8 ms·

People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

127 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

alexandrerond 11y ago
It reminds me of a story I was told about certain orange juice factory worker never drinking orange juice.
DiversityinSV 11y ago
I'm glad there is real data on this. I kept explaining to people that our email and social habits in SV are a complete outlier vs. the rest of the world.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bcook 11y ago
  So, before knowing there was reliable data, you constantly made unfounded claims? You made a good guess. Is that something to brag about? An opinion that you feel the need to "constantly explain to people" borders on ranting... (an embarassing past-time of my own)
  - DiversityinSV 11y ago
    Let's say it was strong empiric evidence (e.g. on event invites, I always saw this, SV event invitation emails had the lowest open/clicks vs. other parts of the country) Same email, different regions. Same result. I also get the regular 'I hate emails, I don't click or read them' from a lot of coworkers, despite being the main revenue channel. Yeah, it's fun to be right. I'm bragging about it.
- soared 11y ago
  This is just FB data, which (at my agency) makes up <1% of b2b or b2c leads.
mchahn 11y ago
Could this be explained by technical people using more ad-blockers? Or is it adjusted for ad-blockers?
- stronglikedan 11y ago
  > Could this be explained by technical people using more ad-blockers? I don't know, but I wouldn't think so. I don't use ad-blockers (never have), and I don't click many ads. I go around them or close them, but for the most part have learned to ignore them. The only ads I click on are targeted ads that are relevant to my interests. I would think that technical people are less likely to be duped into clicking them, but I wouldn't attribute it to ad-blockers.
- ACow_Adonis 11y ago
  A curious note on my own behaviour. I've been on the internet since...roughly 1993/94? Reflecting on how I act, even back in the day "before ad-blockers", even if I saw an ad that seemed to link me to the place I wanted to go, I wouldn't click on it. Instead I would open up a new window/tab, actively go to a search engine, search for the website/company/product I was interested in visiting (perhaps the one mentioned in the link/ad) and enter via their website/front door. I think this is a behaviour I've picked up from the historically learning that banners/popups are just BAD NEWS...no exceptions. Like powerpoints, attachments or strange emails, I just have ingrained in me these things are not to be trusted and to not engage with them. Who knew where they're really taking you with their redirects, what they're doing, if they're really sending you where they say they are, or whether there's some hijack/virus/whatever. Back in the day, they were just generally something delivered from the seedier side of the internet: something to be avoided. Nowdays, the seedier/annoying side of the internet has of course become the mainstream, but that's why we have ad-blockers. I'm curious to know though, if I'm the only person who, through their own behaviour/history/preference, has been trained to go straight to the company/source/product rather than through an ad even when its presented to us...
  - BWStearns 11y ago
    You're not alone, I do the same. Anything living in the traditionally scuzzy bottom of article and right sidebar areas is guilty until proven otherwise. I'd be curious to see some research on this because I've actually had trouble finding things I was looking for when they were in traditionally bad screen real estate. When something does manage to seem interesting my assumption is that it's simply lying to me and won't take me to the thing I'm actually looking for. So rather than spend the extra time being disappointed and hitting ⌘+[ I just open the new tab and search. I use vimium so I do occasionally fat-finger or mis-read a flag and end up following an ad.
bcook 11y ago
I would just say that computer savvy people do not click on ads, and Silicon Valley has a concentration of said people.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
Would it prove just as valid to say tech people don't click on ads?
colmvp 11y ago
Funny considering two of the biggest companies in SV in Facebook and Google make incredible revenue from ads. I wonder if their employees use AdBlock or click on ads.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  Anecodotal: a friend of mine worked at an ad tech company (not one of the big brand names, though likely one that's served you ads at some point). He said that everyone at their company used Adblock, to the point where it was part of their developers' standard checklist when debugging issues that their clients were having ("first, disable Adblock").
ForHackernews 11y ago
Why would I ever click on an ad?
- danneu 11y ago
  Because you didn't know it was one.
  - teekert 11y ago
    Really? How about if you see something you actually want and are looking for? Is that really so difficult to imagine?
    - bottled_poe 11y ago
      Most ads seem to link to products/services that are not related to the content of the page that I'm currently looking at. Instead, they present targeted content based on browsing habit profiling. I'm far less likely to click on an ad that is out of context with what I'm currently thinking about.
    - Nursie 11y ago
      Then I would have searched for it and found the link that way.
      - mirimir 11y ago
        Right. The ad might remind you that you need something. Or it might trigger a flash of insight. But it would not likely lead to any reliable information about the issue. And that reminds me. It's very hard to get reliable information about new products. Just about all "reviews" are just advertorials.
    - drdeca 11y ago
      An example: I occasionally will click on ads for webcomics that seem like they might be interesting.
- 11y ago
eva1984 11y ago
Ironically, advertising business is mainly run by ad blocker users.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  I heard that Google had to rename their ad management portal's CSS styles because the site was broken for customers using ad blockers. :)
  - 0xCMP 11y ago
    Well, still didn't work for me! :P (Privacy Badger, Disconnect, uBlock) But I'm rather aggressively blocking anything/everything I can.
    - lstamour 11y ago
      If I recall, Facebook's ad manager might've asked me to disable my Adblock in order to preview the ads. ;-)
