The $1,000 You Don’t Know You’re Spending

How social media platforms monetize your attention and what it’s actually worth

Social media promised seamless connection. After a decade of competition and consolidation, a handful of platforms now dominate with billions of users each. The average user spends about 140 minutes per day on social media ¹, paying nothing for it. Advertising revenue covers the costs (and then some).

So how much are advertisers actually paying for your attention? There are two relevant numbers: what social media companies earn per user, and what advertisers get in return. Let’s start with the first number.

One approach to getting this number is to check how much you would pay to avoid ads. Under perfect competition, this should equal the advertising revenue a platform earns per user. Meta’s EU ad-free subscription costs €7.99/month (~$100/year) ². Assuming 60 of the 140 daily social media minutes are spent on Meta, that’s roughly $0.30/hour for your attention.

As a cross-check, we can use official financial data from Meta to calculate this number. Meta’s 2025 revenue was ~$200B across 3.5B users, or ~$60/person/year — about $0.15/hour at 60 min/day. This is a global average. Correcting for geography: the US and Canada generate ~40% of Meta’s revenue but represent only ~10% of users ³, putting American/Canadian users at roughly $0.60/hour.

For context, Meta’s reported costs are $117B/year ³ – about $33/user/year, or $0.10/hour. Against ~$0.60/hour in US revenue, that’s a net margin of roughly 40-50%. The infrastructure cost of serving you content is remarkably low relative to what your attention is worth.

In comparison, 2025 Super Bowl ad slots ran ~$7M per 30 seconds, with roughly one hour of total ads across a 3.5-hour game watched by ~127 million people ⁴ – about $1.90/hour/viewer. That’s only ~3x the US Meta figure, and the Super Bowl happens once a year.

These figures should generalize reasonably to Google, TikTok, and other major platforms. Note that advertising revenue per user is a floor, not a ceiling, on what your attention is worth; advertisers only spend if they expect a return. Estimated advertiser ROI on digital ads typically runs 3-5x ⁵, implying the true value of your attention is $0.30 to $1.80/hour, or roughly $200 to $1,000/year at two hours of daily use. Of that, a third flows to platforms and two-thirds to advertisers, who recoup it through the products you subsequently buy.

Two caveats here. First, advertising isn’t purely extractive; it informs consumers about products, and the goods you buy based on advertising presumably generate real value for you. The calculation above captures cost, not net welfare impact.

Second, social media carries externalities beyond the ad transaction: mental health effects, addiction, political polarization, and disinformation. A well-designed randomized controlled trial by economists at NYU and Stanford quantifies some of these directly⁶. Participants were paid to deactivate Facebook for four weeks. The researchers then measured downstream effects on behavior, political knowledge, wellbeing, and subsequent platform use. This design lets them infer causality rather than mere correlation. They found that deactivation increased offline social activity, reduced political polarization, and durably reduced Facebook use post-experiment.

The wellbeing question remains unsettled. Participants required ~$180 to deactivate initially, implying they valued access. But after four weeks off, their willingness-to-accept dropped to ~$150 (a 14% decrease), suggesting the platform is somewhat addictive and that perceived value is partially illusory.

The bottom line is that your attention on social media is worth $200–$1,000/year to advertisers, delivered at remarkably low cost to platforms, and comes bundled with externalities that are real but hard to price. Whether that’s a trade worth making is a personal calculation, but it’s worth making it consciously.

Footnotes:

How social media platforms monetize your attention and what it’s actually worth

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