What an hour of your attention is worth

I spent an evening working out what I'm worth to Big Tech, and then spent the rest of the week trying to stop thinking about it.

The clever thing about "free" on the internet isn't that the trade doesn't exist. It's that it's been designed so you can't see it.

No money changes hands. No receipt arrives. No app shows you the meter ticking as you scroll. The exchange is real — your attention and your data in, Instagram and Google and LinkedIn out — but by the time the numbers get tallied, they live in a quarterly earnings report you'll never read. So the trade feels weightless. Like you're getting the service for nothing.

You're not getting it for nothing. You just can't see the price tag.

The strange thing is that the price tag isn't hidden. It's public. Every company listed on a stock exchange tells you, four times a year, exactly what you're worth to them. You've just never been shown how to read it.

How to read an earnings report

The number you want is called ARPU — average revenue per user. Every public platform reports it, because investors want to know.

One way we can calculate the value is straightforward: take the company's annual revenue, divide by monthly active users. What you get is what the platform earns off the average person who uses it, per year.

For Meta last year the global figure was about $52 per user. For YouTube's ad-supported side, around $24. For LinkedIn it's $15 averaged across all 1.2B members, but much higher once you strip out the dormant accounts.

These aren't estimates from watchdog groups. They're straight from the companies themselves, in the section of the earnings release where the whole point is to convince shareholders that each user is worth more than they were last quarter. The incentive is to talk the number up, not down.

Whatever ARPU says, the reality on the ground probably isn't lower. If anything, it's a floor.

The numbers, service by service

Rough figures, from the companies' own quarterly reports:

• Meta: ~$52/yr global, ~$320 in the US
• Google (all products): ~$100/yr globally, ~$500 US — $400B in revenue across ~4B users across Search, Android, YouTube, Cloud and Workspace combined
• YouTube ads alone: ~$24/yr global, ~$80 US
• LinkedIn: $15/yr averaged across all 1.2B members, but ~$57/yr across the 310M monthly active ones
• TikTok: ~$16 global, ~$70 US — doubled in two years
• Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, X: all in the $10–30/user/yr range

The geographic skew is the part most people miss. Meta's figure in the US is roughly ten times what it is in Asia-Pacific. Europe sits in the middle at about $92. Same product, same features, same algorithm — different rate card, because ad buyers pay more to reach wealthier audiences.

Subscription services are simpler because you're handing over actual money. Spotify Premium is about $60/yr per user. Netflix averages $140 globally, $207 in the US. Amazon Prime is $140 before you've bought anything.

Marketplaces don't fit ARPU cleanly. Uber and Lyft take around 20% of each fare. Airbnb combines host and guest fees for about 14–16%. DoorDash and Uber Eats take closer to 25%. Shopify's card take is 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.

Three different mechanisms, all measurable if you're patient enough to look.

Per hour is where it clicks

ARPU is annual. But attention isn't spent in years — it's spent in hours, in the little windows between other things. So the honest conversion is to divide.

The average US Meta user burns about 200 hours a year across Facebook and Instagram. $320 ÷ 200 = roughly $1.60 per hour of your attention. YouTube works out to about $0.27/hour. TikTok $0.22. Snapchat cheaper still. Do the same sum on global averages and Meta drops to around 26 cents an hour, YouTube to 8.

Those rates are only what the platform earns this year, by the way. They aren't what your data is ultimately worth. Everything you click and hover and pause on feeds ad targeting across the wider web, plus (now) AI training corpora. ARPU is the rent. The equity is bigger.

But even the rent, laid out per hour, makes something obvious. You can see exactly why every platform is obsessed with "time spent" as a north-star metric. If one extra hour a week on Facebook is worth ~$83 a year per US user, multiplied across three billion users, the maths for why the feed never stops scrolling is not mysterious. The feed is a meter, and keeping it running is the business.

The calculator

The point of making the numbers this concrete is that you can plug in your own usage and see what you personally throw into the machine each year. Drag the sliders for how much time goes into each platform and watch the ledger tally up. Rates are global averages.

The rates come from the earnings-report maths above — global ARPU divided by average annual hours on the platform.

The alternative is cheaper than it's ever been

Once the number has somewhere to sit, it's much harder to ignore.

Most people look at a total over $1,000/yr and go quiet for a second. Not because any one platform is egregious — on a per-hour basis they really aren't — but because the aggregate is real, and it's been invisible until now. That's the first useful thing the exercise does. It makes a choice possible.

The obvious next move is to look at alternatives. Signal instead of WhatsApp. Kagi or Brave Search instead of Google. Paid Spotify instead of ad-supported Spotify. Bluesky or Mastodon instead of X. Fastmail instead of Gmail. None are perfect, and some cost actual money — but once you can price what you're currently "not paying", the paid alternative often looks less expensive than it did five minutes ago.

The more interesting move is what's happened on the build side. Standing up a social app used to take a small team months. With Claude Code, Cursor, v0, or Lovable, a weekend is honestly enough. Profile pages, a shared feed, a wall for photos, maybe a jukebox — a MySpace-sized thing for you and a dozen friends, on a domain you own, with none of it feeding anyone's ad platform.

The economics have quietly inverted. For twenty years the only viable social network was one big enough to run ads against. The cheapest social network in 2026 is the one you and six mates build on a Saturday afternoon.