[larrywright]

I'm not sure I've seen anybody report hard numbers on this, but anecdotally what I've heard is this: geeks don't click on ads. Any site that targets geeks has a harder time making revenue from advertising than one targeting non-geeks, by a significant margin.

[petercooper]

You're right, but since you follow me on Twitter, you must have missed my numbers on this.. ;-)

On Ruby Inside, Rails Inside, and Ruby Flow, I run a cpl million ad impressions each month and make an OK amount of money from it despite the CPM being deathly low (say $2-$3 on a per ad basis). The CTR, however? It's south of 0.5%.

I also ran an Adsense for Feeds experiment for a few days recently. Don't have the numbers to hand but it was 1 click in approximately 16,000 impressions.. and these are real, unblocked impressions. I made 40 cents. Developers don't click on ads. "Geeks" do, though, IMHO.. otherwise sites like Slashdot wouldn't bother.

Compare this to Adsense ads on my old, archived personal blog.. and they run at over 20%.

[ohashi]

I click ads. They interest me often, but I cannot honestly think of the last time (if ever) that I bought something from one.

The less web savvy the audience the higher the click through, best CTRs I ever experienced were on myspace related sites, my target audience was 15 year old kids judging from profile links I saw.

[larrywright]

Yeah, I had seen your numbers, but I was referring to some sort of larger study on the matter.

As for Slashdot, I always sort of wondered whether or not the appeal to those advertisers was less clickthrough and more name recognition. That is something that I think is a bit under-rated. I think that matters when evaluating products - I know that I tend to favor brands that I've heard of in some way vs something completely unfamiliar.

[petercooper]

As for Slashdot, I always sort of wondered whether or not the appeal to those advertisers was less clickthrough and more name recognition.

That has been cited by some advertisers, for sure - especially those who are recently funded or have larger branding budgets.

Take New Relic, for example. They're sponsoring The Ruby Show for I'd guess (and I don't know for sure, but basing on rates of similar podcasts) at least $300-$500 per show? There's no way they're getting that much business from people listening to the show checking them out at that very moment. In terms of brand awareness, though, $5-8k a year is nothing if almost every Ruby developer has at least heard of you..

[fretje]

> ...geeks don't click on ads.

I think it's rather "geeks don't see ads".

[petercooper]

It's worth noting that the sorts of ads most non-enterprise programming sites run aren't the sort of ads that the adblockers strip out by default (major networks, Flash, etc). You could manually add them, but I don't know if people go to the bother in large numbers if they're not horrid, intrusive ads.

[jrockway]

I use EasyList, and all these ads are blocked.

[peterb]

Exactly. Many (most?) geeks use an adblocker.

[frou_dh]

And don't they like to mention so all the time. It's the computer equivalent of "I don't own a TV".

[gridspy]

Probably more like "I have have HD reception" - opting out of ads improves your experience a great deal.

[jonny_noog]

I do use an adblocker, but even before I did, I think I'd just used the web so much that it was almost like my brain had gotten used to the general pattern/shape of ads on web pages to the point where I just unconscionably ignored them.

[drp]

That's called "banner blindness". It's important to keep in mind that banner blindness applies to things that look like ads, not just ads. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

[jonny_noog]

Good point. But I'd also be interested to know the experience level of users involved in Nielsen's study. My own anecdotal experience suggests that people less accustomed to the web are far slower at discerning what is an ad and what is content.

On a related topic from that link, I don't think I've ever come across a banner ad made to look like a dialog box that has been good enough to fool me. But again my experience seems to suggest that those with less computer experience are far more easily fooled.