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.
From this I believe that your problem can be solved. In accounting terms, the 1605USD isn't a flow (e.g., revenue) but rather a stock (e.g., receivable). They've estimated value about how much a profile is worth, which you shouldn't use to draw those conclusions about revenue.
similar anti-fingerprinting tech can kill ad revenue as it makes users non distinguishable from bots (but likely doesn't matter here)
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en
This is the process for determining which ads get run. The bid is only one of many factors, so as their support document indicates, the price you pay is often quite lower than the bid, which reflects a ceiling rather than a real sale price.
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2580383?sjid=17...
This is their guidance on demographic targeting. Note there is no category allowing you intentionally target children. This doesn't mean advertisers can't figure out some way to do it anyway, but it means Proton can only sample from adults. Presumably, some probably very large number of the people who "use Google services" in your estimate are children, which childstats.gov indicates represent about 22% of all Americans. That makes it more like 195-235M adult users of Google services.
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2464960
As indicated here, you don't pay to place an ad. You pay for clicks, so regardless of what you bid and who you target, Google isn't getting revenue for the number of placements you bid on, which is what Proton is sampling here. Presumably of the 250 x 0.78 to 300 x 0.78 million adult users advertisers are placing those $1605 average bids on, quite a bit fewer than 100% actually click on at least one ad.
1. this seems to be google ad network specific, not google services per-see
2. the analysis seem to only include users which do in general generate ad revenue, e.g. all AD Block everywhere users are not included in the distribution
3. given the lower bound I assume ad views which have no clear attributable user, and/or users with a very low and irregular amount of views, are not included (e.g. some mostly "offline" people, people mostly using an ad-block but sometimes somewhere still seeing an add, also it's G-Ads, so anyone using only FB, TickTock etc. would not show up I think)
remember the average 'world' user is about 100x to 500x less valuable than a US user.
Do you wear a red baseball cap?
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
But I guess that would apply more to display ads than to search ones, so I'm not sure. Confusing.
My second guess is that DINKs have more disposable income.
- avg. $1_605
- but mean is $760, i.e. half the users generate $760 or less
I also wouldn't be surprised if the sampling distribution has two maxima even if smoothed (on around the mean and another at the lower end). Would be nice to have that plotted out properly.
Median*. Mean and median are both measures of averages, though colloquially average is taken to exclusively mean the mean.
The ad ecosystem allows them the equivalent of ideal price discrimination. You bring in exactly how much revenue they can squeeze out of the economy for access to your eyeballs.
It's gotten to a point where if I can't run an adblocker like Ublock Origin I won't use the browser/device (I still need to look at DNS level blocking but everything I use runs FF so not super pressing).
Chrome (and derivatives) are only installed for testing stuff, FF for all it's sometimes questionable UX and AI crap (which can at least now be disabled with a single toggle) has been my default for a long time and is still for that reason.
In fairness though, I don't use many google products any more either (YT (with an adblock and sponsorblock) mostly).
google made about 400bn last year. 200bn of that was from the US alone.
now you can estimate how much the UK brought in.
& for PPC rates - you can see conversion rates as well.
I run an alternative to Google analytics for a niche market so yeah.
2nd: where did you get the 200 bn USD figure for the US ?
3rd: if we multiply 250 M people (likely Google users in the US out of a population of 349 M) and multiply it by the 1,605 USD that Google is said to make out of an average user in the linked blog post by Proton, we get 401 bn USD, not 200 bn.
median is the sample in the middle of the distribution (when it is treated as a sequence of samples ordered by their value), e.g. if you have sort(seq(dist))=[100$, 5$, 5$, 3$, 1$] the median is 5$
average is sum(dist)/size(dist), so avg * size(dist) => sum(dist)
in the example above that would be median 5, avg. 22.8, total 114, size 5
if you where to multiple the median by size you would have 25$ for the total value, which is very much very wrong