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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

With 500 million EU citizens, that's about €3 per person.

This makes me wonder, how much does Google make from showing ads to one person?

About $8 billion revenue per quarter for EU + Middle East, let's say roughly 60% of people in Europe use the internet and > 90% of them use Google.

Therefore: 8,000,000,000 / (500,000,000 * 0.9 * 0.6) = $29.63 per person revenue per quarter. Could be as much as +- $10 given how arbitrary (research based, but still guesswork) my inputs were...

Somewhere around $100 per person per year seems insane but I guess how much do you spend per year on stuff?

P.S. please feel free to correct my figures!

This really puts things in to perspective. Subscription startups looking to get some percentage of the population to pay $10 a month can never reach the scale of google advertising when they are extracting nearly that much value on average from every single person.

Well that's part of the problem inherent with the subscription model, isn't it?

Google can make >$100 a click for ads on mortgages or insurance keywords, but subscription models are locked in to revenue that doesn't scale with the category of use - unless they become some sort of affiliate service.

A friend of mine bought a house from a cost-per-click ad...

If the seller has $1000 per click, that's really going to distort the market...

If you are comparing with Netflix, then you should consider family accounts, where many people share that $8/m

> P.S. please feel free to correct my figures!

Presumably the value of advertising is highly correlated to the amount of money you spend (on things you have some choice over).

Disposable income is a strongly skewed distribution (across countries, within most countries).

An average won't help you much if you want too know how much Google makes off you!

That $100/person isn’t spending by individual users. They are spent by companies advertising and paying for clicks.

Guess how many times an average person clicks on an ad knowingly/unknowingly.

So: who is giving the money to the companies that they use for advertising?

other companies ?

Consumers...

Tax payers

That's really not relevant.

Perhaps in the sense that we all (indirectly) pay the tax (i.e. cost) of advertising, whether we use Google or not.

Ok, I know.

_What are_ consumers?

In AdWords the CPC for some keywords is around €3. Obviously not every EU citizen will be the target of these keywords but Google can increase the CPC to recover the money.

There are plenty of keywords where it's 10x that Plumber PPC keywords can be £20-40 in the UK

Hopefully far more than €3 a year.

What price do we sell our personal data for?

The price of using Google.com, YouTube.com, Gmail.com and many many other services, for free.

And I thought I was "paying" for that by having 15 minutes long "ads" thrown at me every for every 5 minutes of content I watch.

YouTube seems to be getting really bad in that regard, even worse than TV.

That's not quite right.

While you can get ads that are 15 minutes long they can always be skipped within 5 seconds. That's not even comparable to television.

That might be true, but one of my use-cases for YouTube is listening to music, over a tablet, while I shower

So these 15-minute "ads" pretty much lead to the situation that halfway through my shower I won't be listening to music anymore, but rather some tutorial on how to best light a photoshoot or a "documentary" how Hezbollah is destroying Europe.

Don't get me wrong here: They can have their ads, but throwing 15-minute ads between videos that average out at around 3-8 minutes just feels like a very bold choice.

And it's not like watching that 15-minute ad means you won't be bothered by them for a while, you can watch it and after the next 3 minute song, there will be yet another ad.

Eh. YouTube isn't a very good platform for music, and it's even worse if you aren't paying for the premium service. Why wouldn't you use something like Spotify?

If your use case is using a video streaming service to listen to music then perhaps you should consider using something else instead of fighting against the tide. Don't get me wrong, I do the same from time to time, but typically when I listen to music I'm not loading up YouTube...

The dynamic playlists actually make YouTube a pretty decent music streaming service. I can find a song I like and just create a "mix" out of it, featuring similar songs, with just 1 click.

Having the actual music video with the music is also a very nice extra, some of these can make a song like 10 times as good.

If the YouTube premium wouldn't be so expensive (asking 16€ per month over here) I'd already signed up just for getting ad-free music.

I've gotten some 20+ seconds unskipable ads. That's the moment when I simply switched to MPV for watching youtube videos as the ads keep squeezing through every adblock filter I've tried once in a while.

Perhaps I should have worded my statement a little differently. I meant that you can always skip the ads that are essentially entire videos.

not _always_

There are ads on Youtube that cannot be skipped, and they can be much longer than 5-6 seconds.

Block the ads. You have every right to do so. There is zero obligation to watch ads. If a company like Google can afford to operate a service like YouTube, then putting it up in the first place is the cost of doing business. I happily block ads on all devices I use and am in control over, even at work.

Pi-hole, uBlock Origin (even kills the adblock detectors), Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, Tracking Token Stripper, Webmail Ad Blocker, etc.

Ads. What ads? You have a VPN set up on your home network, you can pass your mobile phone through it so as not to get ads even while away.

Haven't found a good way to do that on my tablet (iPad), yet. I have tried adding known ad-networks to my router-blocklist, it does not seem to impact YouTube at all.

I guess I really gotta look into building myself a Pi-hole.

https://github.com/rajannpatel/Pi-Hole-PiVPN-on-Google-Compu...

If everyone paid for youtube, they'd still show you ads every five minutes and harvest your information. Then people would be telling you that you have to suffer this because you don't pay for the bonus package.

Sure, but I for one would pay €3 a month to not have google harvest any data from me. If they're making €100 a month from me, that's one thing.

around $70 p. a. IIRC.

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