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

dotcoma

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.

kybb4

Add Meta and the rest of the Attention Economy and for a family of 4 they extract 10K a year. The rest of the world its like $700-1K. The US Attention pool gets overfished because thats where most of the world cash sits. Over optimized Cream Skimming.

derwiki

Glad I block ads and use Kagi

dathinab

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.

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.

JohnQPulp

It's interesting/non-intuitive to me that parents would be worth less than non-parents. I wonder: is that because they actually tend to spend less, or is it because more of the clicks are accidental ones, from when the kids get handed the phone? But I guess that would apply more to display ads than to search ones, so I'm not sure. Confusing.

josefritzishere

And they still have the gall to charge users for services. Disgusting.

CommenterPerson

This is why I use Ecosia and Duck most all of the time.

tsoukase

I have never seen a single ad online, except may be for one moment the ad blocker malfunctioned. I am certainly an around 0$ ad value user for Google. So some must be much more than 1605.

morpheos137

If search was frictionless then it would be far cheaper. People wonder why google search has been enshittified vs 15 years ago. If people could find exactly what they needed they would need far less ads.