  - soared 11y ago
    Analytics breaks with ghostery, which is annoying.
zepto 11y ago
Silicon Valley tends to lead the rest of the US in tech behaviors.
- kordless 11y ago
  This is the best comment in here. We are the early adopters and when we do or don't do something, the rest aren't far behind with same.
  - teekert 11y ago
    Oh, "we" are so good, we are sooo leading. We even ignore things we don't want! Or do "we" also ignore ads for things we do want and the rest of the populous does not, and are the rest of the people therefor smarter and better of? Are ads always fraudulent rip-offs? Really?
    - kordless 11y ago
      Being an early adopter doesn't imply being smarter or better. The fact is, early adopters may frequently be considered as advanced types of guinea pigs, where they are willing to put up with shit other customers might not.[1] I don't know the comment about the Bay Area being "sooo leading" is necessarily accurate. We "lead movement" in a group of users based on the fact we adopt (and work in) technology more than other groups. This isn't elitism (which your comments lean toward implying) but more realism of the situation. Silicon Valley is where most of the high technology in the world originated. It only makes sense the natives that live near that region are more likely to be designated as early adopters. Of course, you can take my comment any way you like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter
hartator 11y ago
10 people is not a big enough sample size, specially online.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Look at the upper left corners of the images. They're looking at datasets of 100k+.
- xanados 11y ago
  It's not 10 people. This is data that Facebook gives you and each of those numbers is per user in the selected region. The proper way of reading that first graph is that for all Facebook users in San Francisco, on average they liked 6 pages ever, liked 1 post in the last month, etc.
work-on-828 11y ago
I really wish there was a service which would let me gripe about my problems and it would email me 10 Ads a month of products trying to solve those problems.
- traskjd 11y ago
  You mean like some sort of text box, where you type in your problem, and get results, perhaps augmented with some paid advertising from folks that know their offering would solve your problem? :-)
  - work-on-828 11y ago
    Google works for more immediate problems, but not for longstanding ones.
- technotony 11y ago
  "Advertize what you want to buy, not what you sell" I forget the name but there was a site trying that about eight years ago. Argentinian startup I think. Might be worth trying again, you could build early adoption from twitter maybe? Usual problem building a two sided market...
  - danblick 11y ago
    See "The intention economy" by Doc Searls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_economy
  - soared 11y ago
    "Use keywords do define what you are looking for" "Google.com"
- ccozan 11y ago
  I use for this Google alerts, for now results are mixed. But give it a try!
Trundle 11y ago
I think this has a large effect on opinions in an often revisited internet topic "moving away from ads". Whenever a service starts to offer a paid alternative, or people get on the topic of tracking, or micropayments comes up, it's always struck me that commenters seem used to effectively free content and seem to just ignore that there are people subsidizing their internet usage by clicking on ads comparatively all the time. I think it would be wise for us to reflect on, and admit, that we (power users) are currently getting a far better than average deal in providing for the web services we use. Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.
- mirimir 11y ago
  > Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked. Searching tells me that CPM is typically between $1 and $10. That implies ad income per site view of $0.001-$0.01, right? The fact that clicks are worth $1, or even $100, is irrelevant. What matters is ad income divided by site views. If every viewer paid that price, enforced by a paywall, the owner would earn as much as they had from ads.
  - qbrass 11y ago
    The barrier for ignoring ads is lower than bypassing a paywall. People will just be choosier about where they go and the site owner won't necessarily make as much.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      Paying $0.001-$.01 to bypass a paywall is arguably a very low barrier. Allowance for children, poor people, etc would be needed, of course. Maybe amusing image-mapping captchas would be workable. That could even be an income stream, Mechanical Turk style.
msoad 11y ago
People in Silicon Valley don't click on ads and DO use shortcut keys! ;)
patio11 11y ago
Ad clicks are studied pretty extensively. A good search term is "compulsive clickers." The cariacature-with-a-bit-of-truth version is less-educated older white woman in Iowa. The heavy clicking user population, roughly 4% of users, is generally believed to contribute more than a majority of total clicks. This is as well-studied as you'd expect of clearly quantifiable data worth billions of dollars, and remains socially contentious.
- jkaljundi 11y ago
  Also as I remember the 2-4% of people who ever click on ads tend to be older female population. Microsoft Advertising used to have some good research on it, can't find it now. It's said often you are more likely to survive an air crash than click on an ad.
- personjerry 11y ago
  This reminds me of the recent South Park episode on ads, for some reason.
- camillomiller 11y ago
  This definition totally reinforces Rushkoff's vision of most contemporary Web Businesses as value extracting entities. By the way, the fact that you have to be mildly stupid or technologically illiterate to really be clicking on ads is the proverbial pink elephant in the room. To further extend this reasoning, building up stupidity and lessening tech literacy is actually functional to Facebook's and Google's business models.
- lordnacho 11y ago
  Have you got some links to studies? I know someone who is starting a web shop.
  - optimalrob 11y ago
    Look for ComScore studies on natural born clickers 2008-2009. Surprisingly it seems this click concentration work was never updated.
- 11y ago
gyc 11y ago
Also interesting is the skew in visiting Facebook via desktop computers vs. mobile in tech-centric areas vs. non-tech-centric areas. In addition, it was interesting the see the difference in usage patterns between Denver and Boulder, given that they are so close geographically.
