Annual average revenue per (active) user (from North America) is about $180 for Google, $150 for Facebook, and $80 for Twitter. As you might expect, Amazon has far higher revenue per user ($700), and Apple is about $140, but they're both more like $30 when you only count their advertising revenue instead of much lower-margin retail and hardware manufacturing businesses.
Searching for "ARPU" news will give articles with new takes every time anyone publishes new quarterly numbers, but those are roughly accurate. Obviously, they can be distorted to tell whatever story you want by messing with market segmentation, time period, and what kind of revenue/profit/margin/expenses/capital you want to invoke, but those are rough numbers.
To be clear, those are first-party advertising companies, this isn't the value of a page view to a random blog with side-roll ads from some third-party advertisers/trackers. I have no idea what Taboola/Outbrain chumboxes generate other than that they both have $1B revenue and there are about 5B Internet users worldwide, which means the average user is worth $0.20 per year to them. And it's reasonable to assume the majority of their revenue comes from wealthy English speaking adults, so maybe your demographic is worth $5 or something like that.
It's astonishing that the value is so high. I use the internet on N devices for probably 12h a day and I can't imagine I'm worth even a positive amount anywhere.
I max out free tiers of OneDrive/DropBox etc, use my free minutes of build time at the dev sites, I use some social media features but I browse Twitter and reddit on custom apps that don't show any ads. I never ever click an ad in an article or search no matter how interesting or relevant.
So if since I'm a net loss, that means that for everyone who is like me, there has to be someone who is an even larger gain for these companies. I have all of those services (Google, fb, twitter) and I'm still pretty sure I provide a negative revenue for all of them. So Someone needs to provide the revenue I don't. It's a scary amount. My internet activity is subsidized by someone who must be doing a scary amount of clicking on the sponsored google results, or something.
I wouldn't say the amount is that high, it's like $50 per month and that in comparison to all the value one gets out of the internet. Sure, things like Wikipedia or some YouTube channels have other revenue streams like donations that are nor accounted for and paid tiers probably subsidize free tiers, but still. And also in comparison to the prices of individual subscriptions for Netflix or YouTube Premium or a news paper like The Guardian which are each often on the order of $10 per month.
Searching for "ARPU" news will give articles with new takes every time anyone publishes new quarterly numbers, but those are roughly accurate. Obviously, they can be distorted to tell whatever story you want by messing with market segmentation, time period, and what kind of revenue/profit/margin/expenses/capital you want to invoke, but those are rough numbers.
To be clear, those are first-party advertising companies, this isn't the value of a page view to a random blog with side-roll ads from some third-party advertisers/trackers. I have no idea what Taboola/Outbrain chumboxes generate other than that they both have $1B revenue and there are about 5B Internet users worldwide, which means the average user is worth $0.20 per year to them. And it's reasonable to assume the majority of their revenue comes from wealthy English speaking adults, so maybe your demographic is worth $5 or something like that.