How much am I worth to a social media platform?
June 29, 2024 11:04 AM Subscribe
Let's say I scroll on social media for 1 hour (yes, only one hour, that's accurate, it's certainly never longer than that. ahem). Assuming I just keep scrolling, without clicking any ads, or making any purchases - how much money did the platform make from my attention?
Is there a reasonably accurate way to calculate how much money a given person is making for the platform with an hour of their time?
Are different user demographics worth more? Which demographics, and how much does their "watch value" differ?
I'm curious about all the major US platforms - TikTok, Insta, FB, YouTube, Xitter, etc.
Broad and tangential answers are welcomed too - I'd love more background context to inform how I think about social media ads. Thanks!
Is there a reasonably accurate way to calculate how much money a given person is making for the platform with an hour of their time?
Are different user demographics worth more? Which demographics, and how much does their "watch value" differ?
I'm curious about all the major US platforms - TikTok, Insta, FB, YouTube, Xitter, etc.
Broad and tangential answers are welcomed too - I'd love more background context to inform how I think about social media ads. Thanks!
The answer is it depends.
Ads on most social media platforms are sold under both a bidding structure and a cost-per-goal structure. So setting up a campaign, I pick the demographic (within some limits) and location and then whether I'm paying for clicks or impressions, and whether I'm trying to maximize reach (views) or conversions (could be as far down as purchases.)
The cost varies by time of day and who else is bidding as well as your demographic. That would be hard to calculate as it really is highly variable - that's why a) the platforms offer to optimize bidding via algorithm for clients and b) people who can develop highly optimized campaigns can make money saving advertisers money.
You can look up cost per thousand impressions on various platforms (CPM). An impression is a view. You can also look up CPC (cost per click.) If you figure you saw 20 ads in an hour (could be a lot more or fewer depending on your scrolling and how many advertisers were going after your demo) you can approximate it.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:27 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
Ads on most social media platforms are sold under both a bidding structure and a cost-per-goal structure. So setting up a campaign, I pick the demographic (within some limits) and location and then whether I'm paying for clicks or impressions, and whether I'm trying to maximize reach (views) or conversions (could be as far down as purchases.)
The cost varies by time of day and who else is bidding as well as your demographic. That would be hard to calculate as it really is highly variable - that's why a) the platforms offer to optimize bidding via algorithm for clients and b) people who can develop highly optimized campaigns can make money saving advertisers money.
You can look up cost per thousand impressions on various platforms (CPM). An impression is a view. You can also look up CPC (cost per click.) If you figure you saw 20 ads in an hour (could be a lot more or fewer depending on your scrolling and how many advertisers were going after your demo) you can approximate it.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:27 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]
Are you ever buying a product you saw in one of those ads? Marketers are not stupid, they know they want to spend money that gets them sales, not clicks or, even worse, impressions, which you're hoping translate to sales but generally can't prove, and certainly not in a granular level. Historically, this was very hard to track--you could buy advertising space in a newspaper, but it was hard to know if you were getting your money's worth. Fast forward to now and there will be some sort of conversion tracking going on where advertisers can attribute their sales to spend on different social media platforms (there are a bunch of ways to do this, some defeated by ad-blocking, some not).
For a publicly traded company, you can probably reverse engineer a rough value per hour out of the information they release on an earnings call. That will, of course, be for the typical (active) user, not you individually, but the typical user doesn't click on ads anyway.
posted by hoyland at 11:28 AM on June 29
For a publicly traded company, you can probably reverse engineer a rough value per hour out of the information they release on an earnings call. That will, of course, be for the typical (active) user, not you individually, but the typical user doesn't click on ads anyway.
posted by hoyland at 11:28 AM on June 29
Globally, Facebook made $12.74 profit per active user last year. So, on a per hour basis, not very much.
posted by Klipspringer at 11:29 AM on June 29 [7 favorites]
posted by Klipspringer at 11:29 AM on June 29 [7 favorites]
Broad and tangential answers are welcome
i filtered through most of what i could find about the intersection of 'attention' & 'economy' for a comment on the blue
posted by HearHere at 12:42 PM on June 29
i filtered through most of what i could find about the intersection of 'attention' & 'economy' for a comment on the blue
posted by HearHere at 12:42 PM on June 29
A social media site's entire value to advertisers is based on the number of active users and the number of pageviews, so even if you personally never click anything you are adding to the perceived value of the ecosystem.
Now you could consider that your activity is just 1/200 millionth of the platform and so isnt going to make any noticeable difference. However another way of looking at this is that you only have 24 hours in the day, and probably less than 10 of those as completely free time, do you really want to spend one of those hours helping to enrich some social media empire? How much is your time worth to you?
posted by Lanark at 1:03 PM on June 29
Now you could consider that your activity is just 1/200 millionth of the platform and so isnt going to make any noticeable difference. However another way of looking at this is that you only have 24 hours in the day, and probably less than 10 of those as completely free time, do you really want to spend one of those hours helping to enrich some social media empire? How much is your time worth to you?
posted by Lanark at 1:03 PM on June 29
Following on on Klipspringer's post...
According to Statista, it looks like FB makes around $50 to $60 per year for US users. A few sources suggest the average used spends about 20 hours monthly (which would be around 240 hours per year)
That's suggest FB makes around $60/240 = around $0.25/hour for a typical hour of US user time.
These are all super-rough numbers, but maybe give a ballpark, if you want to use that math.
Also - if you use warriorqueen's suggestion of looking at as costs per thousand: 25 cents is about what facebook would make from you seeing about 35 or so ads, which seems like a reasonable ballpark of what you might see in an hour?
posted by ManInSuit at 1:19 PM on June 29 [1 favorite]
According to Statista, it looks like FB makes around $50 to $60 per year for US users. A few sources suggest the average used spends about 20 hours monthly (which would be around 240 hours per year)
That's suggest FB makes around $60/240 = around $0.25/hour for a typical hour of US user time.
These are all super-rough numbers, but maybe give a ballpark, if you want to use that math.
Also - if you use warriorqueen's suggestion of looking at as costs per thousand: 25 cents is about what facebook would make from you seeing about 35 or so ads, which seems like a reasonable ballpark of what you might see in an hour?
posted by ManInSuit at 1:19 PM on June 29 [1 favorite]
And also: If you look at BungaDunga's 10€/month subscription note - if you assume people are doing about 20 hours a month, that means FB will let you buy your way out of ads for around $0.50/hour, which also aligns roughly with the ballpack guess that they make about $0.25/hour for the average user .
We seem to have three strategies for coming to an answer that all seem to support that same very rough answer of 25 cents or so. (ie: It's not a low as, say, two cents, but not as high as, say, two dollars)
posted by ManInSuit at 1:29 PM on June 29 [2 favorites]
We seem to have three strategies for coming to an answer that all seem to support that same very rough answer of 25 cents or so. (ie: It's not a low as, say, two cents, but not as high as, say, two dollars)
posted by ManInSuit at 1:29 PM on June 29 [2 favorites]
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posted by BungaDunga at 11:14 AM on June 29 [1 favorite]