"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.)
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.