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

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/10/comScore_and_Starcom_USA_Release_Updated_Natural_Born_Clickers_Study_Showing_50_Percent_Drop_in_Number_of_U.S._Internet_Users_Who_Click_on_Display_Ads

by kevinburke • 16 years ago

71 64 16 years ago

comscore.com

jerf2• 16 years ago

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.

alanfalcon• 16 years ago

Wouldn't the solution be better approaches to ads? Something like AOL's Project Devil (http://advertising.aol.com/creative/projectdevil) seems to be the way web advertising should work going forward.

cabalamat• 16 years ago

> Can you imagine being kicked out of a site because you never click on ads?

If they did that, people would click on ads they didn't care about, and advertisers would be annoyed.

cpeterso• 16 years ago

I admit it: I sometimes click ads for products/services I do not like. It's like flattr, but with the advertisers' money. <:)

ergo98• 16 years ago

The only ads I can ever remember clicking on were accidental.

The only ads that really make sense, I think, are the branding/image/guiding type ads, not the performance-based CTR ads that have taken over the tubes.

Toyota did a whole damage control series during the purported uncontrolled acceleration debacle, and I noticed them and it influences your opinion. As do ads that build an image or general awareness: If I know about a brand of SSDs, maybe I'll search for that brand the next time I'm looking.

Ads that succeed or fail based upon a click have always been dumb. Remarkable that Google built a whole empire on it.

gvb• 16 years ago

When I use google to search for something that I want to buy, I quite often comparison shop the ad links that google puts up.

Other ad links? Like you, pretty much never.

pavel_lishin• 16 years ago

I remember those ads. Every time one came on, my first thought was, "Oh yeah, this is that company that sent out those cars that tried to kill their drivers."

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Anecdote time..

Podcasts are still attracting plenty of advertisers, even with non-trackable generic ads, leading me to believe some advertisers don't care for tracking.

Check out Dan Benjamin's 5by5 family of podcasts - they're pretty much funded by advertising and most of it is poorly trackable. I don't know what he charges but from other similar podcasts I do know the figures for I have reason to believe it's higher than $50 per 1000 listeners per show - this is astronomical compared to trackable forms of advertising online.

amalcon• 16 years ago

Google's (core) ad business has less in common with traditional media advertising, and more in common with paying the store to put your product in a special display. They realized that people were using their search engine as a big storefront, and adapted the same basic model.

Wilduck• 16 years ago

Display adds have definitely made an impression on me. But, for whatever reason, I tend not to click on the adds, but to open a new tab and google the product. I'd click on them if doing so did that process for me. I.e. "Click here to google <random product/service>."

samd• 16 years ago

Except that as the metrics and tracking gets better so does the advertising.

jonsmock• 16 years ago

Yes, the relevance should get much better. For instance, I did once click on a StackOverflow ad, because the product sounded interesting.

The other annoyance about advertising is the interruption, which I'm not sure will go away.

jerf2• 16 years ago

The ability of tracking to get better is almost unbounded; the ability of advertising to get better is probably not. Given the way things are distributed, there is a segment of the population who will simply never respond to advertising the way advertisers would like and sooner or later they're going to be able to notice us.

And while I will (and did) concede that I am not magically unaffected, as I am human, I will point out that my actual economic decisions tend to come from non-advertising sources. When I have actual money to spend I look for reviews and the experiences of others. "But reviews are just ads too!" Not all of them, and I have gotten pretty good at finding the ones that aren't. I'm even pretty decent at reading through the reviews that are mostly ads. It's not that I'm unaffected, it's that I take paths they don't want me to take and I don't plan on stopping.

trotsky• 16 years ago

Product placement may play a bigger role. Apple has already shown the world how effective buying/trading your products into 4 out of 5 TV shows and movies can be. I don't know how active major brands are in online placement, but the FTC disclosure rules are generally considered easy to skirt or just plain ignore by smaller players.

Looking around at tech blogs and social media it's easy to spot dozens of pieces a day that might as well be ads for firms like google, microsoft, samsung, amazon, apple etc. In many ways these are far better than display ads because of the engagement of reading and sometimes commenting on a piece. The measurable difference between some of these brand's #1 fans and paid promoters seems quite small. How sure are we that some of them aren't just ads already?

dustingetz2• 16 years ago

i doubt they would kick anyone out--the site would just close.

sites like stackoverflow are possible because hosting costs are cheaper than advertising. even as ad profit per user decreases, hosting costs per user decrease as well.

similarly, i wouldn't underestimate the value (to the advertisers) of impression advertising--the masses of people who watch TV and click facebook all day define pop culture by these impressions.

fleitz2• 16 years ago

Tech sites will still run PR pieces, and the audience is valuable enough that many will run ads just for impressions. (eg. Microsoft, Apple, etc), or shift towards running more PR based ads. (eg. Corporate culture, etc)

You'll never be kicked out, at worse you'll be offered to upgrade to a paid account. Also, how much value is there in the people unaffected by ads commenting, submitting articles, linking to the site, etc.

rorrr• 16 years ago

Not only that, it's getting worse.

