If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to college education, the less educated your audience, the more likely they are to click through on an advertisement.
While this may be good news for some, it certainly seems to spell doom for supporting intelligent content through advertising.
The two states with the lowest click rate were Massachusetts and Washington, while the state with the highest click-through rate was West Virginia. These correlate very strongly, according to Chitika’s blog post, with the education rates in those states.
The study works with stats on a large scale, comparing click through rates with education rates for entire states. The blog quotes Daniel Ruby, research director for Chitika, as saying that this should be taken as an opportunity.
“Obviously, if you’re targeting a more educated demographic, you need to do a better job of making your ad worthwhile,” says Ruby. “This, like everything, is an opportunity to push the industry towards the idea of content first, sales pitch second, even among advertisements.”
We fear that far too often, things like this work in the other direction and content follows the money, not vice versa.
Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is supported by advetisers who have realized this and are targetting our unusualy educated audience & influential audience. 73% of respondents to our recent readers’ poll have an advanced or undergraduate degree, over 46% have significant or final authority over IT purchasing decisions, and our advertisers target their ads accordingly. We believe that our readers are also unusually attractive and smell extra sweet, but we have only anecdotal evidence of that.
