You know those blinking and flashing parts of a website that we all ignore? Otherwise known as ads? No? Right now, on our site, we're advertising and an event for Jeff Merkley and a support campaign for Steve Novick. I love how both camps can get together in the noble fight to get Witigonen more money. They should also do it more often. So should you, in fact. But, if you still don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not surprised. It turns out that most people don't click on ads. In fact, the ones that do aren't really typical internet users.

We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.
Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these "heavy clickers"? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

The article then goes on to strange, curious lands.

If my hypothesis were true, what would it mean if marketing is profiting primarily off of those who are economically and socially struggling? How do we feel about this philosophically, ethically, and professionally? Would we feel proud of living off of a business model that targets the poor?

The people who are being screwed here, as is rightly brought up in other places, are not the poor Midwesterners who click on shitty sweepstakes ads, it's the content providers who are being charged for clicks. We're being screwed. Of course, that's one reason places like Blogads (who, while providing a great service, have an ABSOLUTELY AWFUL WEBSITE that is horribly slow and broken) charge for the time the ad is placed on the website and not per-click. The vast differences in ad campaigns is also a very relevant issue. Per-click is, in many cases, an artificial metric that doesn't work. This is more so for traditional advertising. New, internet-only advertising (for instance those sweepstakes ads) have their entire lifeblood be through clicks.

The Merkley and Novick ads on our site right now are an example of the very large gray area. If the Merkley campaign gets you attending the Tester event, great. Some money from them and you'll probably end up being a supporter, if you're not already. But, if you don't attend, you'll at least come away from it with the fact that Tester supports Merkley (if you didn't know that already). Novick gets the same benefit; even if you don't sign up for their campaign, you know that those people have endorsed him. Of course, both ads assume that you can match a last name/face/first name to somebody you have positive feelings towards. Given the general readership of this blog, and others like it, that's probably a fairly safe assumption.

Regardless, however, it seems like many people simply ignore ads in the first place (though I have to mention that I love how Techcrunch does their ads - it seems like these small button ads are getting more and more popular). Of course, it's the same problem that any advertising has - it's easy to mentally filter out (and, if you're using the Firefox adblock plugin, easy to actually filter out). However, I think the point remains the same. Online advertising is not exclusively pillaging clueless Midwestern internet users (though spammers might be, but we all hate them). The model doesn't quite work, it's true, but it's getting there.

Like most things in life, it all comes down to giving us more money.