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6% of Web Users Generate 50% of Ad Clicks
pcause writes "A recent study finds that 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs. Worse news for advertisers: these clickers are not representative of the population as a whole, most have incomes under $40K, and their clicks are not related to any offline buying. (They are mostly males between 25 and 44 years of age.) The number of clicks on an ad campaign is also not strongly correlated with brand awareness for the ads' subject, according to the study. This is bad news for ad-supported Web sites and businesses, as rates should drop if the Net economy begins to take these findings seriously."
The remaining 50% are made up of people who just gotta punch that monkey!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
No buyee.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Now I don't feel at all guilty about ad-blocking.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Maybe I am just evil, but I would not have posted this if I worked for a site that generated a lot of revenue through banner ads.
and with these statistics google is worth 100+ billion dollars???
hahahahaahahahahahahahahahaha
sell now suckerss!!!
I propose limiting their ad clicking on the ISP side with advertising traffic shaping. It is an unfortunate market reality, but these ad-clicking hogs are wasting valuable advertising bandwidth for the rest of the users, and it must be stopped.
Don't let 5% of the ad clickers ruin the internet "experience" for the rest of the users.
Ah, good old soviet union. Send these 6% to gulag and domain-squatter and probably spam problem solved.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I don't even have to say it.
Who keeps falling for the ads? [/insensitive clod]
There are adverts on the internet? Why doesn't anyone tell me about these things!
I must have my proxy, hosts, and AdBlock set up wrong!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Most websites have click ads in exactly the same position every time you visit their site. I have trained my eyes to simply ignore them. Either that or I shrink the browser to move them out of sight.
Is this really upsetting? It seems that in comparison to blasting the air waves with an untargeted advertisement or littering the countryside with billboards this is still a good idea.
Perhaps is just that advertising on a whole is questionable.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
The only online advertising that this will hurt are the mass spam adds. Anything being targeted at a specific demographic can be easily and verifiably checked. As an example, anyone who runs adds on a site like Penny-Arcade can be quite sure that any click throughs are exactly the type of people they want to reach. Click throughs from adds run on Slashdot? They know the type of people doing the clicks. Random Click-here-for-hyped-product-of-the-moment? Not so much.
Personally, I think this is a good sign. Adds targeting specific audiences and communities tend to be more respectful and interesting. If these findings promote that kind of advertising instead of flashing spams adds designed to distract, then hooray!
The thing to bear in mind here is that the ads that were about before the internet- TV spots, posters on the street, pages in magazines and newspapers, jingles on the radio and so on have a click-through of zero. Yet people still bother with them.
The real problem here is that the pay-per-click method doesn't charge advertisers fairly. A combination pay-per-view, and pay-per-click model might be better.
Hmmm people who actually click on ads rather than blocking them are actually likely to click on other ads also? Then when they realize that they did not, in fact, win a free iPod, they don't buy the product that is being sold?
I am less than shocked.
Advertisers have just got to admit that, Click throughs are not the only use of ads. Just like in the real world, an ad does not need to result in an immediate sale for it to be useful.
It also wouldn't surprise me if 6% of advertisers were responsible for 50% of ads (not even counting spam campaigns). I surmise that the majority of people just aren't interested in the same useless crap being advertised on all the major sites. Looking over my open browser tabs right now, there's not a single ad representing anything I'd be remotely interested in buying (except for a ticket to the World Boardgaming Championships, but I don't think I'll be able to go).
We do know that some ISP's redirect ad references and fill in pages in transit with different ads. How long before these same ISP's generate phantom client clicks for the ads the insert? Not really that hard to add on and they can even throw that traffic away at their incoming service boundary. This would provide the ISP with a higher value from the advertisers point of view.
Opps have we broken commercialization again.
Other thought,
What percentage use a hosts file and no-script to block out ads? These are likely to be in the mid to upper income set and high network usage.
On the rare occasion I do see an ad that I might be interested in, I still don't click it. I will just type in the URL of the company, because I want to get a feel for the site before I drill down to a particular product.
