Proton this week published a detailed analysis estimating the annual advertising value that different types of Americans generate for Google's ad auction system. The report, titled "The Price of Free Google" and authored by journalist Edward Komenda, was released on April 28, 2026. It draws on a matrix of over 54,000 demographic profiles and applies real cost-per-click data from live advertising campaigns to assign an estimated dollar value to each.

The central finding is stark. According to the report, the average American generates approximately $1,605 per year in advertising value - but the median sits at just $760. That divergence between mean and median is intentional and revealing. A small cluster of high-value profiles pulls the average upward, which means the business model depends heavily on a narrow demographic minority. The top 10% of profiles - predominantly heavy desktop users - account for 43% of all advertiser value.

The methodology

Proton constructed a matrix varying four variables: age, gender, location, and device type. To each combination, the report assigns what it calls "search archetypes" - modeled search behavior derived from life stage rather than a flat assumption applied across all profiles. A profile in the 30-to-39 age bracket without children is, statistically, more likely to generate searches around investment accounts and B2B software. A profile in the 60-plus bracket generates more queries around Medicare supplements and retirement products.

According to the report, cost-per-click figures were drawn from aggregated, anonymized pricing data across active campaigns - the rates advertisers actually pay in Google's auction at the time of the analysis. The model estimates the ceiling of advertiser demand for a given profile: the maximum the market would pay for access to that person's attention. Proton is explicit that the figures do not represent exact revenue Google receives from any individual user.

The range: $31 to $17,929 per year

The spread across the 54,000 profiles is extraordinary. At the top of the range, a 35-to-44-year-old man in Bozeman, Montana, using a desktop computer and conducting high-value corporate searches generates an estimated $17,929.30 per year in advertiser value. At the bottom, an 18-to-24-year-old father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, using an Android phone and making low-value searches generates $31.05. The ratio between the two is 577x - two people using the same free service, assigned vastly different commercial worth.

Projected across a decade, the average American represents roughly $16,050 in cumulative ad value. The most monetized profiles approach $180,000 over the same period.

Device type as a proxy for income

One of the more technically precise sections of the report concerns device type. According to Proton's analysis, a desktop user is worth 4.9 times more to advertisers than the same person on Android. An iPhone user is worth 2.7 times more than the equivalent Android user. The reason is not the hardware itself - it is what the device signals about context and purchasing behavior.

Desktop implies professional context and transaction readiness. iPhone correlates with premium consumer spending. Android correlates with lower expected conversion rates. The same individual, conducting the same search, carries a different auction price purely based on the device they use. This has direct relevance for marketers: cost-per-click benchmarks published by PPC Land show that legal services reached an average CPC of $8.58 in 2025, while arts and entertainment sat at $1.60 - a spread that reflects not just vertical competition but also the audience composition, including device mix, across those categories.

Parenthood and the shift in ad category

The report identifies parenthood as a significant negative value signal in Google's auction system. Non-parents are worth approximately 17% more on average, with the gap widening during peak earning years. The mechanism is a category shift. Once a profile is associated with parenthood, the relevant ad inventory moves from high-cost categories - wealth management ads at roughly $6 per click - to lower-cost categories such as minivans and preschools at roughly $2 per click. The highest-value profiles in the dataset are defined not by any single trait, but by a combination of signals pointing to spending power and commercial intent - and none of them are parents.

Age and the value curve

Advertiser value peaks in the 35-to-44 age bracket. By age 65, average value drops to $511. Older Americans do not disappear from the ad ecosystem; they are reassigned to a narrower set of high-spend categories - Medicare supplemental insurance, pharmaceuticals, and financial products oriented toward dependency. According to the report, this means lower general value combined with more aggressive targeting from a smaller slice of advertisers. The age curve matters for anyone running campaigns with demographic exclusions: the data suggests that older audiences carry meaningful value in specific verticals, even if their headline ad value is lower.

Geography: why zip code sets the floor

Google's auction is partly driven by local service providers - lawyers, real estate agents, financial planners - competing for local clicks. The more competitive a local market, the higher the floor price for all profiles within it. That dynamic produces significant geographic dispersion.

