The Price of Free Google Report.
Proton analyzed over 54,000 demographic profiles using 2025 ad auction data to estimate what advertisers pay to reach different types of Americans. The range is much wider than you might expect.
The average American generates about $1,605 a year in advertising value. A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches, generates an estimated $17,929.30. An 18- to 24-year-old father in Fort Smith, AR, using an Android phone and making low-value searches, generates $31.05.
That’s a 577x difference between two people using the same free service.
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You use an android because you like it
I use an android to drive advertising revenue down
We are not the same
This feels like a good post to mention AdNauseam! For anyone who wants an adblocker that helps more than just you! It basically blocks ads but also sends a click request to every ad that should have been loaded. The data being sent with this request contains spoofed garbage data that makes the tracking data sets lose value. It also keeps a funny metric on how much the estimated cost for your clicks is :)
Ad networks have things like DoubleVerify, Human and Integral which can detect this, and it can cause account bans and captchas as well.
Account bans? Which accounts will be banned?
Social media accounts. The big social media platforms look for signs of automation (like auto clicking ads) and may lock your account for “spam” if they detect it.
Well let’s see…
- I’ve used Firefox with uBlock Origins pretty much as soon as uBlock Origins came out. I’m now using Librewolf.
- Im using a YouTube extention that automatically skips sponsers and adreads.
- I don’t use Google for my searches. Haven’t for over 10 years.
- I use Spotify on my PC, with the Bash Spot X patch.
- My OS is also Linux, so no built-in ads.
- On my phone I have AdAway installed.
- I patched my YouTube app with ReVanced Manager, giving me block against ads, sponsers, and adreads.
- I don’t use Spotify on my phone, instead opting to download music I bought from artists (typically Bandcam) or get through Soulseek.
- I use Firefox on my phone too, with uBlock Origins. Did that for nearly as long as my PC.
- I also don’t use Google for my searches there.
I’m very curious about what my value to Google is, considering all that.
It’s crazy that we have to go to that much effort just to have a reasonably pleasant online experience.
Basically same,
- Linux and Graphene
- IronFox/Zen Browser with Adnauseam, Sponsorblock, DeArrow and ClearURLs
- Mullvad VPN with AdBlock (off because of Adnauseam).
- GrayJay instead of YouTube.
- SimpMusic + Locally downloaded songs for music.
- Local media server for movies
Only places i have yet to tighten privacy (AFAIK) is email and chats (did make a burner acc on Discord and deleted the old one though). I dont use social media apart from the fediverse. All those accounts are deleted.
Update:
I do use K9 Mail and Thunderbird for email clients and F-droid and Aurora Store as an app store replacement.
I want to set up a Jellyfin local media server. As soon as I get my own apartment I’m going to take a serious crack at hosting my own home server for a lot of my needs.
Your location data. You help with traffic notifications, harveating of networks in relation to your location. Even if you dont use maps.
What is bash x spot?
I got it reversed, it’s spot x bash. But it’s bash script that modifies the spotify client to remove all ads. Doesn’t give you premium features, only removes ads. The script must also be run every time spotify updates.
I only drive to my work and back, no where else do I actually drive because I’m an introvert
Also, Ironfox and Cromite are awesome too!
Hopefully Ironfox and Librewolf both replace Firefox itself overtime somehow (Since Firefox new leadership has been enshittifying it), maybe Cromite can do same for Chromium too
What do you recommend for searches?
The top 10% of profiles: heavy desktop users — generate 43% of all advertiser value
Helps explain why Microsoft has started injecting ads into the OS so aggressively.
Imagine if humanity would spend all this energy and effort into things that would actually benefit humanity world wide. Medicine and medical personnel, food research and production, education, housing, care for the elderly…
Oh man, this world could be so nice…
We’re still basically monkeys with nukes.
AND impatience
I want to argue against that but that would take too much time.
Ape live short die fast time 4 individual ape priceless
AND impotence
Are you saying Google search is not beneficial or Proton’s price gauge report is not beneficial?
I’ve said that endless times about the military industrial complex.
Earth’s humanity could be so well cared for without that BS.
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The average American generates about $1,605 a year in advertising value. A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches, generates an estimated $17,929.30. An 18- to 24-year-old father in Fort Smith, AR, using an Android phone and making low-value searches, generates $31.05.
Just imagine how much people have to buy through ads to justify this amount of ad spending.
It’s just Americans. Very vulnerable to suggestions and very wealthy at the same time.
Everyone is susceptible to advertising — the principles rely on fundamental human psychology, just the same as propaganda. However, Americans simultaneously are served more ads in their day-to-day than most other places, and also have a captured education system that is designed to create more unthinking consumers.
Americans are also the primary target it’s all adjusted for. Ads are a social mechanism.
Even ads for non-American audiences sometimes copy ads aimed at Americans in various detail which doesn’t make sense there.
Somewhat similar to perception of fashion differing between living in a big city or in a rural area. In a big city everything is happening around you. In a rural area you learn of things happening, might get interested, might not.
