Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
WATCH: Shredding On The Google Guitar!
Website owners: Opera users are the most valuable, in terms of ad clicks
If you don't want to click through, the basic gist is this: Opera users are 50% more likely to click ads than Chrome users. Internet Explorer are the next-most likely to click ads, followed by Firefox. Safari users actually click the least ads!
The difficulty comes from trying to analyse these figures. A nascent analysis, perhaps citing Internet Explorer, would state that the lack of ad-blocking is to blame. Both Chrome and Firefox have excellent ad-blocking extensions, that's why their users click so few ads. But Opera has ad-blocking! And if it was only about blocking ads, wouldn't Internet Explorer be at the top?
So, Opera has ad-blocking, yet its users still click the most ads. Curious. (Incidentally, is there a popular ad-blocking add-on for Safari? As in, one that even non-power users would know of?)
Perhaps it's the users themselves. Are Opera users more inquisitive? This report uses in-line text ads as a sample set, so maybe... Opera users are more literate? Perhaps Safari and Chrome users merely scan text, rather than actually reading it? The problem with this argument is Internet Explorer -- it's right up the top with Opera! Can we really say that the average Opera user is comparable to an IE user? Surely they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum!
What's the answer, then? I'm guessing that the sample set is from a biased set of websites -- perhaps from a forum that's frequented by a lot of Opera users? Internet Explorer should be at the top, with its lack of ad-blocking and its 'newbie' user base. Still, I'm going to suggest to my chief that we write more Opera news...
Comments
15
Subscribe to commentsScott SliwinskiAug 18th 2010 1:53PM
Of course they are, they probably have no AD-Blocking Plugins, so in thier case, THEY SEE THE ADS!
sRcAug 18th 2010 2:30PM
Opera has ad-blocking built in, no need for a plugin to do it
sandroAug 18th 2010 3:43PM
Although opera has builtin adblocker, you can get other adblocker for opera too (urlfilter.ini, abp.js or css blocker!)
ainstusharAug 18th 2010 7:10PM
@sRc
Since when does opera have built in AD BLOCKER? Opera has CONTENT BLOCKER. That way, a user has to right click on an ad and block it individually. You can get scripts from websites, but you have to manually load them, and update them. Again, that's not called ad blocking. There is no adblock plugin for opera. I love opera, but the lack of usable/practical extensions and crappy dragonfly is a turn off.
And oh, Safari now has extensions, so the popular chrome adblock extension works in safari. Might want to include that.
milrtime83Aug 18th 2010 2:45PM
Scott, you may want to read the whole article before commenting...
bjsguessAug 18th 2010 3:05PM
Why assume that IE users are all newbies?
There are millions upon millions of IE users that are stuck checking websites using IE from their corporate desks. These are people who are hardly internet beginners. They also probably can't run extensions to block ads.
I'm willing to bet that many IE users are less sophisticated than their Chrome counterparts but your sweeping generalization just doesn't make any sense.
hectormaciasa79Aug 19th 2010 11:01AM
There seems to be the asumption that a regular user clicks all of the ads just because theyre shown, which is plain stupid.
You can have ads blocked or not, it doesnt make any difference, you will click them or ignore them, whether theres a stupid adblocking thing or not.
King AntoniusAug 18th 2010 5:04PM
Is it just me or is there something wrong with the bottom two bars? Look at the numbers and the length of the bars they are next to.
King AntoniusAug 18th 2010 5:05PM
Nevermind. I misinterpreted something. >.>
JabbathewocketAug 18th 2010 5:48PM
This is the proverbial "much ado about nothing"
Opera has the fewest users, therefore everything that any of those users do is magnified in signifcance (at least on the scales we are talking about here)
What follows is a completely made up set of numbers to prove the point
Browser A has 10 users who each click 1 ad one time generating 10 "hits"
Browser B has 100 users 10 of whom each click 10 ads generating 100 "hits"
Browser C has 10000 users who combined generate 500 "hits"
Comparing in this fashion is meaningless.. as clearly browser C has the "most" hits and is the most "valuable" (assuming everything else is equal and the pages where all displayed exactly the same every time for every user)
Until/unless the sample size can be measured to be the same under controlled circumstances (and given the browser market it would need to be a very large number of subjects) the numbers mean next to nothing when taken out of context.
Or if you have read this far, tiny sample of users (opera's installed base) does not generate useful stats that can be applied to the browser market as a whole.. any more than asking your nearest 5 friends what their favorite food is can predict a trend (beyond what your 5 friends like to eat)
EaglehaslandedAug 18th 2010 6:15PM
The data the graph is generated from is apparently based on more than 40 million ad impressions. If we assume the sample was taken from pages that do not generate a bias towards a particular broswer, we can expect aproximately 980,000 of those impressions to come from Opera users. The sample is therefore hardly miniscule.
Since the CTR statistic on which the graph is based is clicks divided by impressions, as long as each browser has enough users to overcome random variation the difference in user base sizes is not a problem.
thepirateeyeAug 18th 2010 6:17PM
Are they including mobile browsers? I use Opera Mini on my iPhone, and its choppy zoom tends to make my fat fingers click on things I didn't want to click on.
LocutusAug 18th 2010 6:26PM
Opera has 100%, not 50%, more clicks. Chrome has 50% less than Opera.
MpmcfarlaneAug 18th 2010 8:31PM
Personally I use Chrome and I click on lot's of ads to make Google more money.
IriverconvertAug 18th 2010 11:44PM
I'm sorry, I stopped reading as soon as I saw that they had misspelled the word "behavior" or "behaviour" as "beheviour".