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Filed under: Browsers
An interesting report, titled 'Are Opera Users the Most Valuable?' has been making the rounds this week. The commentary has been opinionated and fiery and, truth be told, we're still no closer to working out why Opera users click the most ads.

If you don't want to click through, the basic gist is this: Opera users are 50% more likely to click ads than Chrome users. Internet Explorer are the next-most likely to click ads, followed by Firefox. Safari users actually click the least ads!

The difficulty comes from trying to analyse these figures. A nascent analysis, perhaps citing Internet Explorer, would state that the lack of ad-blocking is to blame. Both Chrome and Firefox have excellent ad-blocking extensions, that's why their users click so few ads. But Opera has ad-blocking! And if it was only about blocking ads, wouldn't Internet Explorer be at the top?

So, Opera has ad-blocking, yet its users still click the most ads. Curious. (Incidentally, is there a popular ad-blocking add-on for Safari? As in, one that even non-power users would know of?)

Perhaps it's the users themselves. Are Opera users more inquisitive? This report uses in-line text ads as a sample set, so maybe… Opera users are more literate? Perhaps Safari and Chrome users merely scan text, rather than actually reading it? The problem with this argument is Internet Explorer — it's right up the top with Opera! Can we really say that the average Opera user is comparable to an IE user? Surely they are at the opposite ends of the spectrum!

What's the answer, then? I'm guessing that the sample set is from a biased set of websites — perhaps from a forum that's frequented by a lot of Opera users? Internet Explorer should be at the top, with its lack of ad-blocking and its 'newbie' user base. Still, I'm going to suggest to my chief that we write more Opera news…Website owners: Opera users are the most valuable, in terms of ad clicks

Fuente: Download Squad