CPC is actually only smallish percentage of the online ad marketplace. The real dollars are in CPM ads - display / brand advertising, the stuff you see in the big skyscrapers and 300x400s on high-traffic pages.
It's about brand awareness, not clicks or conversions.
Those placements run at pre-negotiated rates, and represent the bulk of ad revenue.
The problem is that, if I see a 40-foot advertisement on a city bus, "Drink Buzz Cola", I know that the Buzz corporation has elected to spend serious dollars and the risk of public exposure on their brand. Internet advertising still has a smarmy one-on-one private feel to it:
"How do I trust this 'Buzz Cola' who have spent .01 cents for a 4 inch ad on MY facebook page?"
...people don't get a sense that the ad campaign is city-wide, nation-wide, international, whatever, and is being shown to millions of people...even when it is. And so the brand-building ("everybody's doing it!") doesn't work the same at a psychological level.
Most people don't go through this mental process. Brand awareness happens beneath the level of cognition anyway. You can show people unfamiliar brands repetitively in an unobtrusive context and then when you put them all together and deliberately show the person and ask, "how many of these have you seen before?", the answer will usually be "none". But if, before this, you ask them to rate a group of brands, including the ones they've been shown along with some truly new ones -- they will rate the shown group higher on various metrics even though they think they've never seen them before.
I'm not suggesting that there is actual ratiocination going on when people look at ads. But a large, public, showy ad argues from authority much more than a little flickering thing on a website (that only I can see).
actually direct response and branding are about 50/50 these days online because search has been kicking so much ass. You cab find these numbers on the iab.net site
Yeah, I should have indicated that I was excluding search from this. The original article was more about "display" / contextual ads, be they text or images, on content/community sites.
Would we feel proud of living off of a business model that targets the poor?
Sloppy. He doesn't make a hard distinction between gray-area fraudulent "sweepstakes" ads and legitimate ads. The above quote makes it sound like selling products/services to the poor is somehow wrong...obviously false. If the sweepstakes ads are clicked on by poor people more often than rich people, well, that's not a big surprise, but it has nothing to do with advertising in general.
This is very narrow minded. Perhaps the CPC ads on average are targeted towards the demographics they discovered.
I have successfully used Google Ads outside the USA. The target audience was high income, but they did click on ads as long as they were relevant (or close to relevant).
i actually found his tone a bit condescending with an "I'm better/richer/smarter than you". many be people say they ignore ads that actually click on them, its cool to ignore ads. but the whole bit on middle America is lame.
CPC is actually only smallish percentage of the online ad marketplace. The real dollars are in CPM ads - display / brand advertising, the stuff you see in the big skyscrapers and 300x400s on high-traffic pages.
It's about brand awareness, not clicks or conversions.
Those placements run at pre-negotiated rates, and represent the bulk of ad revenue.