the.com/clickthrough
the tiny yes that built every billion-dollar empire on the internet.
means The act of clicking a link, ad, or button to move from one web page to another — and the metric that counts how often people actually do it.
from A pure child of the web, stitched together in the 1990s from "click" (itself an echoing imitation of the sound a mouse button makes, a word that once meant only a sharp little noise) and "through" (the Old English thurh, meaning passage from one side to the other). The phrase "click-through rate" emerged with the first banner ads, when advertisers needed a number to prove someone had passed through their digital doorway — and the word collapsed, as digital words do, from two into one.
- first banner
- AT&T's 1994 ad scored a 44% rate
- today
- average display ads hover near 0.05%
- bait
- clickbait headlines exploit the curiosity gap deliberately
- the funnel
- one click of millions actually converts to cash
google search ads — advertisers pay per click, with average ctr around 2% for search ads
facebook feed ads — typical ctr 0.5-1.5%, major revenue driver since 2012
email marketing campaigns — average ctr 1.5-3% across industries, core metric for email roi