Your Time Is Worth More Than 56 Cents an Hour
Social media is stuck at a local maximum -- for now.
All of the world’s information is online, ready to educate and empower us. Yet so much of our time is spent on cat videos, clickbait, or content designed to spark envy and anger. Why?
I wish for a world in which our time spent online made us better people — smarter, more informed, happier, healthier, and more generous toward others. While there is an astounding amount of phenomenal content online (some of which is popular), many of us spend a lot of time engaging with content that isn’t helpful to our well-being.
It’s easy to blame this on advertising-driven business models. Social media companies make money from ads, which they can show only when users are actively engaged. They optimize for the highest levels of engagement, and the content that generates the most engagement often makes people envious, angry, or resentful.
“You are the product,” some say, arguing that companies like Meta, ByteDance, and X are hyper-optimizers who manipulate users to maximize ad revenue.
I see things differently.
56 Cents an Hour
Based on estimates of Meta’s revenue and user engagement, the company (which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) generates roughly 56 cents for every hour of engagement in the U.S.
If I (as a user) am the product, and Facebook is effectively selling my time and attention to the highest-bidding advertiser, they aren’t doing a very good job! I would humbly argue that my time and attention are worth a whole lot more than $0.56 per hour.
Federal minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25 per hour, and California’s minimum wage is $16 per hour. Meta, with all its resources and expertise, is generating less than 8% of federal minimum wage per hour of user engagement and less than 4% of California minimum wage. Meta is not hyper-optimized.
If Meta were truly hyper-optimized — if it were maximizing value extraction1 from its users — it would be generating significantly more than 56 cents per hour.
The current model is both not serving the long-term well-being of users, and inefficient from a business standpoint. In the long run, it’s hard to imagine this model surviving. Instead, we’re likely to see one of two equilibrium states emerge.
The Hyper-Optimized Future
The Profit-Driven Model
In one version of the future, companies like Meta and TikTok figure out how to extract dramatically more revenue from each user hour. It’s not hard to imagine a tech company generating at least $5 in revenue per hour of engagement, about 10x the revenue that Meta generate today. There are many situations where companies are pretty explicit in paying for my time and attention — free dinners where I listen to a sales pitch, free gift cards in exchange for filling out surveys — and the price point is far higher than $0.56 per hour.The Value-Driven Model
In the other version, platforms deliver dramatically more value to users. Instead of cat videos or rage-inducing clickbait, users spend their time learning new skills, receiving personalized advice, or solving meaningful problems. Companies like Coursera hint at what’s possible — a world where users don’t just pass time but gain skills and credentials that improve their lives. This will likely be amplified by AI tutors offering personalized instruction or health apps providing real-time guidance to boost fitness and mental well-being.
With advances in technology, the possibilities for value-driven consumer tech products are even greater. Imagine an AI tutor that offers personalized instruction, helping users master new languages or complex skills. Or a health guidance tool that monitors your fitness and mental health in real time, offering actionable insights to improve your well-being. In these scenarios, users might willingly pay for the benefits they receive, creating a sustainable and mutually beneficial model.
Where Are We Now?
The reality today is that companies like Meta fall into neither of these categories. They’re not generating huge profits per user hour, and they’re delivering mostly low-value entertainment to their users. The current model — offering content that’s engaging enough to keep people scrolling while making pennies on the hour — feels unsustainable in the long run.
Someone will come along and figure out either how to extract more value as profit (allowing them to throw money at user acquisition to grow), or how to steal users away from Instagram and TikTok by providing greater long-term value to users while being just as engaging.
Social media companies are at a local maximum — they’ve optimized the current system about as far as it can go. But the global maximum lies elsewhere, in models that either extract far more profit or deliver far more value to users. The next generation of products has the potential to transform lives, not just waste hours, and I’m eager to see them grow.
From everything I can see, Meta’s execution is quite good! I think they are close to a local maximum in terms of revenue. And they are far from a global maximum. That’s probably a big part of why they are
Absolutely love this vision for the future of social media! Glasp is already moving in this direction by empowering users to learn, share knowledge, and grow together.
I wonder how the distribution of value looks like: serving ads to certain demographics on Meta and Google is significantly more expensive than other demographics, so I wonder if the reach of those social networks has the effect of reducing the average value extracted per attention-hour.