According to the report, the ten most valuable U.S. ad markets are, in order: Edmond, Oklahoma; Bozeman, Montana; Naperville, Illinois; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Durham, North Carolina; Bellevue, Washington; Silver Spring, Maryland; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Washington, D.C.; and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The ten least valuable markets are: West Valley City, Utah; Lowell, Massachusetts; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Gulfport, Mississippi; Greensboro, North Carolina; Evansville, Indiana; Buffalo, New York; Toledo, Ohio; Wheeling, West Virginia; and Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Bozeman appears at the top of the value list despite its relatively small size. According to the report, the influx of remote tech workers and outdoor recreation spending has made it one of the most fiercely contested local ad markets in the country. Edmond's density of high-cost-per-click professional services makes it the highest-ranked market overall. At the bottom, cities across the Rust Belt and Appalachia reflect lower median incomes and fewer competing local advertisers - both factors that reduce bidding pressure and lower the market price for local attention.

For performance marketers, geography-based bid adjustments are a standard lever. The Proton data provides an independent market-level signal for where advertiser competition is structurally highest, which may partially explain why local CPC inflation tends to concentrate in specific metro areas.

Lock-in and the lifetime value of a user

The report connects advertising value to product lock-in. With 1.8 billion active Gmail users, according to Proton, the long-term value of keeping users inside the Google ecosystem is substantial, and it compounds with each additional year of behavioral data. According to the report, "every cross-product integration, every friction point on data export, every feature built to increase daily engagement is backed by this math."

This framing has particular resonance for the advertising industry right now. Google's RTB settlement, approved by a federal judge on March 26, 2026, requires the company to introduce a new user control allowing people to limit the personal data shared during real-time bidding auctions. The settlement came after nearly five years of litigation and represents the first time Google has been required to publish dedicated disclosures explaining how its RTB auctions work and what data is shared with whom.

An independent privacy audit published in April 2026 found that Google failed to honor Global Privacy Control opt-out signals 86% of the time across more than 7,000 California websites - setting 11,021 advertising cookies despite user opt-out. The aggregate potential liability from that finding was estimated at $5.8 billion. These enforcement-side developments sit alongside the Proton report's demand-side analysis: together, they sketch the architecture of a system in which user data flows generate commercial value at scale, with users largely unaware of the pricing structure applied to their attention.

What the data reveals about auction mechanics

For marketers, the Proton analysis illuminates the supply side of the auction in an unusually direct way. Most CPC benchmarks describe what advertisers pay in aggregate, by industry or keyword. The Proton model inverts that: it estimates what a specific demographic profile is worth to the whole system, aggregating across the searches that profile is statistically likely to conduct over a year.

The result maps closely to patterns already visible in platform data. Research published by Google and Yale University in 2024 examined how ad auctions could evolve from simple cost-per-click bidding to long-term user lifetime value optimization, using Markov Decision Processes to balance immediate auction revenue with future user engagement metrics. The Proton report provides an external approximation of what that user lifetime value looks like from the advertiser demand side.

The concentration of value at the top of the distribution - the top 10% of profiles generating 43% of all advertiser value - also has bidding strategy implications. Campaigns targeting high-CPC verticals, desktop users, and specific high-competition geographies are, in effect, competing for access to that top decile. Google's 11-year data retention policy for Ads reporting, which took effect in November 2024, means that historical behavioral signals for these high-value profiles accumulate over a longer period than those available on competing platforms, deepening the advantage of incumbency.

The privacy infrastructure around auction data

The Proton analysis arrives in the context of a broader set of structural changes to how Google manages data flows between its products. Starting June 15, 2026, Google Analytics will transfer authority over advertising data collectionentirely to Consent Mode settings managed within Google Ads, removing Google Signals from its prior role as a co-controller of that data. The practical consequence is that organizations that previously relied on turning off Google Signals as a privacy backstop will lose that protection unless they also set ad_storage to denied in Consent Mode - a configuration that Google's own in-product notification warns will significantly impact advertising measurement and conversion tracking.

A complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission in January 2025 by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties alleged that Google's RTB system, which operates on 35.4 million websites and 91% of Android apps, broadcasts data about U.S. individuals approximately 31 billion times per day. That complaint was brought under the Protecting Americans' Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, citing foreign companies - including multiple with Beijing addresses - among the certified recipients of RTB bid request data.

