Ok, so it doesn’t *exactly* say that, but here are a few bullets from a study commissioned by Media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore.

• A very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total U.S. online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behavior. 
• Heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks.
• Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000 and are more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites.
• We can’t count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying on-line exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy.
• While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns.
• For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.

So, why am I writing about this?  Well, reports like this are not written for fun.  No one just says, "I wonder what a haevy clicker looks like."  There was a purpose for this report, and it’s goal is to obvious lay the groundwork for explaining to marketers that they shouldn’t be spooked by the fact that no one clicks on ads anymore.  Here is an ad network simply building a research report so that their sales guys have an answer for the question of, "Why are my clickthroughs so low?"  Now they can say, "Well you don’t need clicks.  In fact, clicks are bad.  You want the impressions, so let’s do some more CPM deals!"

Now, this of course flies directly in the face of logic.  "But look – we have a real research paper saying clicks don’t matter!"

It’s a funny report when yout think about it.  When Internet advertising got started, accountability was touted as one of its strengths.  Now that ads don’t get clicked on, they want to throw accountability out of the equation.  Moral of the story – take everything you hear in advertising and marketing with a big grain of salt….