OK, I might be simplifying things.
“Wealthy”
Compared to the rest of the world - yeah. Be that 30 years ago or now. Things that are normal for Americans are something impractically good for the rest of the world.
I mean, there are median and average income maps and such on the web.
But I admit that everything is different, say, in most countries you can do fine without a car. Of what I’ve read and heard about USA, a car seems more important than a place to bunk (I mean, the whole concept of someone with financial problems sleeping in their car seems wild from a country where a car is something less basic than a living place).
America is gold-plated and even then only for top 5%
Wage slavery exists all over the globe, america included. Thinking Americans are “wealthy” while actual billionaires exist will ensure our globe never unites.
The ruling class united long ago, that’s why they keep winning.
I think there’s a degree of moving goalposts here.
A mid-XIX-century worker could die of hunger if they lost their job. There wouldn’t be any social services or boarding houses for poor to feed their children, and their wife - you know. OK, I mean, there were boarding houses, but that was even worse than growing up in a poor family.
An early-XX-century worker was still in similar danger, but there were both organized labor and changing level of life. Working their way out of poverty being real and a lot more accessible press and education were some of the changes from the previous. And political rights too.
A mid-XX-century worker could basically live normally through hard work. And one could say that both in Warsaw block and in the West social nets were in place. In the third world not yet. !@#, me and writing about hard work.
“Wage slavery” of a person who’ll die of hunger and of a person who’ll feel bad from looking poor, but will have socialized options for food, board and even help with looking for a job, are two very different situations.
So let’s please remember that we, Americans included, already sort of live in a socialist heaven compared to 100 years ago.
I think humanity is improving.
“Wage slavery” of a person who’ll die of hunger and of a person who’ll feel bad from looking poor, but will have socialized options for food, board and even help with looking for a job
What country are you from? Clearly you aren’t familiar with Americans’ reality.
Yeah. Americans are very wealthy in general. And very trigger happy for spending with their credit cards
K
Im priceless. Or worthless.
That might be what they pay Google to advertise to those groups. But do they manage to get that much profit out of those advertisements from those groups?
I know it is not true to say that “advertising doesn’t work on me” but I wonder if the revenue the advertisers are getting out of that professional man in MT adds up to anywhere close to $17,929/yr worth of sales of their products/services.
Some people might think it’s nonsense to pay more to reach some group than it gives directly, but there might be a degree of diffusion such that it’s not.
Suppose, that computer-savvy woman is the source of advice for her many friends after trying some things out or whatever.
Suppose, that professional man uses occasionally a free tool for their task, that seems to be “first page in Google”, but is in fact the most familiar from 8 things listed on that first page.
Then they use it again or their coworkers or friends know that the tool exists. Then eventually they might buy it.
It’s all probabilities, but those that spread.
Why did I even write this, it’s obvious.
And the assholes only give me back like 2 bucks.
Tax them and turn that into a UBI.
Even if you got the full 1k that would never be enough to survive. Maybe a yearly stimulus check
UBI isn’t about stopping working and not earning more money. It’s about giving everyone a minimum so they can be picky, and jobs have to offer conditions that are literally better than nothing, as ‘nothing’ now comes with UBI.
There are also places where 1k is more than enough, and those places tend to be depopulated.
High-value, low-value
😑
Google is a femcel
I need to start poisioning my data more and make it stupid expensive to advertise to me.
But google still gets paid. The advertisers will just pump money into Google’s coffers.
I expect my price is through the floor. Living in Ireland with ad blocker enabled and Google set to disable ad tracking and personalized ad delivery. Even when I use their YouTube app and am compelled to see ads, many of them are bottom of the barrel garbage for pay to win games / casinos and outright scams because Google can’t match a more lucrative campaign against me.
It’s funny because I also listen to podcasts on Spotify and the podcasts are so bereft of matching campaigns the ad break starts and stops almost instantly. The only one that doesn’t is Behind the Bastards which repeatedly inflicts 2 minutes of plugs for other Cool Zone Media podcasts that I’m habituated to auto skip through.
What’s really crazy is that other than the fact all of this data is collected about you and freely sold among all these companies while it’s nearly impossible to see your own information or try to correct inaccuracies. It’s like a social credit score and online systems are very good at following people between devices.
Yep, they are still very convinced I’m a senior citizen. Possibly because of some bureaucratic mixups from when my dad passed away; at least that’s when I started getting AARP mailers, end of life planning and other such stuff intended for someone thirty years older than me
What defines advertising value to calculate this?
I dont buy anything online, Amazon or otherwise. And I dont engage with any ads unless by mistake. I suppose there is value in market research itself but nobody is making any sales revenue off somebody like me.
but nobody is making any sales revenue off somebody like me.
Everybody who thinks this is definitely having sales revenue made off of them. It needs to be restated forever in discussions like this that the metric for success in online advertising is not largely “oh shit, I could go for one of those right now”.
