Size Matters

My startup is focused on internet advertising, and one thing we've commented on around the office is how computer monitors used to be much smaller. So what? Well, that means internet advertising used to be a much larger portion of the screen, because of IAB standard sizes were developed in the mid 1990s.

So I decided to investigate this hypothesis by cobbling together what I could find on screen resolution and banner advertising clickthrough rates. I fit the data to a 2 parameter model where one parameter was the clickthrough rate for screen resolutions higher than 1024x768 ("high resolution"), and the other parameter was the clickthrough rate for screen resolutions at or below 800x600 ("low resolution"). Note the resolution 1024x768 does not have it's own parameter, on purpose: there are only 5 data points, so I wanted to limit the model.The parameters end up being 0.2% for high resolution screens and 0.8% for low resolution screens.

Could a factor of 4 in clickthrough rate be recovered by switching to much larger ad units?