DISQUS

Community Page on DISQUS

what is this?

Mathew's comments

Jump to original thread »
Author

Who clicks on all those Web ads?

Started by mathewi · 10 months ago

Interesting post by danah boyd — a sociologist who has become known for focusing on social networks such as MySpace and how young people use (and abuse) them — about the billion-dollar question: Who is clicking on all those Web ads, and what does that say about Web ad ... Continue reading »

5 comments

  • Thalles Waichert

    10 months ago

    interesting... i always asking me about that. Recently I have developing a academic research about the ads and content blogs. May be these data will help me.

    Ahn, by the way... i write my progress on my blog... it's in portuguese, but if you wanna read i will apraciate!

    sorry about my grammar mistakes... hehe
    reply
  • marcel weiss

    10 months ago

    wow, shocking.

    No, seriously. does that surprise anyone? It actually says nothing about webadvertising but it says something about advertising. just because these kind of numbers are available for webadvertising doesn't mean it is per se worse than say tv-ads. what do you think would be the clickthrough-rate on tv-ads if there were any and it would be measureable? exactly.
    webadvertising comes with two more features than the normal ads from the analog age:
    1. people can click through to the product
    2. targeting can be made way better (long tail yadda yadda)
    reply
  • mathewi

    10 months ago

    That's a good point, Marcel -- and danah even mentions something like
    that in her post. TV ads and the Home Shopping Network and so on may
    have similar "click-through" rates, but they're not as easy to track
    as Web ads.
    reply
  • Tino Buntic

    10 months ago

    That research was Mediapost analyzing it's own site, which would not make it representaive of the internet as a whole. Mediapost is a website for "media, marketing, and advertising professionals," the exact type of people that know an ad when they see it and, hence, don't click on it. (Weird, because where does the low income, old, midwestern females fit into this site?).

    Outside of this group, there is a large number of people that really don't know an internet ad is an ad. Websites and blogs that appeal to this type of group (non internet marketers, non-bloggers, non-advertising professionals) see higher click-thrus.

    Even if you do a proper survey of non-internet-savvy folk and ask them if they click on internet ads, you still may not get accurate results because they would answer "no" to a question that asks "if they click on internet ads" if they do not even realize that an ad is an ad.
    reply
  • mathewi

    10 months ago

    That's true, Tino -- many people may not even be aware that they are
    clicking on an ad if it's a text link, which I guess helps to explain
    why Google is so critical of sites that use such links and try to
    disguise them as content.
    reply

Add New Comment

Returning? Login