That said, I appreciate those 6% for "sponsoring" free content. Thanks!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
In discussing using click-through rates to measure the effectiveness of branding campaigns, Starcom USA Director of Connections Research and Analytics Grant Prentice says "Natural Born Clickers (the study) shows us that we can't count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying on-line exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy." Who'd a thunk these guys were trying to sell something... BTW, the TFA also said that the study result doesn't apply to direct marketing campaigns.
If true, this 6% figure is good news. If it's really this small number of people, then it should be possible to track them down and kill them.
- Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
- Not in our dreams! Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ballgames. And on buses. And milk cartons. And t-shirts. And bananas. And written on the sky. But not in dreams! No sirree!
My 0.02 cents
The problem is that advertisers want to pay per-click to get per-impression results.
There's no "click" on TV or radio or newspapers, just an impression. But when people realized that there *was* a click-through to be recorded on the web, they wanted to pay for that under the assumption that click-through and impression were correlated and therefore that they could gauge if their intended audience was getting the ads by the level of click-through.
This makes things easy. If the click-through on an advertisement is high, clearly you need to keep it there. If it's low, it's clearly not properly targeted. This can be automated to run without human intervention. The survey disproves this.
So, really, what it's showing is that the web advertising market needs to be structured more like a traditional media buy.
I suspect the biggest winners in this market will be large web companies with enough folks to have an advertisement team and captured demographics information to be able to say "Sure the click-throughs are all 35 year old virgins with a crap job, but the *viewers* are actually mostly upper management level people with a wife and a mistress"
And, since this is Slashdot, we can make the logical conclusion that the companies in the article were paid by one of the aforementioned large web companies with enough folks to have an advertisement team and captured demographics information.
Gentoo Sucks
Especially when 99% of the sites want to send you to:
1. Spamoulicious Media 2. Phishing in da lake.com 3. Passwords R us 4. Mafia Payday Loans 5. Communist United National Terroists (C.U.N.T.'s) etc.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Seriously, the ads I click on are 99.9% accidental. I think I've clicked on about five ads I actually WANTED in the last ten years.
Is it any wonder that the people who are clicking on ads constantly are not the "average joe?" Most people hate commercials and other junk that gets in the way of what they were looking at.
"Oh, another ad for the same BMW I switched away stations on the radio, muted on TV, and flipped past in the newspaper. I think I'll click on this one because it's in the middle of my news story about Britney Spears' latest breakdown."
I wonder what correlation there is between this 6% and the people who click on the "V1agr@" spams in their email.
The same goes for offline advertisements. How many of the junk snail mail adverts do you read? I grab it all and toss it without a second look, most people do. I've recently gone over this issue with a modern art professor (many of todays ads get taught in art classes now believe it or not) and he talked at length about saturation. You can't do anything, go any where without being bombarded with this crap and it's gotten to the point that most people tune it out.
I myself make mental notes to never do business with certain advertisers I feel are shady (which is more than I like to admit). Most people however are oblivious to it and the information just hits the subliminal. I feel the bombardment is backfiring and the whole advertising industry is in a huge bubble that's about to burst. Companies wont be able to justify the extreme costs of advertisiments when most people just don't care anymore.
I can see it now, 30+ sessions to cure whatever the call this internet addiction.
I'd like to suggest Adclickophilia and Obsesive Compulsive Clickorder.
Well, I find it hard to be surprised. I mean, in the world of Get Paid to Click Ads. Some of those sites generate a very nice amount of traffic. It's pretty close to the ol' Slashdot effect in those regards.
http://getpaidforum.com/forums/index.php?act=idx -- One of the larger forums for the GPT industry.
Myself, I just class them as really really small loans. Say, under $5, but at 50% interest per month.
Ever heard of Brand Awareness? Getting a banner ad out there and seen by hundreds of thousands of people three or four times a day is worth it if you have a product to sell that already has good distribution. Even if these ads never generate clickthrough, they are still worth it.
