[jerf]

"Shockingly little revenue targeted ads generate per user" is also relative to the context. I bang on these numbers a lot on HN because for many of us here, the amount of damage Facebook does to our lives, the amount of ads it shoves in our face, and the way it has contorted an entire industry into surveillance capitalism, is way, way more than $20/month worth of damage to our lives, culture, and society. It is also a good way to counter the frequently-proposed "what if the companies share ad revenue with their users?", which along with being sort of a "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" problem if you really analyze what that entails, has the even more fatal problem that there really isn't any money to do that with. If we cut you in for 50% of the ads you see in a month, you might be looking at a whopping $15-20 a month, or, pretty close to a single hour at what is roughly the de facto minimum wage. Even if we ignore how that instantly pushes all these companies from megaprofitable behemoths to bleeding money out of every orifice, $15-20/month isn't enough to make a compelling story on that front.

I think a lot of people have a mental model based on the size of these companies that they must be making hundreds of dollars a month per user, and it's good to run the numbers to show they don't so society can make more reasonable plans.