- soared 11y ago
  Boulder is comparable to SV, hippy start-up whatnot. Denver, not so much.
vezycash 11y ago
Here are my reasons for not clicking on ads. 1. Knowledge - I know an ad when I see one. And I know someone's getting paid for that click. It's like knowing the trick behind a magic trick. 2. I used to click ads - I clicked a ton of ads when I was still learning to use the web. So now, my bullshit detector is well trained. It can tell spam just from the URL, the wordings, the color... 3. I see fewer ads now - Host blocking + ublock block origin.
frik 11y ago
I want contextual ads, like the original AdSense "Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. For example, if you are visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that an ad pops up offering a special price on a flight to Italy, that’s contextual advertising. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#History , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_advertising
- HappyTypist 11y ago
  Agreed. I have clicked on many Adsense ads and never a Facebook ad. I have also clicked on a couple of Stack overflow ads, and got my current job thanks to stack overflow careers. These advertisements add value to me and the site owner, and while I don't like them, I do not mind them if they are appropriately done and non intrusive. I don't give a crap about the latest clash o clans rip-off, and if you advertise that to me you're hurting your CTR.
- jfoster 11y ago
  For this reason, I think the ultimate ad network would be a combination of Google's data, Facebook's data, and data from a payment processor (PayPal or Stripe). Google knows what you're after, right now. Facebook knows what you're into, in general. PayPal/Stripe know your propensity to spend money online. I would argue that the perfectly targeted ad will want to know about all of these. Google's data & mechanism (search) is probably the most useful; there's a pretty good chance someone searching "where to buy X" is looking to buy X. Combined with purchase data and personal preference data, the ability to target would seem near-perfect. Not only would you know whether the user is likely to buy X online, but you would also know what brand of X they might be interested in (eg. if they liked "Dell"), where they would prefer to purchase it from (eg. if they liked "Amazon"), and what bundling might appeal (eg. if they liked "Logitech"). For some people, this is the nightmare scenario. All these big companies putting together their data to algorithmically know what a consumer will buy before the consumer knows what they will buy. I'm with you, though. I think it would make advertising a lot less annoying, especially if it leads away from "we need your attention!" video ads into hyper-targeted text & images. The underlying assumption, though, is that advertising companies would be more successful if targeting were better. Undoubtedly, a segment of their audience would be in much higher demand than they are now. I suspect that a lot of other segments would be in much lower demand, though. Would Emirates bid as high on Google for "holidays in Europe" if they knew I had never spent online, was elderly, and liked "Cruises" on Facebook?
teekert 11y ago
Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to ignore such ads. Aren't geeks missing out by ignoring things targeted specifically to them (us)? Are geeks just stubborn? If you say things like "we get a better deal because stupid ad clickers pay for our internet experience", you are completely missing the fact that such an ad clicker probably made a valuable discovery through an ad, one that was even worth real money! Do most HN-ers really believe all ads are fraudulent rip-offs designed to trick us just into clicking on them? Sure some are, but people here seem to think they all are.
- 0xCMP 11y ago
  The problem is there is no filtering, thanks to having a paying customer (ad maker), and then horrible ads get shown. And they slow my experience down, take over my website, use technologies that can infect my otherwise uninfected computers, and confuse me when I want to click download. I learned from an early age that every single ad was essentially evil. All of it was a trick to get me to click something I did not want. Maybe, if they hadn't done that (and if they had ever really stopped... cause they haven't) I wouldn't have Privacy Bader, uBlock, and Disconnect running all at once. In the beginning all I had wanted to do was get actual information on a topic or download the latest version of something for Windows. And every time I see someone not running highly aggressive adblockers I can understand why they think somethings on the internet are so complicated. "Just google it" -> "Yea, and click which irrelevant ad which takes up the whole first fold of the page on my not Retina MBP?"
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bcook 11y ago
  Quite often (for not completely understood reasons), I will see a interesting ad and purposely avoid clicking it but immediately Google the advertised company/product. Considering my ignorance of analytics, my "ad avoidance" might be easily correlatable and considered a "click" on the obviously influential ad, especially when the ad that I was avoiding was presented by Google.
wfunction 11y ago
Is it because they run ad-blockers or disable tracking more?
rcheu 11y ago
It actually looks more like people don't use Facebook nearly as much in general? I don't think this data supports the suggestion that people in Silicon Valley don't click on ads, they also have very low comment, like, and share frequency as well. I think active time on site per user in Silicon Valley is just lower than the national medians. Also note that this seems to be rounded up to the nearest whole number, so we can't figure out like:ad click ratio or something like that from the data.
xkiwi 11y ago
I recall @pg 's essay immediately: "WHAT YOU'LL WISH YOU'D KNOWN" http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html here is what he wrote: If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. Silicon Valley, or people on HN generally, are doing this unconsciously. I was shock that a lot of (non tech)people accept things as they are (as default). They let phone APP like LinkedIn scan and grab the contact list; buy things that are in the trend; over estimate price but underestimate value, etc. ADs is good only if they introduce something new, CES-ish new, something that are not in the trend but available up on request. Something that you are not aware of, hope we get to that type of ad-era soon enough.