Furthermore there are only two ads I click on and it NEVER leads to my buying things. The first are informational ads. Like I clicked on that Chevron Ad on Slashdot recently. I was interested in all the various energy distribution and generation methods they were persuing. The Second are Text ads for companies I really dislike. I will click the advertised link because I know it is costing them money. Ya it may only be one cent but it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.
Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites
So basically they're unemployable opportunists with no ability to assess risks.
The surprise here is that it took three companies working together to figure this out.
Blank until
The Flash-based "Talking Woman" has helped me.
When Mom calls long distance, Talking Woman is cheerful and polite in the background. Mom thinks I've finally found a nice girl and given up computers.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I know that 50% of the money spent on advertising is down the drain. The problem is, I don't know which 50%.
I would think a more interesting figure, and perhaps not even able to be inferred from this research, would be to determine how many users don't even click-through at all. If it's greater than half... I would say the adserve business is pretty useless. But hey, dont they pay people to click-through anyway? Maybe, we found the 6%! Oh, the irony if so!!
...and it should be known by now
Wow - I wanna see the meetup of that 6% of tiny-penis, high-quality-meds-taking, fake-watch-wearing, lottery-ticket-holding, nigerian-bank-account-holders who are all chatting about the sexy-bored-housewife they met via their inbox.
i'll being my perpetual motion machine and some investment stock certs.
...is that CowboyNeal is in that 6%.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
I use Adblock, I hardly ever buy stuff, and when I do, it's approximately never because of advertising.
I feel like maybe I'm not supposed to be using the Internet. I might be hurting the economy.
It doesn't take a "study" to realize that only imbeciles (or people new to the internet) actually click through internet ads. These are probably the same people that buy infomercial and home shopping channel garbage.
I am botnet that does nothing but virtually click on ads all day stopping only occasionally to brag about it.
BWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
They're in Innsmouth, they look vaguely squid-like and they're totally insane. What more do you need to know?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"DUH"
:P
And yes, this is a meager attempt at being humorous. Not a serious reply at all. Please go back to sleep.
While people may not be clicking, that doesn't mean the ads aren't getting them thinking. Google holds the record as only site where I've ever clicked on an ad and bought something. That is because their ads are extremely targeted and they've been linking to sites actually selling something I want when I'm ready to buy. However, other ads still make me consider products. I've never bought anything from Think Geek by clicking on an ad, but the ad has got me thinking about something I might want, which I may then later go to Think Geek and buy.
Just because you can click on ads, doesn't mean you will, but just because you don't doesn't mean you weren't influenced by it.
6% of Web Users are Botnets
I forget where, but I remember seeing an article that the click-throughs actually made up a small portion of the advertising effect. It was more important to integrate well with a website and get brand recognition through that.
0.00666% of all users are responsible for ordering viagra, funding the Nigerian Embassy and in general keeping spam afloat. Remember, if he hunts long enough even a blind squirrel can find his nuts.
I wonder what percent of ad clicks are either (a) misclicks or (b) stuff like punch the monkey or "do you like George Bush" or "Take the gay quiz and find out if you're gay" and other things that people click on for reasons having nothing to do with actually wanting to buy anything.
It works the other way around too -- people may not click on that Budweiser/Coke/Southwest Airlines ad, but it increases brand awareness so next time they're booking a flight or ordering at a restaurant or whatever they think of those brands.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
is what about GOOD advertisements. Slashdot sometimes have interesting ads that are decently targeted (especially if you consider that the people who are NOT targeted by these ads are using AdBlock or something). The better gaming web sites often have decent game adverts. Google ads (on the actual search pages), depending on the search, often comes up with decent links (especially the big sponsored ones at the top. Not the cheapo ones on the right).
If you take out the "2174071401 free smilies!!" and the "MEET HOT SINGLES WHO WANT TO HAVE SEX NOW!" ads, and redo the statistics, I'm curious about the results (which we'll never have, that would be too hard to test im guessing).
