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.
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.