Are Microsoft Users More Vulnerable to Advertising?

Posted 12/11/2009 at 2:41pm | by Bart Salisbury

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If only total dupes fall for click-through advertising on search result pages, and users of Microsoft products are the most likely to click-through, does that mean users of Microsoft products are total dupes? Logically fallacy aside, Microsoft product users might be total dupes, but not for this particular reason.

Chitika, which researches search-targeted advertising, reports that users of Microsoft products are more likely than others to click an ad on a search result page. For example, users of Bing are 75% more likely to click an ad than users of Google. And users of Internet Explorer are 50% more likely than Safari users, and 80% more likely than Chrome users to click an ad. Overall, Windows users are twice as likely as Linux and Mac users to click an ad.

So users of Microsoft products are gullible dupes--easy prey for the mavens of click-through advertising, right? Hardly. In this case the percentage differences are accurate, but the actual click-through rates for all platforms are so low the differences are probably meaningless. For example, 99.85% of Internet Explorer users don’t click-through, compared with 99.34% of Firefox users, 99.50% of Safari users, and 99.79% of Chrome users. In other words, percentage-wise, hardly anyone, regardless of browser, clicks-through. The pattern for operating systems is similar--in all three cases: Windows, Linux, and Mac, more than 99% don’t click-through.

Given the general nature of Microsoft product users--in all fairness it’s a lot more diverse a population than Linux or Mac users--Microsoft product users seem to be doing pretty well in these relative comparisons. Furthermore, there’s nothing here to suggest they are any more or less susceptible to click-through ads than anyone else.

Image Credit: Chitika