
8 percent of Internet users account for 85 percent of all ad clicks - kevinburke
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
======
aresant
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.

------
jerf
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.

~~~
ergo98
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.

~~~
petercooper
_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._

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.

~~~
whatusername
Television. Or Radio. Or Billboards. All better examples than podcasts.

~~~
petercooper
I think cost of influence is a more important metric for judging how serious
advertisers are than the overall size of a market.

Take television, for example:

 _"during the 2007-08 season, Grey's Anatomy was able to charge $419,000 per
advertisement"_

Independently, I found the viewing figures were 17-18 million per episode for
that season. So about $24.65 "CPM". And that was one of the best mainstream,
regular ad returns on TV (CSI had a higher audience and far lower charges per
ad). That's half of what I know even minor podcasts are making..

On the flip side, a TV show tends to have many ads packed in whereas a
podcasts runs with a few at most but in terms of CPM, they seem to trump most
TV.

~~~
whatusername
fascinating. I wasn't aware of the ad rates for podcasts. Are they for
american audiences or overall audiences? Because I would see Australian ads if
I watches Grey's Anatomy or CSI -- but I hear the generic ads when I listen to
TWIT.

My point was more that TV/etc is a fundamentally less trackable audience.
(agreeing with your point that some advertisers don't require tackable ads).

------
patio11
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.)

------
alanh
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.

------
jacquesm
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?

~~~
axod
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
axod
Come on. You don't seriously believe those numbers do you? They're from
crazyland.

Also there are so many types of advertising... Banner advertising is but one.
Things go out of fashion, other types of advertising become popular, etc

I monitor my ad revenue and ROI _very_ closely, and have done over the last 10
years. Slightly more than some random unscientific 'study' ;)

~~~
jacquesm
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101494>

~~~
axod
lol What will that prove? Why not do a poll asking who here likes Justin
Bieber?

------
benmccann
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
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.

------
fleitz
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)

~~~
jeffreyrusso
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.)

------
stellar678
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.

------
mxavier
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.

------
minouye
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.

~~~
spanktheuser
>> 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.

~~~
minouye
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 :)

~~~
spanktheuser
>> I've just seen that the splitting the marketing budget between channels can
get political.

One of my favorite stories involved a very successful online marketing
campaign for Oldsmobile. When they launched the Alero, there was amazing
testing of TV vs. Print vs. Outdoor vs. Direct Mail vs. Online. They tested
for scale - how many sales were produced - and cost per channel. The results
were that Online came in #2, with print a distant third. Before the test,
print had a $5mm spend and online was just shy of $1mm. After the test, Olds
tried to move their entire print budget into online. The agency team at Leo
Burnett (LB owned StarCom at the time) that was responsible for print hit the
roof and waged a successful campaign to have much of their budget restored.
They didn't want to lose their jobs, I guess.

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

------
DanI-S
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?

~~~
acangiano
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
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.

------
postfuturist
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.

------
dustingetz
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.

------
ck2
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.

------
freejoe76
Whoa, this press release was from October 2009. Got anything more recent than
that?

------
Andrew_Quentin
DId anyone else notice that the report is from 2009?

------
rorrr
Not only that, it's getting worse.

