8 percent of Internet users account for 85 percent of all ad clicks

A misleading, but very viral headline that is going to misinform a lot of people about the state of online advertising . . .

Let's look at the data:

a) "The collaborative studies focus on an understanding of how U.S. Internet users click on display ads." - so we're talking about "display" not contextual, search, mobile, or any of the other high-engagement / high-relevancy ads that are among the highest-growth areas fueling online advertising's growth?

b) The inventory available for "display advertising" has SKYROCKETED - from 2007 to 2009 thanks to the popularity of social media sites which we all know has notoriously low CTRs. Facebook alone contributed hundreds of millions of users and showed them hundreds of billions (trillions? more?) of units of display advertising during that time period.

If you want the real goods on online advertising trends I reccomend you read the PWC IAB Advertising Revenue report:

http://www.iab.net/insights_research/947883/adrevenuereport

The data reflects a much more solid foundation for sustained growth in the online advertising marketplace than you may conclude from this link-bait from Comscore.

One of the reasons I'm skeptical about advertising going forward (among several) is that as metrics get good enough, advertisers are going to want to stop paying for people like me who are minimally affected by ads. ("But you're affected subconsciously like everybody els..." Yes, thank you, I said minimally.) And we're not going to be randomly distributed. You might be able to make an ad-based business in bulk or on a band fan club site, but technical sites are going to be in a lot of trouble, I think. Can you imagine being kicked out of a site because you never click on ads? The tech is coming.

This has been an open secret in the industry for years, since AOL released a rather disturbing report on "compulsive clickers".

Anecdotally, I theoretically could (but, as stated in my privacy policy, refuse to) identify a small handful of users from my site who get to it through "the best result" on the blue Googles every single time. (AdWords is profitable in aggregate so I've never given this issue serious thought with regards to assessing how much money it costs or whether it would be worthwhile to educate that population to save money.)

Interesting.

Myself, I find that I click essentially two kinds of ads:

1) Sponsored search results that are exactly what I was looking for anyway, and

2) Ads relevant to my interests, typically delivered through the Fusion Ads network.

Anybody that makes a substantial portion of their income on ads or plans to do so had better take notice.

The one good thing is that with performance based advertising it doesn't really matter who clicks the ad as long as there are sales it's a win for both parties. The inherent problem with performance based advertising is one of trust, do you trust party 'x' to truthfully report which sales were attributable to your ad inventory or not?

I've never clicked a TV ad, direct mail flier, or billboard. That doesn't mean those ads are worthless. This is often a somewhat silly metric for measuring advertising depending upon the goals of that advertising.

Quote from the article: “Today, marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact. As a result, savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions – whether clicked or not – have on consumer behavior, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics.”

I used to think that I never click on ads, and it's true in that I never click on Internet ads, but I've found that ads I receive on Steam are vastly more effective for me.

If you don't know how Steam ads work, when you first log in to Steam, it will pop up a window with several pages of ads for different deals and promotions going on. Given how low some games on Steam cost, I find that I very frequently will click through and buy the games advertised (things like $5 for an otherwise $50 game can be so attractive!)

I guess the criteria I use for ads is relevance. The only thing I really ever buy over the internet is games, so advertising on the internet for anything that ISN'T a game just won't get my attention, no matter how well you write it.

I think that for high volume customers with offline purchases, such as Tide who are essentially augmenting their traditional advertising with online this could be true. However, for low volume customers with online purchasing such as most startups it's probably best to stick to CTR.

Indeed, it would seem a new 'revelation' in online advertising that depreciates the value of a click would be highly valuable to web properties with notoriously low CTRs. I think it's primarily a puff piece to generate increase revenues for properties with low CTR. (I'm looking at you Facebook)

Advertising just makes more sense in some places than others. Google capitalizes on this because they have such a broad audience.

I also rarely click on ads, but one example where I always click search ads is - when I'm looking to hook up new Internet service. The best deals seem to inevitably be available from search ads on Google.

I think if the 8 percent making up the 85 percent of clicks are accidental, well...this will shake out eventually as advertisers try to optimize their spending. But it doesn't mean there won't be places where advertising is online is highly profitable.

I think some of this has to do with proliferation of ad-blocking software (I hardly know anyone anymore who doesn't run AdBlocker Plus or an analog thereof), but perhaps even more to do with a more savvy audience.

Ads were once an avoidable consequence of watching TV. When I visit my parents, I have noted they have entirely altered the way they watch TV so that they can skip any and all ads with DVR. I can't help but think that active avoidance of ads in other mediums like this would perhaps lead way to passively avoiding ads (ignoring their presence) on the web.

FYI this is referring only to display ads. Also, I'd take this with a grain of salt since the study itself states that view-through impacts are not to be ignored.

On a related note, 8 percent of Internet users are somebody's grandmother.

I find this truly bizarre. Who are these 8%? Is there some new, widespread form of obsessive compulsive behaviour that involves clicking through EVERY link on EVERY page?

One reason why nobody should get panicky about opt-in ad-block browser plugins draining ad revenue. Those people (me) were never going to click on your ads anyways.

there has been some discussion about how google has incentive to lead people to spammy sites, because people click the adds. as people get better at the internet, spammy per-click adds become less profitable.

i speculate that advertisers are over-paying for per-click adds, and as that market settles, google will no longer have incentive to send people to spam pages, and make more money by sending people to legitimate sites with clean adds.

Yes, they are mostly AOL members.

Not being funny, look at your user-agents for people who click on your ads.

As AOL dies, so does the ad clickers.

Don't worry, facebook will pick up the slack.

Whoa, this press release was from October 2009. Got anything more recent than that?

DId anyone else notice that the report is from 2009?

Not only that, it's getting worse.