- Umn44 11y ago
  "I was shock that a lot of (non tech)people accept things as they are (as default). " You shouldn't... the human brain is bad at reasoning, and remember everything we do is powered by power stations within our cells, aka we're resource based creatures which means our powers of cognition and behavior can be easily overwhelmed and exhausted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
thedevil 11y ago
"Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads... Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently" The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear. Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.
- thedevil 11y ago
  On that note, does anyone know anything about the impact of internet use in drug addiction (and crime)? I have a very speculative hypothesis that internet (social networks, porn, etc) might work as a super-crack, competing with (and crowding out) other addictions because it's cheap, abundant, and instant.
  - nl 11y ago
    You're not the first to suggest that[1][2]. It's one of those things that is pretty hard to come up with proof either way though. [1] http://thedailyjournalist.com/theinvestigative/are-the-internet-and-gaming-reducing-crime/ http://thedailyjournalist.com/theinvestigative/are-the-inter... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h... (although I'm pretty sure this extract misinterpretates some parts!)
  - jeremysmyth 11y ago
    Same effect, but different mechanism (and causal route): http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/ http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
  - slang800 11y ago
    Non-substance addictions (including internet use) lack the physical dependence created by drugs like cocaine. So, it would be hard to compare them to "super-crack". I could certainly see how, for example, repeatedly checking your phone could mirror the behavioral aspect of smoking cigarettes. However, losing your phone won't cause withdrawal symptoms like headache, nausea, or fatigue. Also, I'd agree that social behavior being focused around online interaction could potentially serve as a deterrent (or at least distraction) from drug use / crime. Based on Todd Kendall's paper [Pornography, Rape, and the Internet](http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/conf/sic/papers_2007/kendall.pdf http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/conf/sic/paper...), porn has been responsible in some part for the decreasing rate of rape, but not other crimes. I can't find much research on non-rape crime being affected by internet use, but the St. Helena TV study by Tony Charlton did show that aggressiveness in children was reduced by the introduction of TV. Obviously TV is far less interactive than web-browsing, but it's the most similar study I can find. :P
melted 11y ago
Note also that this could be due to the fact that clicks (and I suspect likes as well) that come from the internal company networks (which includes VPN) are not billed to the customer, and are not counted for anything involving revenue. Google/FB employees spend much of their time at work or connected to work.
rajneeshgopalan 11y ago
I think people with a marketing/business background are also not sensitive for clicking on ads.
- MillerMichael 11y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I believe people who know how ads work, call them admen, are less sensitive to ads than people who do not work in this field of work.
Phemist 11y ago
Clicks are a bit of a weird metric in my opinion. It encourages optimisation for single instances of ad views, whereas what makes ads effective is the cumulative effect of multiple viewings. This may not even lead to a click, but to someone feeling more inclined to go a certain way when making decisions.
- soared 11y ago
  That is called awareness, the 1st step in the marketing (purchase) funnel.
snarfy 11y ago
I would assume tech users are more likely to install ad blockers.
manigandham 11y ago
As much as I like HN, there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation when it comes to ads. People absolutely click on ads. All the time. Regardless of where they live. Digital advertising is not some mystical industry but actually one of the most scientific and data-driven with a massive amount of metrics generated everyday. I know the author of this article but it's a very slim look at the entire ad ecosystem. There could be a thousand reasons why SV just has less ad clicks with anything from less facebook use to more adblocking to less fit for the audiences that many companies (that are advertising on facebook) are actually after. There are just as many other adtech companies and channels that show that SV has very high interaction rates in clicking on whitepapers, signing up for emails/newsletters, webinars, etc and other kinds of advertising outside of facebook. Even google gets tons of search ad clicks in SV. Facebook metrics are cool but it's important to remember that they are just a little sliver of the larger ad market and that the larger context matters anytime you analyze numbers like these.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Yes, people click on ads. I click, on average, when not using an ad blocker, accidentally around 200 ads a day on mobile. I've now made it a sport to click, after I accidentally clicked, another few dozen times. Kinda like Cookie Clicker. Most clicks are accidental, or people doing fraud (for business or fun reasons)
  - soared 11y ago
    Just so you know, Google very easily identifies your clicks as fake or accidental so they are just thrown in the trash, nobody pays for them.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Well, it’s not about money. More: I accidentally click an ad, get angry, click it another 100 times, and end up laughing about it. Next week, when I have time, I’ll just root my device again and install AdAway and XPosed with YouTube-AdBlock and YouTube-Background-Playback, and the issue is resolved.
ksec 11y ago
Does Ads need to be clicked for it to become good ads? What has happen to display ads? I personally think some ads are like reminder, remind be of a brand, remind me of something i know, reiterate, stating the obvious, all these are marketing, and what ads should be.

