depends on the offer but in a lot of cases, its always best to use a landing page rather then sending traffic directly to the offer.

In my experience with health products, a hyperlink in text or a button works much better than a banner in a landing page.
Most cases a landing page will far outwork a direct link

I think most of the people are immune to banners nowadays.
Banners are more for brand recognition for large/wealthy brands.

It depends on how you want to earn from banner ads. Are you looking for CPM or CPC? Getting approval from major ad networks may not be possible, so you need to look at other options. You can try A-Ads (instant approval) or RUNative (no requirements) for CPM. If you are looking for CPC, try AdHits, They pay up to $0.14 per click or more. These ads will be ideal for a landing page. Just provide a button for users to click to reach the destination page.

There are also a lot of ad networks out there touting header bidding. The only issue I see with this format for offering ads is every single network that can have an ad to display needs to load in the browser. As a result, some sites may take a long time to fully load. I'm assuming you are looking for something that is not Adsense?