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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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
I’ve said that endless times about the military industrial complex.
Earth’s humanity could be so well cared for without that BS.
Are you saying Google search is not beneficial or Proton’s price gauge report is not beneficial?
Nah, better using it for guns and nukes.
Gotta nuke something. 🤷
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.
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
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.
Im running Jellyfin myself. Still havent ported it to my server tho, just running off a disk in my main PC. Whenever i get more storage on the server or just a proper one (currently just running an old laptop w like 500GB storage) I will try to move all of my socker containers and movies there.
I would want to write some kind of roadmap and define all the cloud based services id need, like NextCloud and other stuff id want available remotely, but that would be done tinkering since id have to configure a VPN for it 😬
Why wait? I moves with you!
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 have been using DuckDuckGo and SearXNG.
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
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.
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.
My assumption would be it was an ad for a VPN or some sort of internet privacy service. An ad got through when it normally doesn’t is what leads me to believe that.
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.
Ever since a nephew of Freud introduced concepts of Psychology into the Marketing world back in the mid XX century that advertising has shift mainly to work via psychological effects.
Perfect examples are perfume TV adverts (all about associating a perfume with sex and feeling sexy) and Car TV adverts (generally about associating a car with freedom, success and sometimes power).
So yeah, most of that shit is meant to just reside in your subconscious and subtly prod you towards a certain product or service at the right time, even if only because a certain brand name feels “familiar” or even “trustworthy” when you have to make a choice about a kind of product or service you don’t usually buy.
This sounds like something the advertising world would want you to believe. It’s in their interest to keep the public thinking that advertising works. It’s good for their bottom line if people believe that even if you don’t act on an ad immediately it’s something that eventually nudges you.
Maybe that’s not true. Maybe, in fact, sometimes advertising is a net negative because you’re bombarded so often with an ad that you come to resent the company pushing it. I don’t know what Raycon is, but based on what you’ve said I’m also not interested in ever giving them money. So, the worst case for the advertiser is that not only do their ads reduce sales from people who are reached by those ads, they also reduce sales in anybody those people talk to.
The idea that advertisers’ psychological manipulation just works on people needs to die and stay dead. If you saw it, it had an effect on you, and if that effect is negative then it’s obviously worse than nothing.
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?
No OP, but I have never done any of those things in your example.
Bullshit. Are you my 93 year old grandmother?
have you ever made a planned purchase? if so, it’s almost imposible you were not influence by marketing even if it only was to narrow your choices to what’s available in your market
marketing is EVERYWHERE… there is no escaping it unfortunately
I guess you can always buy the cheapest off-brand item without previous search…
sure but you cannot do that for every purchase in your life… and even the off-brands advertise and have exclusivity agreements for distribution
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?
my grandfather goes to the nearest building and asks. if they don’t know he moves to the next person
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.
How much someone is willing to spend to put an ad in front of you.
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 :)
it doesnt function with other adblockers though :(
It is a ublock fork, the best adblocker on desktop.
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.
Ad networks have things like DoubleVerify, Human and Integral which can detect this, and it can cause account bans and captchas as well.
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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
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.
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
They’re getting to you early.
You can, if you allow personalized ads.
Not that I believe for a second not allowing them changes a single thing, they just don’t show it.
Imagine the amount of resources humanity could have if we just ended this garbage.
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.
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.
Fuck I’m getting rolex ads and nice vacations lately.
From the looks of it I do a lot of “high value” searches and I’m perpetually online due to work. I bet they fucking love me.
Clear cookies and use a vpn to book flights.
High-value, low-value
😑
Google is a femcel
And the assholes only give me back like 2 bucks.
Tax them and turn that into a UBI.
Im priceless. Or worthless.
What does this actually mean? An add pops up and the person says yes I’ll click and buy it?
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.