I often click meaningful, well targeted ads, and I know many who do, and we're all around the 6 digit salary mark with a lot of money to spare... So it can't be all that bad...
The problem with the housing market may be a lot of people bought ARM mortgages from Punch-the-Monkey click ads. Stupid people buying from questionable mortgage companies.
Spam does sell. There must be some twit in the thousands of Mortgage spam out there for it to be effective. Flash ads like the dancing people/aliens. If they didn't work, we wouldn't see it.
And now the idiot that did that is going to get foreclosed on, dragging YOUR home value down. Or the government will bail him and the banks out, causing YOUR taxes to go up.
Wonderful.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
If I am on a site such as purepwnage.com, an internet radio station, or something else that I enjoy a lot (gametrailers.com is another), I will click the ads just to help the people that run the site. Unless the ad is EXTREMELY interesting, or it is for a company that I would have gone to buy something from anyway, I will just close the window once it loads.
::wink wink::
The same goes for folks with small websites or blogs... like my own.
Living With a Nerd
...but I almost never click ads. I do this because they're ads, and when I'm surfing around I'm generally looking for information, not services. If I'm going to click through to some other page than what I'm looking at right now, it's going to be because there's a link within the content that I'm looking at to some other page with content that I'm interested in, and the content that I'm looking at has to tell me what to expect in the other page. For instance, a blog with a link to information sources. As long as ads continue to look like ads and not like related, verifiable content, I'm going to continue to not click on them. Once advertisers focus on embedded word of mouth marketing rather than sensing what I might be looking for a putting in a bar on the side of the screen or some flashing picture, then I'll start clicking through.
Brian: "6% of the time, it works 50% of the time."
Ron: "That doesn't even make any sense."
... they don't realize that we all mute or FF TV commercials as well!
Preferences : User Info : Sig
It appears to have undergone a makeover recently.
That's bad news for online advertisers, but I also think new forms of rich media are starting to reach broader audiences on the whole. It's a very fast growing industry. http://www.tagsum.com/news/10308/6-of-Web-Users-Generate-50-of-Ad-Clicks
"Dummies. We click, so you don't have to."
YES, salvation is here, not only do these three companies tell you that you have a problem, they also tell you that they can FIX it for YOU!
Ain't they nice.
Never trust advertising and this is never more true then when advertisers sell their own product.
Basically the entire "article" goes, "the way you are doing it now is wrong, we sell another way and it is better according to our figures".
Statistics used by marketing, even Satan himself would balk at such devilry.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"not representative of the population as a whole, most have incomes under $40K, and their clicks are not related to any offline buying. (They are mostly males between 25 and 44 years of age.) " I think these 6% are Adsense publishers who click on their own ads.
Actually click-through isn't the only metric they have. There's already quite a lot of effort put into tracking "conversion rates"; how many people who follow an advert (or say price-comparison-site link to a product) actually go through with a purchase. The results of these analyses are what drives decisions about how and where to advertise; how many and what products to include in which price comparison sites - google base gets everything because it's free; others that charge for listing get a filtered set of products according to conversion rates, and every now and then one gets dropped altogether as not worth it.
So exactly how many of the other 94% of web users are generating the other 50% of ad clicks????
I'm guessing that the typical top 6% clicker uses a different metric than brands when clicking.
Now, how many of those clicks came from Tor Exit nodes, or China? ~Sticky
The whole premise of this articlie is that males 25-44 are the ones clicking all those adds.
I don't think that it's a coincidence that this is the major porn veiwing public, nor that most adds (and add supported sites) are for porn
Read my blog you know you want to
The most important factor is effectiveness of the ad campaign. It does not matter if clickers are not who you expect as long as the actual results are more cost-effective than the alternatives. Web advertising can be much more targeted than mass broadcast. It is better for niche farming even if not perfect.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm probably in that 6%. I always click the ads on sites that I frequent. To be fair, I spend at least a few minutes on the advertiser's site as well. Only once did it lead to a purchase (PocketPC software), but the option is always there.
