A fascinating study posted today by Dave Morgan (via Online Spin)  examines whether or not the web users who click on ads are representative of the online commmunity as a whole. What did they find? Ninety-nine percent of web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

I saw a great article on NYTimes.com that provided an overview of the current state of display targeting.  I think it overstates the difference in price for targeting however, “Advertisers are willing to pay much higher rates to reach such screened audiences”.  For example, CPM’s for behavioral targeted inventory are currently $1-2 more than those of specific channels within ad networks.  As advertisers and publishers realize the value of reaching people out of context, I could see these numbers changing, but that shift hasn’t occurred yet.