comScore and Starcom USA Release Updated “Natural Born Clickers” Study Showing 50 Percent Drop in Number of U.S. Internet Users Who Click on Display Ads - comScore, Inc

“The act of clicking on a display ad is experiencing rapid attrition in the current digital marketplace,” said Linda Anderson, comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the study. “Today, marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact. As a result, savvy marketers are moving to an evaluation of the impact that all ad impressions – whether clicked or not – have on consumer behavior, mirroring the manner in which traditional advertising has been measured for decades using reach and frequency metrics.”

From comscore

Nothing really new there. It would be interesting to consider the most active advertisers in 2007 vs. 2009. From a quick look at the TNS data in March 2007 and March 2009 it seems that the financial industry is spending more in 2009, but could also be that the proverbial long tail of advertisers is also getting longer. So, more small advertisers generate impressions no one cares about. Interesting stuff but the idea of “clickers” and “non-clickers” is kinda useless. Can we generally separate people interested in products/services/things and others who aren’t? Would that work in any other medium?