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$1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

proton.me

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Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#21

Post by dathinab »

amazingamazing wrote: post #16
dotcoma wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. If 250 M people use it in the US out of a population of 349 M, Google would make 401 B USD out of them, vs 403 B USD in worldwide revenues. These numbers do not look right to me.

If you’re going to extrapolate you should use the median, which would put it at 200B for USA.

that isn't how the median works

median is the sample in the middle of the distribution (when it is treated as a sequence of samples ordered by their value), e.g. if you have sort(seq(dist))=[100$, 5$, 5$, 3$, 1$] the median is 5$

average is sum(dist)/size(dist), so avg * size(dist) => sum(dist)

in the example above that would be median 5, avg. 22.8, total 114, size 5

if you where to multiple the median by size you would have 25$ for the total value, which is very much very wrong

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#22

Post by dathinab »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19
dathinab wrote: post #18

This is a good example of why averages (by themself) can be very misleading: - avg. $1_605 - but mean is $760, i.e. half the users generate $760 or less I also wouldn't be surprised if the sampling distribution has two maxima even if smoothed (on around the mean and another at the lower end). Would be nice to have that plotted out properly.

> mean is $760, i.e. half the users generate $760 or less Median*. Mean and median are both measures of averages, though colloquially average is taken to exclusively mean the mean.

yes, typo/auto correct

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#23

Post by nonameiguess »

dotcoma wrote: post #2

There's a problem... Population of the US: 349 M, of which 250-300 M use Google services, multiplied by 1605 USD per user = from 401 B USD to 481 B USD, but in 2025 Alphabet did 403 B in total, from every service, in the whole world.

Caveat I'm no expert on Google ads. Never bought one, never plan to, never advertised anything at all on any service. But since I'm capable of doing a basic web search, I found:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en

This is the process for determining which ads get run. The bid is only one of many factors, so as their support document indicates, the price you pay is often quite lower than the bid, which reflects a ceiling rather than a real sale price.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2580383?sjid=17...

This is their guidance on demographic targeting. Note there is no category allowing you intentionally target children. This doesn't mean advertisers can't figure out some way to do it anyway, but it means Proton can only sample from adults. Presumably, some probably very large number of the people who "use Google services" in your estimate are children, which childstats.gov indicates represent about 22% of all Americans. That makes it more like 195-235M adult users of Google services.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2464960

As indicated here, you don't pay to place an ad. You pay for clicks, so regardless of what you bid and who you target, Google isn't getting revenue for the number of placements you bid on, which is what Proton is sampling here. Presumably of the 250 x 0.78 to 300 x 0.78 million adult users advertisers are placing those $1605 average bids on, quite a bit fewer than 100% actually click on at least one ad.

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#24

Post by dzonga »

dotcoma wrote: post #2

There's a problem... Population of the US: 349 M, of which 250-300 M use Google services, multiplied by 1605 USD per user = from 401 B USD to 481 B USD, but in 2025 Alphabet did 403 B in total, from every service, in the whole world.

not back of the napkin - but back of the head quick calculations - number seem about right.

remember the average 'world' user is about 100x to 500x less valuable than a US user.

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#25

Post by dathinab »

dotcoma wrote: post #2

There's a problem... Population of the US: 349 M, of which 250-300 M use Google services, multiplied by 1605 USD per user = from 401 B USD to 481 B USD, but in 2025 Alphabet did 403 B in total, from every service, in the whole world.

This could be explained by the 250-300 M you refer to not matching the same distribution due to

1. this seems to be google ad network specific, not google services per-see

2. the analysis seem to only include users which do in general generate ad revenue, e.g. all AD Block everywhere users are not included in the distribution

3. given the lower bound I assume ad views which have no clear attributable user, and/or users with a very low and irregular amount of views, are not included (e.g. some mostly "offline" people, people mostly using an ad-block but sometimes somewhere still seeing an add, also it's G-Ads, so anyone using only FB, TickTock etc. would not show up I think)

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#26

Post by dotcoma »

dzonga wrote: post #24
dotcoma wrote: post #2

There's a problem... Population of the US: 349 M, of which 250-300 M use Google services, multiplied by 1605 USD per user = from 401 B USD to 481 B USD, but in 2025 Alphabet did 403 B in total, from every service, in the whole world.

not back of the napkin - but back of the head quick calculations - number seem about right. remember the average 'world' user is about 100x to 500x less valuable than a US user.

So, the average user from Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan etc is worth 1% of the average US user or less?

Do you wear a red baseball cap?

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#27

Post by casey2 »

This is why I'm not concerned about robotic labor surpluses. A human can generate tons of invaluable data. Right now they aren't capturing that much value, but eventually it will be worth it. That's why the EU is moving fast on data rights. The US will probably wait until ~$100K is being extracted from every man woman and child. In addition to data centers I'd like to see last mile fiber to every home. Whichever company does that will be rolling in money in 2040.

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#28

Post by [deleted] »

dotcoma wrote: post #26
dzonga wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not back of the napkin - but back of the head quick calculations - number seem about right. remember the average 'world' user is about 100x to 500x less valuable than a US user.

So, the average user from Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan etc is worth 1% of the average US user or less? Do you wear a red baseball cap?

[deleted]

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#29

Post by tissuefarmer »

casey2 wrote: post #27

This is why I'm not concerned about robotic labor surpluses. A human can generate tons of invaluable data. Right now they aren't capturing that much value, but eventually it will be worth it. That's why the EU is moving fast on data rights. The US will probably wait until ~$100K is being extracted from every man woman and child. In addition to data centers I'd like to see last mile fiber to every home. Whichever comp…

[dead]

Re: $1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user

#30

Post by dzonga »

dotcoma wrote: post #26
dzonga wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not back of the napkin - but back of the head quick calculations - number seem about right. remember the average 'world' user is about 100x to 500x less valuable than a US user.

So, the average user from Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan etc is worth 1% of the average US user or less? Do you wear a red baseball cap?

let's not personalize issues.

google made about 400bn last year. 200bn of that was from the US alone.

now you can estimate how much the UK brought in.

& for PPC rates - you can see conversion rates as well.

I run an alternative to Google analytics for a niche market so yeah.

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