Of course, my own sites are funded by advertising, so I have a vested interest in seeing the industry succeed.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I dont do adverts like the 6% do, but on occasion i have clicked on a web advert (not many).
If your trying to buy shoes (very specific) then if an advert says buy brand x here' do they expect automatically an low success rate if they have neither the size, colour or style of the shoe i needed.
Click advertising has and never will be a successful marketing mechanism for the internet as a whole. Sure there are some products and some sites that it works, but these are rare.
Just like television and other successful forms of ad generated industries it is all about product placement and brand recognition that has to be used.
The smartest advertising sites have ads for Coke, or Honda where the advertisers DON'T expect the person to click, but to just view. Just like TV...
After 100 years of influention psychology in advertising for brand recognition, it is scary that a 'bright' new technology doesn't understand the simplicity.
No matter if you go back to the begining of a 'want' instead of a 'need' consumer base that boomed in the 50s or even the first 'marketing' firms based on Freud during the 'need' based economy in the US prior to that, nothing has changed.
Do you think Burma-Shave would have worked if people had to get out of their cars and pick up a flyer on the product at each sign?
Sure things are faster and harder to notice on the internet, but still, you got 5 secs to grab someone's attention, don't disturb or annoy them and DON'T make them do anything and you have a successful ad. PERIOD.
Some of the best advertising that is working on the internet is from youtube type of sites providing commericial content. You can watch any TV show in the world legally, and at your own schedule and you have 4 or 5 15secs pauses of ads. Yet people are 'use' to it, and the ads are becoming the most successful because they live up to the simple rules from the above paragraph.
This can be done with static site and news as well, heck even do a cute Flash/Silverlight video on the page, just don't use sound and don't expand over crap to disturb the person. Product recognition is not a conscious thing anyway, so determining it by ad clicks requires concious involvement. Bad Idea, Bad Model, and Bad Method to test advertising success.
Thanks, found it. When you go under Preferences -> User Info, a window pops up. I missed the slider bar on that window - you have to scroll down to see your sig.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Methinks you must not have used the internet before 1996. The Internet was just fine before people looking to squeeze every last penny out of pageviews got into the game.
There would be no impression-based advertising, and you would only hear about products you were actually interested in, from people you actually know. Everything would spread virally, and no other way. Alternatively, if you knew you needed a certain kind of product you could set a search bot to track it down for you on the Web without any further action from you.
That is to say, it is useful to find out about useful things. It is conversely irritating to find out about endless irrelevant things.
The man or woman who finds a way to make that world a reality will be a trillionaire, and rightly so.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Not sure why, between emails from my girlfriend and not-even-spam messages from (straight) porno sites, but it does.
If you're @ the googleplex please make sure gmail knows I'm straight! I am much more likely to click if it seems likely there's nekkid womenz on the other end.
Of course people who click on ads are atypical. We know that already, and it's been statistically neutralized out of the equation.
There are only 2 goals for an ad, brand awareness, or profit.
I don't need to tell you about brand awareness, you've all seen ads that we're on the internet before, and can figure out why they're there.
For profit ones just break it down into ROI. You don't *want* everyone clicking on your ad. That's why you hear a lot more about "click-fraud" than "impression fraud" when you're in internet advertising.
The original article seems like it was written by people using very out dated methods of media buying. I don't know anyone who evaluates ads based solely on "clicks" for the same reason I don't know know anyone who evaluates websites based on "hits" anymore.
Sure, we still look at Cost per Click; because that ties back into brand awareness values to some extent, but the real vector is Cost per *Conversion*; what did we pay per *customer*. Ya figure out how much a customer is worth, you know how effective your ads are.
But internet advertising is still relatively new. It has a long way to go catch up to even Direct Mail in many cases. And as long as it's still profitable to do it clumsily, you'll see it done clumsily.
