Just read the most recent Seth Godin post

Essentially, he says that Firefox users are a different breed than IE users, and as such should be treated differently. These people are the ones who went out of their way to download a different browser. He likens them to people who went to college.

I can’t help but first think what this means for internet advertising.

The Firefox users, while being a key demographic for many advertisers, are also the ones least likely to click on ads. They are the ones most likely to have extensions which block ads. Essentially, these are the users who in the current context of internet advertising are worth the least to a publisher. If you are going to “treat them differently” as Seth suggests, should it be treating them better or worse?

Now the hard part. How do you fix this? It is a big problem, as Advertisers right now are very much into hard metrics, its one of the big upsides to advertising on the internet in general. In fact, if I was an advertiser right now, I’d try and target these people at low cost, knowing I’m throwing out brand awareness while paying out very little for these users (who are some of my most coveted demographic). The long term solution, ironically, may come from the out-of-favor CPM. Sales needs to convince advertisers that if they are looking at branding, low CTR does not make a campaign fail. The metrics do not explain the true value.