DanI-S• 16 years ago

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?

julianz• 16 years ago

Presumably quite a lot of them are being paid to go around and click on ads to increase revenue for certain sites.

fbnt• 16 years ago

My dad is in that 8%. I guess the more you're a computer illiterate, the less you're likely to get the difference between a genuine and an advertising link.

zaidf2• 16 years ago

We made the most money(via adsense) when our music website's streaming server would go down but the site would be up.

It was a painful reality.

acangiano• 16 years ago

The thought process of non-technical people is truly fascinating. These are people who type "www.google.com" on Google, have 5+ toolbars and smiley screensavers installed, and generally act on any call to action that is presented to them (including fake antivirus warnings).

As web entrepreneurs we need to learn how to exploit these people and make as much money as possible from them. It's the right thing to do to preserve the natural selection process and ensure the proper evolution of the Homo Iunctus. /kidding

noahth• 16 years ago

But in all seriousness, if you want to make a lot of money, it is in your interest to understand these people and make something that they want.

saint-loup• 16 years ago

>>>and generally act on any call to action that is presented to them...

There is also the exactly opposite behavior : non-technical people who are uncomfortable with computers and scared of doing something wrong, and thus do nothing. People who don't read dialogs not because they are lazy, but because they're sure they won't understand a single word of it. They never click, never never try to fix the problem themselves (and find out there's probably no real problem) or understand what's going on.

blacksmythe• 16 years ago

The title is misleading. The 8% are probably fairly normal.

The headline should read "92% of people hardly ever click on ads". Much less surprising.

mxavier• 16 years ago

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.

aresant• 16 years ago

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.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

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?

axod3• 16 years ago

This is all fairly naive to be frank.

(I've made money from advertising since '99).

Ad revenue is increasing year on year. The sky isn't falling.

> "The inherent problem with performance based advertising"

Again, as someone who has made a lot of money from performance based advertising over the last 10 years, this isn't really an issue. You factor it into your ROI.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

I think a 68% to 84% increase in the number of people that never click ads is something to take note of.

For sure the number of 'clickers' will never reach 0 but this is definitely a trend worth monitoring.

minouye2• 16 years ago

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.

spanktheuser2• 16 years ago

>> 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.

Actually, a different study than the one linked by the OP states this. A study they are careful not to elaborate upon in this press release. I worked for StarCom 1997-2000 in their new & shiny online advertising group. StarCom is heavily incented to produce research proving the effectiveness of all types of advertising. And they own a much larger share of online display advertising than they do of paid search engine marketing. I can't prove that their current research is biased. But when I worked there, we were quite careful to present our results in the best possible light. For example, we ran a very large banner ad campaign for a Proctor & Gamble product. There were two reasonable ways to determine if it was effective: Ask an online panel if the recalled seeing the banner ads in question. Or look at the actual grocery store / drug store sales data to see if the banner campaign caused any lift in sales. The first argued that the millions spent on this campaign produced OK brand awareness; the second demonstrated that it did nothing to move the product. Guess which of these two results went into our sales and marketing materials and which was omitted.

minouye2• 16 years ago

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's skeptical. Not that I don't believe that view-through can't provide a measurable lift--I've just seen that the splitting the marketing budget between channels can get political. And attribution based on seemingly qualitative factors feels a bit hokey to me when you can really nail down ROI on a lot of the other marketing channels.

At any rate, I'm sure that P&G was happy :)

jeffreyrusso2• 16 years ago

I've seen view through do some pretty amazing things first hand. It depends very heavily on the advertiser and the vertical, but in some cases it's astonishing what a few million dirt cheap impressions can do to drive sales through other channels.

stellar678• 16 years ago

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.

dustingetz2• 16 years ago

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.

postfuturist• 16 years ago

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.

freejoe76• 16 years ago

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

fleitz2• 16 years ago

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)

jeffreyrusso2• 16 years ago

Google purports to do something similar on its display ad network - they call it "smart pricing". If it's a low quality placement that is "unlikely to produce an actionable business result" (their words), the CPC an advertiser pays is lowered below the natural auction price. The whole system is pretty opaque, but as you mentioned, it likely allows Google to keep millions of poorly performing pages in its display network without harming the overall network (too much.)

alanh• 16 years ago

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.

Andrew_Quentin• 16 years ago

DId anyone else notice that the report is from 2009?

benmccann• 16 years ago

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.”

Ayjay• 16 years ago

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.

koichi• 16 years ago

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

patio11• 16 years ago

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.)

ck2• 16 years ago

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.

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

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