Are advertisers too obsessed with click-through rates?

From Nieman Journalism Labs comes a most excellent post “The Geico Gecko meets The AOL Way: Are display advertisers too obsessed with click-through rates?“

Before you give an answer go give the post a read (and don’t get all tl;dr, reading long stuff is good for your brain). It’s some smart, interesting stuff. The post is loaded with all kinds of stats including this one:

“To show the short-sightedness of such metrics, Battelle cited a comScore study that found in 2009 that 4 percent of Internet users drive a whopping 67 percent of all advertising clicks. Do we really want to target our ads, he asked rhetorically, to such a small user base — the online equivalent to those who respond to late-night infomercials?”

Of course they don’t mention if the late-night informercial is the one for the Time-Life Power Ballads collection, because only the most cold-hearted, dead inside people can resist that.