

Who clicks on ads? "Middle America" - andreyf
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/12/03/who_clicks_on_a.html

======
mynameishere
_Would we feel proud of living off of a business model that targets the poor?_

Sloppy. He doesn't make a hard distinction between gray-area fraudulent
"sweepstakes" ads and legitimate ads. The above quote makes it sound like
selling products/services to the poor is somehow wrong...obviously false. If
the sweepstakes ads are clicked on by poor people more often than rich people,
well, that's not a big surprise, but it has nothing to do with advertising in
general.

~~~
far33d
she.

------
joshwa
I'll say here what I said on reddit:

CPC is actually only smallish percentage of the online ad marketplace. The
real dollars are in CPM ads - display / brand advertising, the stuff you see
in the big skyscrapers and 300x400s on high-traffic pages.

It's about brand awareness, not clicks or conversions.

Those placements run at pre-negotiated rates, and represent the bulk of ad
revenue.

~~~
mynameishere
The problem is that, if I see a 40-foot advertisement on a city bus, "Drink
Buzz Cola", I know that the Buzz corporation has elected to spend serious
dollars and the risk of public exposure on their brand. Internet advertising
still has a smarmy one-on-one private feel to it:

"How do I trust this 'Buzz Cola' who have spent .01 cents for a 4 inch ad on
MY facebook page?"

...people don't get a sense that the ad campaign is city-wide, nation-wide,
international, whatever, and is being shown to millions of people...even when
it is. And so the brand-building ("everybody's doing it!") doesn't work the
same at a psychological level.

~~~
jraines
Most people don't go through this mental process. Brand awareness happens
beneath the level of cognition anyway. You can show people unfamiliar brands
repetitively in an unobtrusive context and then when you put them all together
and deliberately show the person and ask, "how many of these have you seen
before?", the answer will usually be "none". But if, before this, you ask them
to rate a group of brands, including the ones they've been shown along with
some truly new ones -- they will rate the shown group higher on various
metrics even though they think they've never seen them before.

~~~
mynameishere
_don't go through this mental process._

I'm not suggesting that there is actual ratiocination going on when people
look at ads. But a large, public, showy ad argues from authority much more
than a little flickering thing on a website (that only I can see).

------
ntoshev
This is very narrow minded. Perhaps the CPC ads on average are targeted
towards the demographics they discovered.

I have successfully used Google Ads outside the USA. The target audience was
high income, but they did click on ads as long as they were relevant (or close
to relevant).

------
richcollins
I wonder how much of internet advertising is driven by "scammers":

<http://tinyurl.com/yonmpm>

------
Mistone
i actually found his tone a bit condescending with an "I'm
better/richer/smarter than you". many be people say they ignore ads that
actually click on them, its cool to ignore ads. but the whole bit on middle
America is lame.