Which is also the reason that women see ads for Viagra, and men see ads for Oprah's book club.
Corporations should stop paying for advertising time and space. Instead, they should pay each individual citizen (not consumer) for their time viewing that company's ad piece.
Our time comprises our lives. It is our single most valuable and finite resource. If they want me to listen to their self-serving drivel, they can pay ME for it.
How much garbage do you get via snail mail?
Last I checked, getting a 6% "click thru" via direct mail advertising was considered a really good run.
(That is... customer gets ad, and calls for info or comes in)
Direct Mail is still profitable...
Market research companies don't release studies like this for the benefit of general consumption. What they're really doing is suggesting that blind click-through rates are not sufficient measures of return on investment AND you need their service in determining which click-through consumers do generate higher return.
I work for a small(er) business that sells big ticket items. We do a huge amount of business with Google Ads, in the $10's of 1000 per month - the vast majority of our advertising budget. The owner of the company started out in adsense, adding more and add more targets with ever increasing rates. The rates for niche market have increased by about 100% each year for the last 4 years. Recently, we been questioning the effective of this approach versus investing that in different ad networks/raising natural listings.
We reached a conclusion to diversify some, and with this information, it appears that once again whitehat seo tactics are only way to insure long term internet related success. One of our competitors was into seo blackhat stuff and was delisted a couple of months ago. I think it's only a matter of time until our main competitor runs into the same problem.
We had independently reached some of the same conclusions as this report. However, all that being said, I don't think the 6% --> 50% ratio works for our type. I think for our niche big ticket items it's probably closer to 15% --> 70%. Each area could be measured statistically separated e.g. price, niche type, location. IMO big ticket item will get less clicks as many people aren't interested in items out of our price range, whereas a novelty may see an increase simply due to curiosity. At the end of the day, I don't dispute that the report in the ballpark of accuracy, however I would caution that it's is also not blanket stat that can be applied to any online market.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
hehe...Ali sold off the software side, because it wasn't in line with the core business...now it looks like ad impressions aren't the way to go, either?
What's next? Thinkgeek?
I click adsense links when I find something useful on a site that I needed. Just to reward the publisher of the site for putting valid info on the web.
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
The number of clicks on an ad campaign is also not strongly correlated with brand awareness for the ads' subject
On the internet, brand isn't near as important as relevance. That said, once relevance is achieved and the web surfer has a choice of web pages to choose from, then brand plays a more prominent role (ie: they'll choose a website they know over one they don't know).
As for the rest of the study's findings, I think you couldn't possibly convince a reputable marketer not to invest more money/talent/energy into online marketing. There's a lot of fluidity and change on the internet, but the upside is just far too great.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
This reminds me of the music business. "Oh no, nobody is buying our shitty, derivative, over-produced, over-hyped music!" Or in this case, "Oh no, nobody is clicking on our annoying, pointless, untargeted, punch-the-monkey ads."
Give the people something they actually find intriguing and pleasant, and they'll buy your CDs and click on your ads.
Huh? Rates are only going to drop if advertising was overvalued before.
http://outcampaign.org/
0.02 cents =! $0.02
Did you really want your sig. to say "My (two hundredths) cents"?
I would think if you're trying to say "My 2 cents", it would be that way or this way "My $0.02".
Or is there a joke I'm missing here?
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Believe it or not, I've actually found some quite good companies through ads. But I don't trust actually clicking through! Half of the ads on the net are really just links to hacker supported sites, or marketing sites that make no reserves about finding your details and sending you spam. NO, if I see an ad that looks useful, I go and search for the company on google so I don't have to go through any marketing ploys or ad redirects first! YES, I use adblock, but that's because I only really want targeted ads that appear independently on the sites I visit anyway! These are far more likely to be useful in my experience! I also allow ads on certain sites that have useful material!