127 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

It reminds me of a story I was told about certain orange juice factory worker never drinking orange juice.

I'm glad there is real data on this. I kept explaining to people that our email and social habits in SV are a complete outlier vs. the rest of the world.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bcook 11y ago
So, before knowing there was reliable data, you constantly made unfounded claims? You made a good guess. Is that something to brag about? An opinion that you feel the need to "constantly explain to people" borders on ranting... (an embarassing past-time of my own)
- DiversityinSV 11y ago
  Let's say it was strong empiric evidence (e.g. on event invites, I always saw this, SV event invitation emails had the lowest open/clicks vs. other parts of the country) Same email, different regions. Same result. I also get the regular 'I hate emails, I don't click or read them' from a lot of coworkers, despite being the main revenue channel. Yeah, it's fun to be right. I'm bragging about it.
soared 11y ago
This is just FB data, which (at my agency) makes up <1% of b2b or b2c leads.

mchahn 11y ago

Could this be explained by technical people using more ad-blockers? Or is it adjusted for ad-blockers?

stronglikedan 11y ago
> Could this be explained by technical people using more ad-blockers? I don't know, but I wouldn't think so. I don't use ad-blockers (never have), and I don't click many ads. I go around them or close them, but for the most part have learned to ignore them. The only ads I click on are targeted ads that are relevant to my interests. I would think that technical people are less likely to be duped into clicking them, but I wouldn't attribute it to ad-blockers.
ACow_Adonis 11y ago
A curious note on my own behaviour. I've been on the internet since...roughly 1993/94? Reflecting on how I act, even back in the day "before ad-blockers", even if I saw an ad that seemed to link me to the place I wanted to go, I wouldn't click on it. Instead I would open up a new window/tab, actively go to a search engine, search for the website/company/product I was interested in visiting (perhaps the one mentioned in the link/ad) and enter via their website/front door. I think this is a behaviour I've picked up from the historically learning that banners/popups are just BAD NEWS...no exceptions. Like powerpoints, attachments or strange emails, I just have ingrained in me these things are not to be trusted and to not engage with them. Who knew where they're really taking you with their redirects, what they're doing, if they're really sending you where they say they are, or whether there's some hijack/virus/whatever. Back in the day, they were just generally something delivered from the seedier side of the internet: something to be avoided. Nowdays, the seedier/annoying side of the internet has of course become the mainstream, but that's why we have ad-blockers. I'm curious to know though, if I'm the only person who, through their own behaviour/history/preference, has been trained to go straight to the company/source/product rather than through an ad even when its presented to us...
- BWStearns 11y ago
  You're not alone, I do the same. Anything living in the traditionally scuzzy bottom of article and right sidebar areas is guilty until proven otherwise. I'd be curious to see some research on this because I've actually had trouble finding things I was looking for when they were in traditionally bad screen real estate. When something does manage to seem interesting my assumption is that it's simply lying to me and won't take me to the thing I'm actually looking for. So rather than spend the extra time being disappointed and hitting ⌘+[ I just open the new tab and search. I use vimium so I do occasionally fat-finger or mis-read a flag and end up following an ad.

bcook 11y ago

I would just say that computer savvy people do not click on ads, and Silicon Valley has a concentration of said people.

anexprogrammer 11y ago

Would it prove just as valid to say tech people don't click on ads?

colmvp 11y ago

Funny considering two of the biggest companies in SV in Facebook and Google make incredible revenue from ads. I wonder if their employees use AdBlock or click on ads.

chimeracoder 11y ago
Anecodotal: a friend of mine worked at an ad tech company (not one of the big brand names, though likely one that's served you ads at some point). He said that everyone at their company used Adblock, to the point where it was part of their developers' standard checklist when debugging issues that their clients were having ("first, disable Adblock").

ForHackernews 11y ago

Why would I ever click on an ad?

danneu 11y ago
Because you didn't know it was one.
- teekert 11y ago
  Really? How about if you see something you actually want and are looking for? Is that really so difficult to imagine?
  - bottled_poe 11y ago
    Most ads seem to link to products/services that are not related to the content of the page that I'm currently looking at. Instead, they present targeted content based on browsing habit profiling. I'm far less likely to click on an ad that is out of context with what I'm currently thinking about.
  - Nursie 11y ago
    Then I would have searched for it and found the link that way.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      Right. The ad might remind you that you need something. Or it might trigger a flash of insight. But it would not likely lead to any reliable information about the issue. And that reminds me. It's very hard to get reliable information about new products. Just about all "reviews" are just advertorials.
  - drdeca 11y ago
    An example: I occasionally will click on ads for webcomics that seem like they might be interesting.
11y ago

eva1984 11y ago

Ironically, advertising business is mainly run by ad blocker users.

cpeterso 11y ago
I heard that Google had to rename their ad management portal's CSS styles because the site was broken for customers using ad blockers. :)
- 0xCMP 11y ago
  Well, still didn't work for me! :P (Privacy Badger, Disconnect, uBlock) But I'm rather aggressively blocking anything/everything I can.
  - lstamour 11y ago
    If I recall, Facebook's ad manager might've asked me to disable my Adblock in order to preview the ads. ;-)
- soared 11y ago
  Analytics breaks with ghostery, which is annoying.

