Give us your poor, your dispossessed..and we'll make 'em click on Ads

If, like me, you only ever click on Ads by mistake, you probably have occasionally wondered:

(i) If I click so seldom, am I representative?
(ii) If I am representative, how does Google make so much money?
(iii) Given that Google does make so much money, who are these people?

In my more paranoid moments I wonder if Google doesn't have a huge Ad-clicking business on the side - after all, who checks these things - but in daylight hours I assumed it was the same sort of people who wait till crowded Saturday mornings to go shopping with their suitcase full of coupons

So it's interesting to see that Danah Boyd points to some interesting research from AOL on who clicks on Ads

What did we learn? A lot. 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.

No surprises there then.............Danah, whose speciality is SocNet dynamics, wonders about who clicks in SocNets and comes to the conclusion that:

based on what I've seen qualitatively, my hypothesis would be that heavy ad clickers are:

- More representative of lower income households than the average user.
- Less educated than the average user (or from less-educated environments in the case of minors).
- More likely to live outside of the major metro regions.
- More likely to be using SNSs to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

In other words, much to my chagrin, I suspect that heavy ad clickers in social network sites and other social media are more likely to trend lower in both economic and social capital than the average user. Unfortunately, I don't have the data to test these hypotheses at all. (Does anyone? Are there any studies on class dynamics and ad clicking?)

So, more MySpace than Facebook then, if Danah's previous research is valid.

Now we've argued for awhile that something like this is likely to be the case (for consumer services - business is probably different) and that the targeted Banner Ad is actually more likely to hit the people you want. However, its harder to measure, and PPC Ads give (an illusion of) reliable metrics.

Danah also notes that:

I should note that consumer culture has historically capitalized on poorer populations, long before the web. Studies of consumer culture have shown how American identity has been constructed through consumption over the last century and how, not surprisingly, those who have a stronger need/desire to prove their American identity buy into the consumer culture

I love the Idea of being All-American by buying all-Chinese tat

I recall Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy letting a similar cat out the bag recently at a Digital Home workshop I co-hosted, when he pointed out that older people are far less susceptible to Ads, whereas the Youth are far more suggestible.

An afterthought....running the numbers for the UK, with roughly 40m people online at best, 99% click an Ad lets say once every 3 months, thats c 160m clicks. Then lets have the 1% clicking away at a click a month - c 5m clicks. The article notes that the majority of clicks are from 0.2% - 80,000 people, but for them to hit even the 160m clicks level thats 2,000 clicks pa each - about 6 per day.

Postscript.....It looks like Global Adspend will go up from c $37 bn this year to c $45bn next year....those 0.2% had better get clicking some more, because - as far as we can see - there ain't no more people coming online in the UK. Or maybe the money is going to banners?