Proton's position in the data

The report is produced by Proton, the Geneva-based privacy company whose products include Proton Mail and Proton Drive. Proton's business model is subscription-based rather than advertising-based, and the company is explicit about that distinction: its services encrypt data before it reaches the server, which means Proton cannot build the kind of behavioral profile that Google's auction system prices. That commercial interest is clearly part of the motivation for the report - Proton has a direct incentive to demonstrate the value of the data that its model avoids collecting.

That context does not diminish the methodological specificity of the analysis. The use of 54,000 modeled profiles, applied cost-per-click data from live campaigns, and life-stage-based search archetypes represents a more structured approach than most consumer-facing privacy analyses. The report acknowledges its own ceiling: the figures represent estimated maximum advertiser demand, not confirmed Google revenue per user.

What the numbers mean for ad buyers

For professionals planning paid search campaigns, the Proton data has a practical subtext. The 577x difference between the highest and lowest-value profiles reflects the same structural forces that produce large CPC variations across verticals, device types, and geographies. Understanding those forces from the demand side - what a 35-to-44-year-old male desktop user in Edmond, Oklahoma searches for, and what advertisers pay to reach him - is the flip side of keyword and audience planning.

The report is also a reminder that the free services model generates a pricing structure that runs in parallel with the ad buying system, largely invisible to users but transparent to advertisers who participate in the auction. When platforms charge more to reach specific demographics in specific places, those prices are set by market competition among buyers - lawyers, financial advisors, software companies - not by the platform unilaterally. The Proton analysis makes the output of that competitive process visible, at the demographic profile level, for the first time in this level of detail.

Timeline

  • July 2019 - UK Information Commissioner's Office publishes initial RTB investigation report, raising concerns about the legality of data processing in programmatic advertising auctions (PPC Land)
  • March 26, 2021 - Original complaint filed in Hewitt v. Google LLC, initiating what would become the Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation
  • May 7, 2024 - Google and Yale University publish research on ad auction evolution from cost-per-click to user lifetime value optimization (PPC Land)
  • October 2024 - Google announces 11-year data retention policy for Ads reporting, effective November 13, 2024 (PPC Land)
  • January 16, 2025 - EPIC and ICCL file FTC complaint alleging Google's RTB system broadcasts data on U.S. individuals approximately 31 billion times per day (PPC Land)
  • February 15, 2025 - Google completes transition to OpenRTB protocol, sunsetting its proprietary Authorized Buyers RTB protocol
  • May 19, 2025 - Google Ads benchmark report shows average cost per click reached $5.26 in 2025, up 12.88% year-over-year (PPC Land)
  • September 2, 2025 - Google RTB class-action settlement reached in the Northern District of California (PPC Land)
  • March 26, 2026 - Federal judge grants final approval to Google RTB settlement, requiring a new RTB Control limiting data shared in ad auctions (PPC Land)
  • April 14, 2026 - Independent webXray audit finds Google failed to honor Global Privacy Control opt-out signals 86% of the time across 7,000+ California websites (PPC Land)
  • April 28, 2026 - Proton publishes "The Price of Free Google," estimating annual advertiser value of U.S. user profiles based on 54,000 demographic combinations and 2025 ad auction data
  • June 15, 2026 - Google Analytics scheduled to transfer advertising data authority entirely to Consent Mode in Google Ads, removing Google Signals from that role (PPC Land)

Summary

Who: Proton, the Geneva-based encrypted communications company, published the analysis. The primary subject is Google's advertising auction system and the demographic pricing structure it produces for U.S. users.

What: A report analyzing over 54,000 demographic profiles to estimate the annual advertiser value of different types of Americans in Google's ad auction, using 2025 cost-per-click data from live campaigns. The range spans from $31.05 to $17,929.30 per year, a 577x difference. Key variables include device type, age, parenthood status, and geography.

When: The report was published on April 28, 2026.

Where: The analysis covers the United States, identifying the ten most and least valuable advertising markets by city. It applies to Google's search advertising auction system, which operates globally but is measured here at the U.S. level.

Why: Proton, whose business model is subscription-based and does not rely on behavioral advertising, produced the report to illustrate the commercial value of the data collected by ad-supported services. The findings are relevant to the marketing and advertising industry because they provide an external estimate of audience value at the demographic profile level - the same structural forces that determine cost-per-click pricing in search campaigns.

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