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Comment by harikb | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that your eyeballs are something like $200/month. You are just not likely to pay that money. When you factor in money thrown away at bot/fraud, advertisers spend a shit load of money just to reach you (and indirectly pays for a whole lot of entertainment tv-shows/web-content)

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Total spending on digital ads in the United States, a reasonably proxy for the value of the ads to advertisers, has been cited at about $111B[1]. There are about 280 million Internet users in the U.S.[2] (averaging the 2018 measurement of 275M and the 2019 projection of 285M). That works out to about $33 per user per month—which is a decent chunk of change, but much less than $200/month.

[1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/325645/usa-number-of-int...

Yeah, but I bet the typical hackernews reader is in an age group and wealth level that is more valuable than the average internet user.

I wouldn’t be so sure. I mean it’s anecdotal, but I rarely buy things. I buy all my clothes from the same internet store, and I do mean all, I have five pairs of shaping new tomorrow pants and when they get worn I replace them with the same damn pants. I heard about them from a coworker who uses them. Almost all my purchasing habits are like that, and I suspect I may not be the only one on HN.

I do click on the occasional Kickstarter boardgame advertisements, but I never end up backing because we always end up playing bloodbowl anyway.

On the other hand I do subscribe to the internet part of a Danish news paper that along giving you access to articles also removes all adds for paying users. I guess that’s sort of what brave wants to do, but who wants the hassle of buying alt-coins and reporting the taxes on it?

We all would like to see what these pants are, so good the style is good forever. You'll have to decide if you use an affiliate link ;-)

You might not buy things, but you have to do SOMETHING with your money (assuming you are an above average earner as someone in tech).

If you save your money, then financial companies are going to want to advertise to you to use their services. If you invest, investment opportunities will want to advertise to you. If you travel, vacation destination will want you.

Assuming you don't just put your money in a box, SOMEONE is going to want you to use your money in a way that gives some of it to them.

That sounds crazy if true. The idea that companies are managing to change my behaviour enough with advertising to drive enough revenue and extra profit, for purchases that I wouldn’t otherwise have made, to justify $200 in advertising spend seems absurd. That would mean a significant portion of my monthly spending (much more than $200) would have to be directly driven by advertising. Is advertising really that effective?

The point a lot of people miss is that advertising doesn't just convince you buy new things. Many advertisements are designed to make you feel good about the products you already buy so you won't consider trying the alternatives.

When you grab a bottle of dish soap off the shelf, do you select the same one each time because you prefer it for reasons you can't quite articulate or do you grab whatever's cheapest because they're basically all the same?

I was about to disagree until I read your example. You're right - I buy a lot of stuff for reasons that aren't grounded in reason, and, although I usually relate to stuff such as "my Mom used to have this one at home when I was a kid", well, who knows if that's the actual reason or just some justification from my mind.

Think about the lifetime value the advertiser who influenced your mom is earning!

This is the realm most Car Ads fall under.

Their purpose isn't to randomly convince someone to spend $20-30k on a brand new vehicle.

The purpose is to convince people who've already bought the car that they made the right decision and to feel good about it - and to rave about their new exciting, big purchase to their friends/family.

I buy the allergy friendly one of the store brand that I’ve never seen an advertisement for. Since it’s the store brand the type variates since I don’t always shop at the same store.

But you’re right, I probably buy Coca Cola (and like it better) instead of Pepsi because of life long branding. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an online advertisement for Coca Cola though.

> That would mean a significant portion of my monthly spending (much more than $200) would have to be directly driven by advertising. Is advertising really that effective?

That's why I believe a lot of value all these trackers provide to various companies is not so much the typical 'buy this product now' pop-up that you're thinking, but instead more nefarious value-adds.

Maybe that mortgage or car loan rate you applied for came back a little higher than others would have received on the same day. Perhaps that collection agency decided they wouldn't discount the medical bills because they know 'you can afford it'. I've seen several sites give me one price when I was logged in without an ad blocker, and then a lower price after clearing my cookies.

