Deep-dives into data value, ad revenue, and the economics of personal data. New posts every Wednesday.
ByteDance doesn't publish ARPU, but analysts have triangulated US TikTok ad revenue at ~$14B. Divide that by ~170M US users and you get ~$82/user — higher than Snapchat, lower than Facebook.
OpenAI doesn't break out ARPU the way Meta does, but the numbers are public. $25B ARR ÷ 910M weekly users = $27.50 global, roughly $45 for NA users. Here's why.
$600B sounds abstract until you divide it by people. Here's what the attention economy looks like at the per-capita level — and why most of that value concentrates in a few hundred million users.
If you use an iPhone, your ad impressions are worth roughly 2-3x what the same impressions would be worth to an Android user. The reason isn't one thing — it's a stack of them.
Meta's headline number is $268 per US user per year. But that's the family ARPU — covering Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger combined. Here's how to split it.