zepto 11y ago

Silicon Valley tends to lead the rest of the US in tech behaviors.

kordless 11y ago
This is the best comment in here. We are the early adopters and when we do or don't do something, the rest aren't far behind with same.
- teekert 11y ago
  Oh, "we" are so good, we are sooo leading. We even ignore things we don't want! Or do "we" also ignore ads for things we do want and the rest of the populous does not, and are the rest of the people therefor smarter and better of? Are ads always fraudulent rip-offs? Really?
  - kordless 11y ago
    Being an early adopter doesn't imply being smarter or better. The fact is, early adopters may frequently be considered as advanced types of guinea pigs, where they are willing to put up with shit other customers might not.[1] I don't know the comment about the Bay Area being "sooo leading" is necessarily accurate. We "lead movement" in a group of users based on the fact we adopt (and work in) technology more than other groups. This isn't elitism (which your comments lean toward implying) but more realism of the situation. Silicon Valley is where most of the high technology in the world originated. It only makes sense the natives that live near that region are more likely to be designated as early adopters. Of course, you can take my comment any way you like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter

hartator 11y ago

10 people is not a big enough sample size, specially online.

Mithaldu 11y ago
Look at the upper left corners of the images. They're looking at datasets of 100k+.
xanados 11y ago
It's not 10 people. This is data that Facebook gives you and each of those numbers is per user in the selected region. The proper way of reading that first graph is that for all Facebook users in San Francisco, on average they liked 6 pages ever, liked 1 post in the last month, etc.

work-on-828 11y ago

I really wish there was a service which would let me gripe about my problems and it would email me 10 Ads a month of products trying to solve those problems.

traskjd 11y ago
You mean like some sort of text box, where you type in your problem, and get results, perhaps augmented with some paid advertising from folks that know their offering would solve your problem? :-)
- work-on-828 11y ago
  Google works for more immediate problems, but not for longstanding ones.
technotony 11y ago
"Advertize what you want to buy, not what you sell" I forget the name but there was a site trying that about eight years ago. Argentinian startup I think. Might be worth trying again, you could build early adoption from twitter maybe? Usual problem building a two sided market...
- danblick 11y ago
  See "The intention economy" by Doc Searls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_economy
- soared 11y ago
  "Use keywords do define what you are looking for" "Google.com"
ccozan 11y ago
I use for this Google alerts, for now results are mixed. But give it a try!

Trundle 11y ago

I think this has a large effect on opinions in an often revisited internet topic "moving away from ads". Whenever a service starts to offer a paid alternative, or people get on the topic of tracking, or micropayments comes up, it's always struck me that commenters seem used to effectively free content and seem to just ignore that there are people subsidizing their internet usage by clicking on ads comparatively all the time. I think it would be wise for us to reflect on, and admit, that we (power users) are currently getting a far better than average deal in providing for the web services we use. Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.

mirimir 11y ago
> Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked. Searching tells me that CPM is typically between $1 and $10. That implies ad income per site view of $0.001-$0.01, right? The fact that clicks are worth $1, or even $100, is irrelevant. What matters is ad income divided by site views. If every viewer paid that price, enforced by a paywall, the owner would earn as much as they had from ads.
- qbrass 11y ago
  The barrier for ignoring ads is lower than bypassing a paywall. People will just be choosier about where they go and the site owner won't necessarily make as much.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Paying $0.001-$.01 to bypass a paywall is arguably a very low barrier. Allowance for children, poor people, etc would be needed, of course. Maybe amusing image-mapping captchas would be workable. That could even be an income stream, Mechanical Turk style.

msoad 11y ago

People in Silicon Valley don't click on ads and DO use shortcut keys! ;)

patio11 11y ago

Ad clicks are studied pretty extensively. A good search term is "compulsive clickers." The cariacature-with-a-bit-of-truth version is less-educated older white woman in Iowa. The heavy clicking user population, roughly 4% of users, is generally believed to contribute more than a majority of total clicks. This is as well-studied as you'd expect of clearly quantifiable data worth billions of dollars, and remains socially contentious.

jkaljundi 11y ago
Also as I remember the 2-4% of people who ever click on ads tend to be older female population. Microsoft Advertising used to have some good research on it, can't find it now. It's said often you are more likely to survive an air crash than click on an ad.
personjerry 11y ago
This reminds me of the recent South Park episode on ads, for some reason.
camillomiller 11y ago
This definition totally reinforces Rushkoff's vision of most contemporary Web Businesses as value extracting entities. By the way, the fact that you have to be mildly stupid or technologically illiterate to really be clicking on ads is the proverbial pink elephant in the room. To further extend this reasoning, building up stupidity and lessening tech literacy is actually functional to Facebook's and Google's business models.
lordnacho 11y ago
Have you got some links to studies? I know someone who is starting a web shop.
- optimalrob 11y ago
  Look for ComScore studies on natural born clickers 2008-2009. Surprisingly it seems this click concentration work was never updated.
11y ago

gyc 11y ago

Also interesting is the skew in visiting Facebook via desktop computers vs. mobile in tech-centric areas vs. non-tech-centric areas. In addition, it was interesting the see the difference in usage patterns between Denver and Boulder, given that they are so close geographically.

