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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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???
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.
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.
Bill Hicks always had the best bit about this.
Ed Bernays pioneered this stuff, to the best of my knowledge.
The Century of Sefl - documentary by Adam Curtis
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.
Yeah, you look at products long enough, and you start getting imprinted with what ends up looking like a reasonable price. Is it a good or bad thing? I don’t know. But, like you said, you use it and it’s worth it to you.
Personally, I got a regular set of 1" weights, two 1" dumbbell bars, and clips. And a cable column. That was way back during covid, and it helped get me through being at home a lot. Now I just go to a gym.
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.
I think this shows the fundamental misunderstanding here. It’s not about money coming out of your bank account. While that might be the goal, at the end of the day they are not chasing you personally, they are chasing statistics. But it’s more than just market statistics. It is about sales revenue, but not about you personally. A few points need to be made here:
#1: GOOGLE is making sales revenue off somebody like you. You are not necessarily the individual target of the direct revenue extraction, the advertisers are. You are the product that Google is selling to advertisers. Are you a shitty, unusable, defective-by-design product? Maybe. Is Google scamming advertisers by selling you to them? Maybe. The point is, that doesn’t matter, except perhaps in a philosophical sense. The advertisers are willingly paying for you. They know the statistics, and they are still willing to pay a lot for you and your group, because statistically, they are convinced it benefits them. Google is getting money from the advertisers to provide whatever access to you and the rest of your group that they can.
#2: Somebody is making sales revenue off you directly. I don’t know who that is, and maybe Google doesn’t either, but to survive in this world as “A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches” your money has to be going somewhere, and trying to find out and adjust where is an addictive and profitable passtime for Google, advertisers, and all other data brokers involved in this trade. Whether they actually succeed or not, they’re going to have a hell of a time trying, and they’re going to convince other people it’s worthwhile for them to continue to try and they’re going to get paid to do it no matter how fruitless it might seem. Again, it’s not necessarily about you individually, it’s about what they can sell you as.
#3: At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter whether the individual you actually buys anything. Even if you truly are totally DIY, off-grid and self-sufficient and dumping all your money into a pit under your mattress. If you do end up simply being an outlier in your particular demographic group, even if you’re in a large category of outliers in that group, what matters is that the group buys stuff, and you’re part of it, they don’t know if you’re the good part of the group or the bad part of the group, they want the whole group and they’ll let it sort itself out. The other members of that group will more than make up for your lack of revenue stream. It’s possible just one single member of that group will make up for literally every other wasted target in that group. These so-called “whales” are like the gold sifted out of thousands of tons of gravel and dirt. You don’t care about how much gravel and dirt you went through, getting a higher percentage with much less effort out of a much smaller claim doesn’t make you any richer, what matters is how much gold you ended up with. Would they like to narrow that group to remove outliers like you to get an even higher return on investment with even less effort? They would probably consider that an ideal. Does it really matter to their bottom line? Evidently not. This works for them and the people who pay them. It’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world.
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?
Walk up to somebody on the street and say “what’s a good restaurant” or “my hair is out of control, I just got here and I need a haircut, stat”
I walk to the counter that says “rentals”, because airports are used to this
Edit: sorry for answering the question I guess
I’m not the person you asked, but depending on the country you live, the good places like restaurants and markets may not be online, so we have to use good old word of mouth to find them. I used to search for all places online, but I had to learn the way of my ancestors to find the good stuff around here, because the places listed online are always the most expensive and presumptuous, while lacking actual quality.
But for things like electronics, cars and anything not available locally, it’s really hard to even imagine viable anternatives to searching in the internet
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
Stripes, swoosh, “N” on shoes. Alligator or mini polo player on shirt. A horse hood ornament . A particular signature color, stitching. Ultrawealthy can recognize brands without logos.
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
Like you don’t research a place before you travel, or you just don’t travel? Do you never research a product before purchasing or do you just work with whatever is available in your local store? If you’re buying a car, is it just whatever is on the side of the road or do you search for expert reviews or reliability data?
Oh I was just talking about those particular examples.
I, for one, actively search out the reviews from entities that go out of their way to not be sponsored by the makers of the products they’re reviewing.
Is phone book an ad? The fact I bought something does not mean I did it because ad convinced me. When one buys a car presume they check what is available on the market and select option based on comparison. Same with travel, you don’t visit place because you saw poster somewhere, you have limit time so you find a list of popular options and pick what to visit. It’s exactly what you called it - research and review. It’s people rating things helping you make your choices, not companies convincing this is what you want to buy by showing you 10 seconds stupid ass video. Or at least I hope. I never understood the concept of ads beyond informing that this business exists. From my perspective could be just brand name and what it sells. No difference to me. I always thought it would be much better to just have site list of businesses with description and reviews
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?
the point was you may be using some advertised service even if you think you don’t.
Even just walking down the street looking for a place for lunch, the street signs are advertising to you.
By chance, maybe, but I specifically don’t click on “Advertised” links in search results. Even if do, does it matter if I’d chose service anyway? Coz all it changes is money moved from one rich ass to another. It doesn’t make me buy what I didn’t plan to buy. Contrary, I might avoid products which are too pushy with ads. In place where I come from people used to say that good things don’t need advertisement. So to me this ad changes nothing. If tomorrow world stop making ads nothing changes to me - I do search, it gives me options, I do research and make a decision
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.
Also note how all the AI companies are either tech companies funded by advertising themselves, or funded by other tech companies who are funded by advertising. The goal of advertising is to convince you of things. They literally made a product designed to convince you of things, they made it really convincing, and then they convinced everyone AI is some world-changing, job-destroying, civilization-revolutionizing, future-defining hyperscale meta-technology that everybody has to have because it will simultaneously pit the entire world against each other and unify it into a post-scarcity tech utopia. And people are only now starting to do a double-take and actually start to look closer to see that it’s just a cardboard cutout of artificial intelligence distilled from real people, with no actual intelligence behind it and quite possibly no real future.
How much someone is willing to spend to put an ad in front of you.
It’s literally defined in the very first line of the article