I'd say, in terms of marketing, DON'T put ads on big name ad-servers like doubleclick and the likes, but instead, try and get independent sites interested, maybe through partnerships or sponsoring them directly. Also, make sure your company appears on google somewhere near the top, AS WELL as being on the side with google's ad scheme! Other search engines are useful tools as well! The proportion of shops and companies I have found by searching on google, is FAR larger than the amount I've found out about by any other means! A good search text, with quick links to important areas of your site, as well as a nice graphical layout can make ALL THE DIFFERENCE!
I have my filters tuned so I essentially never see them.
Sorry if it fucks up your business model, but I don't want your annoying blinking spyware.
. . .before they told Microsoft they were undervalued.
Here they are: http://www.clickmonkeys.com/aboutus.shtml and just like real monkeys, these monkeys can't spell either...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I know that's Google's business model and all but I had to load up Gmail and it took me a few seconds to confirm this.
I wonder what percentage of the population has ad-blindness.
No buy-ee.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Starcom Mediavest. With clients such as Kraft and Coke. Heavily vested in the old economy.
Work on your bullshit detectors. These guys are trying to drive down advertising rates.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
thats why you shouldn't worry.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
The impulsiveness of purchases is highest in low income categories. The middle class actually counts pennies much more and the rich have someone counting for them.
The rich tend to have product requirements to meet. They tend to be more technical and have better knowledge of the product they are looking for. Here is an example;
I am involved in a new building (a church) and in the design stages they are laying out the wiring, including the low voltage stuff. An impulse buyer will simply check the price on a box of CAT5 cable and make a decision. I too checked prices. I also checked my requirements. Do I need riser rated cable, plenum cable, shielded cable? We need cable for the alarm, low voltage lighting controls, networking, AV, and intercom.
The lighting if you do the popular DMX-512 stuff, by popular price, 3 pin microphone cable is often used. Advertisements are all over the place for very cheap "DMX" Cables. The spec for DMX clearly defines why mic cable is not to be used including the wrong impedance, and no UL aproval for fire code. Side note, it works for short runs as long as the connector shell is not connected unlike a true mic cable. Keep your 3 pin XLR mic cable away from your 3 pin DMX cable. On the legal side, these cables are not UL approved for in wall installation. RS-485 120 ohm cable is specified by the standard. Riser rated or even Plenum rated RS-485 cable is very expensive and can easly cost more than a lighting control board. The urge to go with something cheaper is very strong at this point.
Using the wrong cable is what fills up the forums on lighting. Just before the production my desk died is a common complaint. The frequent cause is the noise filters in dimmers put noise current into the lighting ground. A borrowed Mic cable with grounded connector shells, connects the frame ground of the dimmer pack to the isolated ground of the signal. Often the spike noise blows out the comm chips and the show goes dark and a piece of **** console is blamed, when the root cause was a cable with grounded connector shells and a poorly grounded dimmer pack. Check the forums. The gremlins that eat the show just befor opening is common. Follow the spec. It's there for a reason.
The CAT5 cable has been tested as a suitable replacement for RS-485 cable and exceeds the original performance ratings. As a bonus it is about 1/5 the cost in a FR4 fire rated classification. CMG is the most common. As a bonus, we don't have to buy 2 kinds of cable as one will now work in both applications for networking and lighting control. Further studies show the UTP cable both radiates and is subject to noise pick-up. STP cable is the next logical step. It is also easly located in riser and plenum ratings. It is much easer to source than plenum or riser rated RS-485 cable. As a bonus, it's a fraction of the cost while performing better.
In my research including checking prices and cable ratings, how many manufactures counted my clicks as a non-sale? The manufacture that got my sale didn't get it from a banner ad. They got it by having full spec sheets online. I found my riser rated shielded CAT5 cable in pretty colors for $108/box of 1,000 feet. Banner ads for cheap cable don't deliver enough information to qualify a product for considration of purchase.
