According to comScore/Starcom/Tacoda, “heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks” and “heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000.” It continues:

Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

Reading the slashdot comment thread, I love comments like this from sootman (scary as this thought is):

NOOOOOOO!!!! We NEED these people! The WWW is supported by ads, so as long as these people do all the clicking, no one will mind if the rest of use use AdBlock, custom /etc/hosts files, etc.

It just reinforces what we have been thinking about and working on for some time - a shift to per-user metrics, things like ARPU (or let’s be clear, ARPMU per thousand users!) for measuring advertising returns and not based on per-impression or thousand impressions. I have sent in a few requests to the companies that put the study together to get more details on the methodology. If this study was done the way I think it was done covering all ad campaigns, then I think the news may not be quite as bad for everyone as it seems at first glance. But I will post an update here shortly.

UPDATE:  Indeed I received the presentation from George - it looks like the study (Presentation for Conference - Heavy Clickers) is across all ads, of which clickthrough rates are much higher for direct offers that promote things like earning money from surveys, sweepstakes and other offers that would typically attract people with more time on their hands who are looking to make a few bucks online. This is really not that surprising to me. Although there are vast systemic problems with the online ad world and a lack of working “plumbing” infrastructure, I’m not ready based on this study to sound the death knell for online advertising just yet.