I'm actually quite impressed that people earn money from these advertisements. I have never clicked one of the adverts, unless it was the top result on a Google search for the thing I was actually looking for. It's like a natural instinct to ignore the ads.
With the rise of addons like AdBlock Plus, I think it's inevitable that this Ad-venture (pun intended :P) will decline, and cease to work, until a new medium or method emerges(Social networks, website-product-placement, etc)
Yep. My cofounder did a ton of user testing. One guy, as he was doing a shopping-related search on Google, said, "You want to know the secret of Google? Ignore the left side of the page. The good stuff is the little things over on the right."
you would be also surprised that there are lot's of people using IE.
The fact is, you and probably most of the people here on HN are the 1%.
ABP has 15 million users on firefox and 10 million on chrome. This is 25 million users worldwide, so out of a total 2.4 billion internet users ABP users are about 1% of the world population.
the rest, 99% of the internet users are people who see ads. probably some of them also never clicked an ad but since the advertisement industry is a huge one, it is safe to assume that it works.
All Adblock does is guarantee that the user won't cost the advertiser any money because the ad is not shown ergo can of be clicked. Google ads are pay-per-click. Adblock does not affect the conversion rate of the people who don't use AdBlock. AdBlock does make it more difficult to reach markets that use AdBlock disproportionately, but those markets don't like advertising anyway, so the difference in reach caused by AdBlock is only a percentage of the user count for the market being measured.
P.S. If you clicked on an ad because it was what you were looking for, then you did exactly what the advertiser wanted you to do. That's the whole idea behind PPC, and why that top spot is such a good one.
Your average Internet user has no problems clicking on Adwords ads. If anything in ecommerce they are just as likely or more likely to click an ad than an organic listing.
With the rise of addons like AdBlock Plus, I think it's inevitable that this Ad-venture (pun intended :P) will decline, and cease to work, until a new medium or method emerges(Social networks, website-product-placement, etc)