Who clicks on Ads?
danah boyd asks the question that’s been on my mind since (at least) the Futures of Entertainment confernce panel on metrics and measurement: Who Clicks on Ads?
Advertising is the bread and butter of the web, yet most of my friends claim that they never click on ads, typically using a peacock tone that signals their pride in being ad-averse. The geekier amongst them go out of their way to run Mozilla scripts to scrape ads away, bemoaning the presence of consumer culture. Yet, companies increasingly rely on ad revenue to turn a profit and, while clicking on ads ?may? be declining, it certainly hasn’t gone away. This raises a critical question: Who are the people that click on ads?
She points out that many of the answers at this point are heavily anecdotal - the kind of assumed “middle America” we often project when we need to explain some mass behavior in which we don’t participate. What she finds, in what little research is available, is perhaps surprising:
(more…)