There is no way insurance companies aren't paying huge amounts of data to calculate rates offered to individuals based on thousands of data points. I imagine the government itself would be able to take advantage of user data in all sorts of clever ways - everything from solving crimes to catching tax cheats to provide better and cheaper background investigations for the millions who require it.

Companies interviewing candidates could save thousands on each potential hire if they could quickly have an algorithm avoid the 75% of candidates they wouldn't consider hiring anyway.

There are just so many ways companies can statistically make a few extra percent here or avoid an expensive loss there, it will be used until the government disallows it, which apparently isn't going to happen anytime soon in most countries.

They have no idea whether you would have bought something or not. Look at it through the lens of how much money you spend in a month, and what the average margin is on the things you buy. When you look at it that way it's not crazy to think there would be enough positive ROI indicators to justify that much marketing spend.

Ad sales are easy: appeal to the ego of the purchaser. I’m convinced ads are all a scam and are in effect money laundering.

The numbers coupled with lack of factual evidence of effect is staggering. I have a lot of distrust in the business. It’s about as accurate as Nielsen.

Man that's rough. You're right, my content is way not worth that.

It's odd to me though. I could pay for content I care about at an amount far smaller than $200/m, and the content creators would make more from me I imagine.

Why the extreme overhead? There's no way some blogger is making $200/m off of a handful of clicks from me. I'd be shocked if they made $5/m directly from me.

So where is the disconnect?

(sidenote, i understand the $200/m figure was not for a single blogger. But, lets pretend that blogger was all of my traffic for the month. I still can't imagine it's even remotely close to $200/m)

Everybody at every step takes a bit of money. It funds a billion-dollar industry of parasites.

Agreed. Which is sort of why I asked that. The reply to me said it would be closer to $200/m. However, I was wanting to pay content creators, not parasites.

So my comment was talking about paying content creators. I can't imagine they come anywhere close to $200/m from me, as you put it it's all the middlemen. So why would I be concerned about $200/m?

Google has a market cap of 894.52B at this point in time. For instance.

Yea, but in my comment I didn't care about Google. We were talking about money going directly to content providers, to compensate for the fact that they don't make ad money off of me.

But do you care about all the services google provides? Do you use their search, email, etc? Those would also be things you would need to pay for.

Sure, and I'd love to see prices for those too. $200/m I doubt, though. Purely search though, nothing else from Google (I pay for my email/etc)

To say though that Google has to get a piece of the $200/m that some blogger makes assumes of course that Google is the ad provider. Not sure, but it seems like a weak argument.

I wish I could start seeing the real no-ads costs here.

Market cap has nothing to do with how much ads are worth, it is just how much people are willing to pay for Google stock.

Google's revenue from ads could be useful, though.

Here's average revenue per user (per year) for many top companies. https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

For anyone who is a user of multiple brands, you need to add these numbers.

Interesting link. I'm not sure how to interpret these numbers though. It says Amazon gets $752 per user per year. But this seems like it is nothing to do with how much my eyeballs are worth - people give Amazon money in return for stuff. The only other brand on that list I use is Google. I'm outside the US, so it appears my eyeballs are worth $137 per year. That is an amount I'd be prepared to pay if it made adverts go away and the money was split between the content providers I do use. But it isn't really clear (to me) how the old guy on YouTube who restores the antique furniture would collect his 75% share due to my eyeball time.

If I could choose to pay for just the content I want, it wouldn't be $200/month, because I'd carefully pick and choose what I care enough about to pay for. I spend most of my online time on a very small number of sites and same few youtube channels, many of whom I already pay on patreon, if I had to pay a little more to cover streaming/video hosting, that cuts google out of the financial picture, I would totally do that. I do not like google, but I do like the handful of content creators that I follow. Any other time I spend online is idle time that I could do without and if forced to pay for it, it would actually help me break a habit I don't particularly want in the first place.

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