People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

Searching tells me that CPM is typically between $1 and $10. That implies ad income per site view of $0.001-$0.01, right? The fact that clicks are worth $1, or even $100, is irrelevant. What matters is ad income divided by site views. If every viewer paid that price, enforced by a paywall, the owner would earn as much as they had from ads.

There's Google Contributer, which lets you pay several pennies per article rather than see ads. It could work if existing ad networks let you opt out of ads and cover the display impressions.

Edit: It also shows you pictures of cats instead of ads - http://i.imgur.com/v3jSqyg.png

Major news organisation provide a couple of paragraphs about the latest development and the interesting part is not the journalists opinion, but what the thousands of people reading the article have to say about it.

This holds for good sites, for e.g. youtube and some others - the comments are mostly worthless.

It's said often you are more likely to survive an air crash than click on an ad.

By the way, the fact that you have to be mildly stupid or technologically illiterate to really be clicking on ads is the proverbial pink elephant in the room. To further extend this reasoning, building up stupidity and lessening tech literacy is actually functional to Facebook's and Google's business models.

UK and USA were the worst for clicks, the rest of Europe a little higher, and apparently in the Far East everyone clicks everything multiple times. Click through rates were ridiculous.

Also interesting to note that despite being online and profitable for yearss they never did find a way of making Facebook pay, in any nation.

We never did make sense of it!

But, to be honest, they're always Likeing some junk they found in an ad or a survey or "10 ways to do something" junk article. So, fair enough.

I've now made it a sport to click, after I accidentally clicked, another few dozen times. Kinda like Cookie Clicker.

Most clicks are accidental, or people doing fraud (for business or fun reasons)

These advertisements add value to me and the site owner, and while I don't like them, I do not mind them if they are appropriately done and non intrusive.

I don't give a crap about the latest clash o clans rip-off, and if you advertise that to me you're hurting your CTR.

Google knows what you're after, right now.

Facebook knows what you're into, in general.

PayPal/Stripe know your propensity to spend money online.

I would argue that the perfectly targeted ad will want to know about all of these. Google's data & mechanism (search) is probably the most useful; there's a pretty good chance someone searching "where to buy X" is looking to buy X. Combined with purchase data and personal preference data, the ability to target would seem near-perfect. Not only would you know whether the user is likely to buy X online, but you would also know what brand of X they might be interested in (eg. if they liked "Dell"), where they would prefer to purchase it from (eg. if they liked "Amazon"), and what bundling might appeal (eg. if they liked "Logitech").

For some people, this is the nightmare scenario. All these big companies putting together their data to algorithmically know what a consumer will buy before the consumer knows what they will buy. I'm with you, though. I think it would make advertising a lot less annoying, especially if it leads away from "we need your attention!" video ads into hyper-targeted text & images.

The underlying assumption, though, is that advertising companies would be more successful if targeting were better. Undoubtedly, a segment of their audience would be in much higher demand than they are now. I suspect that a lot of other segments would be in much lower demand, though. Would Emirates bid as high on Google for "holidays in Europe" if they knew I had never spent online, was elderly, and liked "Cruises" on Facebook?

I learned from an early age that every single ad was essentially evil. All of it was a trick to get me to click something I did not want. Maybe, if they hadn't done that (and if they had ever really stopped... cause they haven't) I wouldn't have Privacy Bader, uBlock, and Disconnect running all at once.

In the beginning all I had wanted to do was get actual information on a topic or download the latest version of something for Windows. And every time I see someone not running highly aggressive adblockers I can understand why they think somethings on the internet are so complicated. "Just google it" -> "Yea, and click which irrelevant ad which takes up the whole first fold of the page on my not Retina MBP?"

Frankly, your comment reads as someone whose livelihood depends on advertising.

Some ads are pushing adware, malware or worse, for sure. And some AdSense ads are designed to look like search results, to trick people looking for Chrome or whatever. But even honest ads are designed to trick us into buying stuff that we hadn't planned on. Or to trick us into impulse buying, without proper research, reading product reviews, asking friends, and so on.

You made a good guess. Is that something to brag about? An opinion that you feel the need to "constantly explain to people" borders on ranting... (an embarassing past-time of my own)

He said that everyone at their company used Adblock, to the point where it was part of their developers' standard checklist when debugging issues that their clients were having ("first, disable Adblock").

I've clicked on ads like that.

I don't know, but I wouldn't think so. I don't use ad-blockers (never have), and I don't click many ads. I go around them or close them, but for the most part have learned to ignore them. The only ads I click on are targeted ads that are relevant to my interests. I would think that technical people are less likely to be duped into clicking them, but I wouldn't attribute it to ad-blockers.

Reflecting on how I act, even back in the day "before ad-blockers", even if I saw an ad that seemed to link me to the place I wanted to go, I wouldn't click on it.

Instead I would open up a new window/tab, actively go to a search engine, search for the website/company/product I was interested in visiting (perhaps the one mentioned in the link/ad) and enter via their website/front door.

I think this is a behaviour I've picked up from the historically learning that banners/popups are just BAD NEWS...no exceptions. Like powerpoints, attachments or strange emails, I just have ingrained in me these things are not to be trusted and to not engage with them. Who knew where they're really taking you with their redirects, what they're doing, if they're really sending you where they say they are, or whether there's some hijack/virus/whatever. Back in the day, they were just generally something delivered from the seedier side of the internet: something to be avoided.

Nowdays, the seedier/annoying side of the internet has of course become the mainstream, but that's why we have ad-blockers.

I'm curious to know though, if I'm the only person who, through their own behaviour/history/preference, has been trained to go straight to the company/source/product rather than through an ad even when its presented to us...