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#mean#google#usd#users#less#median#average#population#whole#world

Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dathinab•28 minutes ago
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•26 minutes ago
> 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.

dathinab•14 minutes ago
yes, typo/auto correct
dotcoma•about 3 hours ago
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•about 2 hours ago
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.
dotcoma•about 2 hours ago
Let's say 100 M ?
itemize123•about 3 hours ago
google's the middleman, and it won't capture the whole 1600 right?
dotcoma•about 2 hours ago
No. They are saying 1605 USD is the average amount Google make from a user in the US.
amazingamazing•about 2 hours ago
Presumably this only counts internet users who use Google.
dotcoma•about 2 hours ago
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•about 1 hour ago
If you’re going to extrapolate you should use the median, which would put it at 200B for USA.
hacker_homie•about 3 hours ago
revenue vs profit?
devttyeu•about 2 hours ago
yieldcrv•about 2 hours ago
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•about 1 hour ago
I think you are right on this point.
derwiki•about 2 hours ago
Glad I block ads and use Kagi
kybb4•about 3 hours ago
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.