That's why people who block ads stand at 6% of firefox users, which amounts to maybe 2% of total users. Hardly worth worrying too much about.
It's like the people who tell you every second how they haven't owned a TV for years, yet fail to grasp the fact they're nothing like the average joe.
For some reason adblock users seem to consider themselves as 'early adopters'. They're not.
"Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."
"heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks."
Sure doesn't sound like most people...
Mice don't think like this either. The ones thinking are the maze builders.
edit: still not sure I quite understand your point here (Or why the downmods). You're saying that adware/spyware generates lots of revenue for ad networks. What does that have to do with the usefulness of advertising on websites?
Hypothesis A: ads are useful, people click on them b/c they deliberately want more info.
Hypothesis B: ads are useless, people click on them only when they are somehow tricked into doing so.
It's obviously the case that out of the set of ad-clickers some are type A and some are type B; the interesting question is the composition of the ad-clicking population.
What follows depends on how you interpret adware and spyware clicks: are they clicked mostly out of confusion (b/c the demographic that has adware/spyware-infected computers tends to be the elderly and other "unsavvy" people) or mostly b/c they're useful to the clicker?
Depending on how you do your weightings you might have to revise down the % of type-A clicks that're going on (and revise it down again to take various kinds of clickfraud into account).
I can't actually tell you if those stats are accurate: I've overheard figures like that from people who might know, but figure they're mostly disgruntled employees exaggerating for effect, so I tend to discount the testimony somewhat.
Remember, the people seeing the adware are the ones who clicked on bonzai buddy in the first place, and/or don't realize the adware on their machine.
These are also the people that don't think there's going to have any trouble canceling that free offer.
(An aside: one of the darkest, most depressing times in my life was working in online advertising. I lasted 6 months.)
Or, find the user when they are already looking for a maze to go through, and take advantage of that to entertain the user and get some brand placement at the same time. That feels like a better analogy to me; it's far easier to get a user to play your game when they're in a playful mood already. In this case, the maze is the cheese. :-)
Enticing people to go through mazes when they are not in the proper mindset is hard though, even when the maze is compelling and might be enticing given a different mindset. Your potential users need to find out about your toys somehow. I'm not totally familiar with how BK has been marketing these games, but if I'm not in the mood to play a game, no amount of enticing will work. There are a lot of times when I am searching for specific information, and even the most compelling offer of fun and engagement is just an annoying distraction.
I guess this is the long way of saying: make sure to engage them when they want a maze to go through, and make them want it to be your maze. Marketing works best when people want to be marketed to.
As a thought experiment, I can imagine sample groups of advertisements I've seen where even the best ad would garner my disgust, because it was so unbelievably obnoxious and engagement-free.
On the other hand though, given a sample group of effective advertisements, I could imagine being able to indicate the one I would be most likely to click on first. Now this doesn't mean the others aren't engaging and fun. It means the one I indicated is more engaging and fun than the rest, but it is possible they are much more engaging and fun than the former group of crap. At best, I might be compelled to go and visit each of them once I am done with the one before. By that standard, they would all be engaging and fun.
But then, I could be thinking about this wrong. Advertising generally works very poorly on me, and so I might not have the proper frame of reference.
However, I've found it generally true that a small subset of ads strike me as being engaging and fun to my hypothetical advertising consumer. However, I don't think this is a tautology as much as evidence that more effort and concern will make that subset grow larger.
Advertisements are like the maze. In early days, people were forced to sit through them in between parts of shows on the radio. Print ads had to be looked at so that people could find the articles. Nowadays, people are able to get around these 'mazes'. Morally, people might want to support the content-creators, but if you ask any newspaper executive or journalist, guilt can't get you very far for very long. Technology has enabled the blocking of advertisements, and a few mice have had a taste of the easy-to-reach cheese. These mice will almost certainly not go back to trudging through the maze as they did before.
Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze. This is certainly a more difficult solution than making a banner ad with a logo. It requires a fair amount of creativity, time, and effort. But some advertisers are already doing this. Take a look at the Burger King games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2do5oV2-8
Burger King has made their brand fun and engaging, making the consumers want to consume the advertisements. In fact, they pay for them! Now isn't that ingenious?
Another example is woot.com. People want to buy stuff, suppliers want to sell stuff. They connect at Woot, and are directly engaged with the product.
This is the way marketing is supposed to work. Plastering noise and garbage on a webpage will drive your users to clean it up. They will find a way around your maze.