I am now in the research stages of picking a wall mount dimmer system. Again, we have system requirements to meet. They are.. Multi-station. The janitor can enter and turn on the lights without turning on a lighting desk. Multi-system integration.. The house light system needs to accept a DMX-512 signal when present, so the lighting console can include the house lights in the lighting program. High power.. enough said. A dozen hanging fixtures with 6-8 100 watt bulbs will require a serious dimmer pack. Another set of PAR64 cans at 500-675 Watts each is a design consideration. Another 2 dozen recessed fixtures for stage, balcony and under the balcony will dictate the number of channels
The truth shall set you free!
Slashdot has ads? Wow, I almost forgot!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
surveys find that the 6% of online users most stupid enough to believe that attractive women they don't know are emailing them in search of hot monkey love are too stupid to earn more than $40k per year.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Answer me this - what is SO IMPORTANT about the 4 inch diameter circle on the top of a petrol (= gas for the Yanks) pump nozzle that they have to use it to advertise chocolate at me while I am filling my car!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What kind of news is this? Is it from a newspaper? TV? Radio? No! Not at all!
The link leads just to a web page featuring the report. Where is it? A news site maybe? Not again!
It turns out to be an advertising agency website, Starcom MediaVest, one so obscure that doesn't even have its own wikipedia entry. They sure make advertising on TV and newspapers, so what surprise is it that they despise web advertising? The report comes from a biased source - fruit from a poisoned tree.
Remember the golden rule: A report has the credibility of those who sign it. Hence, only fools quote reports without stating their source. Slashdot just didn't. Thus, Slashdot was made a fool for today. I think it should have more care.
Good. I can't wait for this whole misguided model of ad-supported content to die a slow and painful death. Not only are advertisements annoying, not only do they take up valuable bandwidth, but the whole model is fundamentally wrong. Whenever something is ad-supported it means the number one priority of the content provider is not your wishes, but the advertiser's. It creates a basic conflict of interest. It makes you, the viewer / visitor / consumer the *product* they sell to their advertisers, instead of the client.
I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and pay for content. As long as the price is fair and the content not DRM-ed. The only reason I don't subscribe to /. is that the editors are so bad.
so people providing ads still think that "by default" the people actually *want* to click and see ads?
I don't know anyone who likes to watch ads if they can skip them. Good and funny commercial are rare and anyway this wouldn't be the point.
Fact: ads are annoying and wasting your time. It's legal spam most of the time.
Fact: you can block ads on a computer much more effectively than on the TV (where u just turn your brain off or go fetch food/drink) - so why wouldn't you?
I can see the day coming where you are required by law to watch ads and not circumvent them. Scary.
Surprisingly, no one said that the persons who click on the ads are actually the ones who got ads (either the same or others..) - so they keep their own business from falling apart :)
Push it up over 250 employees and I'll bet somebody on their web team could tell you how people who click through tend to act once they get to their site.
This isn't hard information to track down--if you install a decent analytics package on your site and do your advertising with just a little bit of forethought you can get put this information together easily.
With that in mind, the people paying by click must know they're getting their money's worth. Because they keep doing it.
Of course, I can't really speak to 'punch the monkey' crap. I'm only really thinking about real businesses, most of whom are probably advertising with Google and other more targeted stuff. I suppose it could be different for these spray and pray types.
AOL something. Pronounced remarkably similarly to a "A'ole".
what ads are you guys talking about? I haven't seen many ads in many years? ( uses http://www.dnsredirector.com/ ) You mean companies still think annoying stuff on the web works to drive people with ADD to thier site, um I mean "customers" to thier site?
An important distinction here, that nobody seems to be hitting on, is that the importance of clicks is dramatically different for advertisers who do all their business through online sales versus advertisers who sell primarily through other channels. For online retailers and businesses with similar models, click-throughs do translate directly to revenue, and this article has far greater significance for their bottom line that it does for Coke/Chevy/et al, who are advertising with the expectation of more indirect gains.
This is just the reverse side of the coin of well educated and successful people tend to have well educated successful kids.
Of course there are exceptions, but the stats hold.
Engineering is the art of compromise.