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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It would be interesting to calculate the user’s value of the time wasted on this shit.
My guess is that online advertising has a negative return for society as a whole. It should be illegal.
I wonder how much money people have wasted buying my data. I have ad blockers everywhere, I never see a single ad or sponsored message, if their system actually works it should be marked worthless.
You can’t generate ad revenue from me if I have ad blockers.
Until you log into gmail and give them a fingerprint to share around. They still track you unfortunately.
Then how do you support our corporate overloads?
They’ll just have to eat the money they already have.
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.
You use an android because you like it
I use an android to drive advertising revenue down
We are not the same
I use an android because Apple has been insufferable about allowing users to run that they want to run and customize their phone how they want to customize their phone.
Google is now showing signs that they want to do the same.
I will move to a linux tablet, watch and a cellular wifi AP if I have to
You should try GrapheneOS. It has no Google crap installed by default, and if you install Play Services for apps that need it, it will be sandboxed so it can’t track you or limit sideloading.
Not far enough. Google if fucking with their appstore, they eventually want it to be a walled garden. If that happens, developers will be hard-pressed to release versions for both Google and aurora (or f-droid or whatever)
I want chat, I want a working camera, a working web browser and to be able to make and take calls. That’s all doable from Linux today, the battery life just really sucks.
GrapheneOS supports F-droid and essentially all APK files. The built in camera and SMS apps work and so do most IM apps and web browsers.
Im priceless. Or worthless.
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.
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?
Since Feb 2025 Google started using browser fingerprinting to track users. While you don’t see the ads, they’re still building a profile on you.
Pretty sure they started that well before 2025.
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?
I’ve been using Startpage, it gives me often better results than google does these days. The image search is shit though, have to use something else for that
I have been using DuckDuckGo and SearXNG.
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
I think about this all the time. Tech company spends $19 billion more in ai, etc. Meanwhile, my local school system is firing teachers over a $500,000 shortfall.
Nah, better using it for guns and nukes.
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?
it doesnt function with other adblockers though :(
As Pear said, its built on top of uBlock Origin, im pretty sure it has all of these same functionality with element blocking and filters built in.
I need to start poisioning my data more and make it stupid expensive to advertise to me.
Imagine the amount of resources humanity could have if we just ended this garbage.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
People think they’re not targets because they don’t do certain things, but not being part of a group also says a lot about you! User blocking ads? This is information about you. User doesn’t buy online? Also information about you. Everything is information and everything together is a valuable consumer profile
