Next.js Hacker News
$1,605: average annual ad value of a U.S. Google user
25 points by muzzy19 3 hours ago | 20 comments
  • 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.

    • JumpCrisscross
      > 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.

  • 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.

    • cebert
      There are some people who don’t use Google. I use Duck Duck Go for search. Additionally, with the rise of LLMs I have been using search much less in general.
      • dathinab
        and ad blockers also can kill ad revenue in various ways (like by not displaying them, or even if displayed by causing them to not be counted due to not realizing they where displayed or finding irregularities due to which they are classified as bot views).

        similar anti-fingerprinting tech can kill ad revenue as it makes users non distinguishable from bots (but likely doesn't matter here)

      • dotcoma
        Let's say 100 M ?
    • itemize123
      google's the middleman, and it won't capture the whole 1600 right?
      • dotcoma
        No. They are saying 1605 USD is the average amount Google make from a user in the US.
    • amazingamazing
      Presumably this only counts internet users who use Google.
      • dotcoma
        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.
        • amazingamazing
          If you’re going to extrapolate you should use the median, which would put it at 200B for USA.
          • dathinab
            that isn't how the median works

            median is the sample in the middle of the distribution 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)/count(dist), so avg * size(dist) => sum(dist) (in the example above that would be avg. 22.8, total 114, size 5

            if you where to multiple the median by count you had 25$ which is very much very wrong

          • dotcoma
            Why ?
    • yieldcrv
      ok, and?

      proton did 54,000 samples of US users and made an average of what advertisers are willing to pay to target, not what they actually did across the whole population

      and plus this isn’t to inform you, it’s to sell you on another proton honeypot

      • dotcoma
        I think you are right on this point.
  • derwiki
    Glad I block ads and use Kagi
  • 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.