soared 11y ago
Boulder is comparable to SV, hippy start-up whatnot. Denver, not so much.

vezycash 11y ago

Here are my reasons for not clicking on ads. 1. Knowledge - I know an ad when I see one. And I know someone's getting paid for that click. It's like knowing the trick behind a magic trick. 2. I used to click ads - I clicked a ton of ads when I was still learning to use the web. So now, my bullshit detector is well trained. It can tell spam just from the URL, the wordings, the color... 3. I see fewer ads now - Host blocking + ublock block origin.

frik 11y ago

I want contextual ads, like the original AdSense "Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. For example, if you are visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that an ad pops up offering a special price on a flight to Italy, that’s contextual advertising. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#History , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_advertising

HappyTypist 11y ago
Agreed. I have clicked on many Adsense ads and never a Facebook ad. I have also clicked on a couple of Stack overflow ads, and got my current job thanks to stack overflow careers. These advertisements add value to me and the site owner, and while I don't like them, I do not mind them if they are appropriately done and non intrusive. I don't give a crap about the latest clash o clans rip-off, and if you advertise that to me you're hurting your CTR.
jfoster 11y ago
For this reason, I think the ultimate ad network would be a combination of Google's data, Facebook's data, and data from a payment processor (PayPal or Stripe). Google knows what you're after, right now. Facebook knows what you're into, in general. PayPal/Stripe know your propensity to spend money online. I would argue that the perfectly targeted ad will want to know about all of these. Google's data & mechanism (search) is probably the most useful; there's a pretty good chance someone searching "where to buy X" is looking to buy X. Combined with purchase data and personal preference data, the ability to target would seem near-perfect. Not only would you know whether the user is likely to buy X online, but you would also know what brand of X they might be interested in (eg. if they liked "Dell"), where they would prefer to purchase it from (eg. if they liked "Amazon"), and what bundling might appeal (eg. if they liked "Logitech"). For some people, this is the nightmare scenario. All these big companies putting together their data to algorithmically know what a consumer will buy before the consumer knows what they will buy. I'm with you, though. I think it would make advertising a lot less annoying, especially if it leads away from "we need your attention!" video ads into hyper-targeted text & images. The underlying assumption, though, is that advertising companies would be more successful if targeting were better. Undoubtedly, a segment of their audience would be in much higher demand than they are now. I suspect that a lot of other segments would be in much lower demand, though. Would Emirates bid as high on Google for "holidays in Europe" if they knew I had never spent online, was elderly, and liked "Cruises" on Facebook?

teekert 11y ago

Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to ignore such ads. Aren't geeks missing out by ignoring things targeted specifically to them (us)? Are geeks just stubborn? If you say things like "we get a better deal because stupid ad clickers pay for our internet experience", you are completely missing the fact that such an ad clicker probably made a valuable discovery through an ad, one that was even worth real money! Do most HN-ers really believe all ads are fraudulent rip-offs designed to trick us just into clicking on them? Sure some are, but people here seem to think they all are.

0xCMP 11y ago
The problem is there is no filtering, thanks to having a paying customer (ad maker), and then horrible ads get shown. And they slow my experience down, take over my website, use technologies that can infect my otherwise uninfected computers, and confuse me when I want to click download. I learned from an early age that every single ad was essentially evil. All of it was a trick to get me to click something I did not want. Maybe, if they hadn't done that (and if they had ever really stopped... cause they haven't) I wouldn't have Privacy Bader, uBlock, and Disconnect running all at once. In the beginning all I had wanted to do was get actual information on a topic or download the latest version of something for Windows. And every time I see someone not running highly aggressive adblockers I can understand why they think somethings on the internet are so complicated. "Just google it" -> "Yea, and click which irrelevant ad which takes up the whole first fold of the page on my not Retina MBP?"
deleted 11y ago
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bcook 11y ago
Quite often (for not completely understood reasons), I will see a interesting ad and purposely avoid clicking it but immediately Google the advertised company/product. Considering my ignorance of analytics, my "ad avoidance" might be easily correlatable and considered a "click" on the obviously influential ad, especially when the ad that I was avoiding was presented by Google.

wfunction 11y ago

Is it because they run ad-blockers or disable tracking more?

rcheu 11y ago

It actually looks more like people don't use Facebook nearly as much in general? I don't think this data supports the suggestion that people in Silicon Valley don't click on ads, they also have very low comment, like, and share frequency as well. I think active time on site per user in Silicon Valley is just lower than the national medians. Also note that this seems to be rounded up to the nearest whole number, so we can't figure out like:ad click ratio or something like that from the data.

xkiwi 11y ago

I recall @pg 's essay immediately: "WHAT YOU'LL WISH YOU'D KNOWN" http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html here is what he wrote: If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. Silicon Valley, or people on HN generally, are doing this unconsciously. I was shock that a lot of (non tech)people accept things as they are (as default). They let phone APP like LinkedIn scan and grab the contact list; buy things that are in the trend; over estimate price but underestimate value, etc. ADs is good only if they introduce something new, CES-ish new, something that are not in the trend but available up on request. Something that you are not aware of, hope we get to that type of ad-era soon enough.