Those are what stick out in our mind because we remember them. I really did see an ad for Roblox as a kid and immediately go start playing. But sooooo much of advertising is subconscious to a point that we couldn’t possibly measure its true effect except by statistics.
Even beyond what we purchase: I’ve been bombarded with sponsorships for Raycons for years. Even with SponsorBlock on YouTube, sometimes they leak through. I will never buy a Raycon product. But I still occasionally talk about them, inadvertently advertising them, simply because they’re a good punching bag. I watched a whole video reviewing what pieces of shit Raycons are. Fuck it: I’m talking about Raycon right now. And that’s still among the worst-case scenarios for the advertiser. So much of advertising isn’t “I want this product now” or even “this product looks desirable”; it’s headspace.
The idea that advertisers’ psychological manipulation just doesn’t work on certain people needs to die and stay dead. If you saw it, it had an effect on you, and any effect is a better effect than nothing. If you realize an advertisement worked on you, the advertisement has failed part of its job.
I mean, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but the sentence “If you saw it, it had an effect on you, and any effect is a better effect than nothing” is just absolutely wrong. Getting a person to install an ad blocker is bad, getting a person to talk negatively about you is bad, like the whole “no press is bad press” thing is not true. You telling everyone you know that raycons are bad is directly bad for the company.
Scientists finding out that sodas are bad for you didn’t result in more soda sales, it resulted in fewer.
Companies absolutely do not want you talking shit about them, that’s literally why they use NPS to measure how well they’re doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
“If you realize an advertisement worked on you, the advertisement has failed part of its job.” Is also just wrong, but let’s argue one point at a time.
Finally “Everybody who thinks this is definitely having sales revenue made off of them” is such an all encompassing statement it will never be true. I think that the majority of companies I see advertisements for will never make sales revenue off of me. Why? Well many reasons, but you haven’t really bothered to think of why that could be the case and you’ve just made a wide all encompassing statement so I’m not really sure I want to bother. But I will make one point. People thinking about a product has nothing to do with spending money on that product. I’m sure that you know someone that talks to you about raycons all the time (oh wait, maybe that’s your friends). Do you (they) go out and spend money on raycons? Probably not. Same for talking about new cars, etc.
Sentiment matters, which is what a lot of advertisement is, not headspace.
For a great example of this, look at amazon with their Super Bowl ring advertisement (which I didn’t even see). Do you think that resulted in more sales or less?
What about me? On the rare occasion I see an advertisement, I have no idea what I’m even seeing. I saw a commercial a few days ago when my adblock failed.
A woman running through a public park. A man hidden in bushes, in all black watching her with binoculars. More shots of her running. He slips down into the bushes. Screen goes black, and then plain white text. “He’s watching”.
WHAT THE HELL AM I EVEN SUPPOSED TO BUY???
WHAT THE HELL AM I EVEN SUPPOSED TO BUY???
If you’re a woman, sexy jogging gear. If you’re a man, binoculars and tick repellent. If you’re nonbinary, donate to your local parks department to fund sidewalks and bushes.
It’s just that simple.
I’m guilty of exactly this. I buy almost nothing online. But I recently got into weight lifting. I wanted good at home adjustable dumbbells. I have a fully stocked gym that I use four times a week, but when I miss a day, I want to at least do something.
Fast forward to me refusing to pay $1,000 for them. I am the target demographic described in the high income no kids male part and low and behold, a beautiful kind Lemming pointed out I can get the exact pair I had been looking for on Facebook marketplace cheaper (and new) on a website I’d never heard of.
Watching reviews, breakdowns, demos, all were imprinting in my mind that I want this particular set. Am I sucker? Maybe. Did I spend $250 on a product I use often and increases my overall quality of life? Definitely.
For every sane individual like yourself there’s 10 others that happily say “I kept getting these ads for this thing on Instagram so I decided to buy it to see if it’s any good.”
“i got manipulated” is how I hear it
Not that I think I’m not susceptible. I am. That’s why I hate ads and do everything I can to avoid them.
I lean into it intentionally sometimes. Some of those things sponsor the things I like, and I want those things to be keep happening, so I’ll buy some Pagoda egg rolls that I never would have touched otherwise.
That doesn’t work with the really intrusive ads though.
How do you search for a restaurant or a barber when you’re in a city you’ve never been before? Or how do you rent a car on an airport in another country? You ask for a telephone book?
I typically find those things on the map. Or in specialized apps. Don’t see how it’s ad driven revenue.
Also who is changing barbers every time or moving between cities every few weeks? It’s like once a year thing for most people, isn’t it?
I’ve just had an epiphany (or maybe a half-baked showerthought) reading this thread.
All marketers are trying to sell people stuff, but if you think about it, what’s the one thing in common that they’re all trying to sell, and that they’re presumably best at?
Their own services.
So who knows if this “advertising value” has any relationship with reality, or if it’s just inflated bullshit marketers make up to sell themselves.
Wild that one of the most desirable regions, Durham NC, is within 1 hr of one of the least, Greensboro NC.
