Contextual Ad Exploitation

Seth post by Danah Boyd, which offers a hypothesis on who is clicking ads:

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 [social networks] to meet new people than the average user (who is more likely to be using SNSs to maintain connections).

The problem with catering to the lowest common denominator is that the people who are clicking the ads

• have less of an ability to buy premium products
• are less likely to do follow on marketing for you to promote your products to other
• are a small minority of your visitors
• are driven away from your site when they click
• each day many ignorant users learn more about the web and click less ads
• the new users coming on the web replacing those who are learning about it are even poorer and less socially connected than those already on the network

In the next couple years there is going to be a major shift in online ad based business models where many publishers push themselves up the value chain. The trend for profitable publishing, is going to include the following aspects

• fewer ads
• ads with more information
• ads that look more like information
• ads tighter integrated into the content
• having

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