Umn44 11y ago
"I was shock that a lot of (non tech)people accept things as they are (as default). " You shouldn't... the human brain is bad at reasoning, and remember everything we do is powered by power stations within our cells, aka we're resource based creatures which means our powers of cognition and behavior can be easily overwhelmed and exhausted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

thedevil 11y ago

"Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads... Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently" The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear. Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.

thedevil 11y ago
On that note, does anyone know anything about the impact of internet use in drug addiction (and crime)? I have a very speculative hypothesis that internet (social networks, porn, etc) might work as a super-crack, competing with (and crowding out) other addictions because it's cheap, abundant, and instant.
- nl 11y ago
  You're not the first to suggest that[1][2]. It's one of those things that is pretty hard to come up with proof either way though. [1] http://thedailyjournalist.com/theinvestigative/are-the-internet-and-gaming-reducing-crime/ http://thedailyjournalist.com/theinvestigative/are-the-inter... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h... (although I'm pretty sure this extract misinterpretates some parts!)
- jeremysmyth 11y ago
  Same effect, but different mechanism (and causal route): http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/ http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
- slang800 11y ago
  Non-substance addictions (including internet use) lack the physical dependence created by drugs like cocaine. So, it would be hard to compare them to "super-crack". I could certainly see how, for example, repeatedly checking your phone could mirror the behavioral aspect of smoking cigarettes. However, losing your phone won't cause withdrawal symptoms like headache, nausea, or fatigue. Also, I'd agree that social behavior being focused around online interaction could potentially serve as a deterrent (or at least distraction) from drug use / crime. Based on Todd Kendall's paper [Pornography, Rape, and the Internet](http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/conf/sic/papers_2007/kendall.pdf http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/conf/sic/paper...), porn has been responsible in some part for the decreasing rate of rape, but not other crimes. I can't find much research on non-rape crime being affected by internet use, but the St. Helena TV study by Tony Charlton did show that aggressiveness in children was reduced by the introduction of TV. Obviously TV is far less interactive than web-browsing, but it's the most similar study I can find. :P

melted 11y ago

Note also that this could be due to the fact that clicks (and I suspect likes as well) that come from the internal company networks (which includes VPN) are not billed to the customer, and are not counted for anything involving revenue. Google/FB employees spend much of their time at work or connected to work.

rajneeshgopalan 11y ago

I think people with a marketing/business background are also not sensitive for clicking on ads.

MillerMichael 11y ago
Couldn't agree more. I believe people who know how ads work, call them admen, are less sensitive to ads than people who do not work in this field of work.

Phemist 11y ago

Clicks are a bit of a weird metric in my opinion. It encourages optimisation for single instances of ad views, whereas what makes ads effective is the cumulative effect of multiple viewings. This may not even lead to a click, but to someone feeling more inclined to go a certain way when making decisions.

soared 11y ago
That is called awareness, the 1st step in the marketing (purchase) funnel.

snarfy 11y ago

I would assume tech users are more likely to install ad blockers.

manigandham 11y ago

As much as I like HN, there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation when it comes to ads. People absolutely click on ads. All the time. Regardless of where they live. Digital advertising is not some mystical industry but actually one of the most scientific and data-driven with a massive amount of metrics generated everyday. I know the author of this article but it's a very slim look at the entire ad ecosystem. There could be a thousand reasons why SV just has less ad clicks with anything from less facebook use to more adblocking to less fit for the audiences that many companies (that are advertising on facebook) are actually after. There are just as many other adtech companies and channels that show that SV has very high interaction rates in clicking on whitepapers, signing up for emails/newsletters, webinars, etc and other kinds of advertising outside of facebook. Even google gets tons of search ad clicks in SV. Facebook metrics are cool but it's important to remember that they are just a little sliver of the larger ad market and that the larger context matters anytime you analyze numbers like these.

kuschku 11y ago
Yes, people click on ads. I click, on average, when not using an ad blocker, accidentally around 200 ads a day on mobile. I've now made it a sport to click, after I accidentally clicked, another few dozen times. Kinda like Cookie Clicker. Most clicks are accidental, or people doing fraud (for business or fun reasons)
- soared 11y ago
  Just so you know, Google very easily identifies your clicks as fake or accidental so they are just thrown in the trash, nobody pays for them.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Well, it’s not about money. More: I accidentally click an ad, get angry, click it another 100 times, and end up laughing about it. Next week, when I have time, I’ll just root my device again and install AdAway and XPosed with YouTube-AdBlock and YouTube-Background-Playback, and the issue is resolved.

ksec 11y ago

Does Ads need to be clicked for it to become good ads? What has happen to display ads? I personally think some ads are like reminder, remind be of a brand, remind me of something i know, reiterate, stating the obvious, all these are marketing, and what ads should be.