The $600B Attention Economy — Your Personal Share
$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.
Digital advertising is a $600B+ industry globally. That number shows up in every industry report but it's hard to feel. $600B is abstract. Divided by people, it becomes concrete.
The per-capita math
Roughly 5.4B people are internet users. If we divide $600B evenly across them, that's about $111 per internet user per year going to digital ads. But evenly is wrong — the distribution is extreme.
The US accounts for roughly 37% of global digital ad spend ($225B+ per IAB's 2024 report) with 330M people. That's about $680 per US person per year. Western Europe is around $250-400. Southeast Asia: $20-40. Sub-Saharan Africa: $5-10.
Why the gap is so wide
Advertisers bid on impressions based on expected return. A US consumer buying a $1,000 sofa generates more revenue than a Vietnamese consumer buying a $30 pair of shoes, so the bid to reach the US consumer is higher. CPMs follow purchasing power almost perfectly.
This isn't a moral statement — it's just how the auction works. And it explains why the regional ARPU differences you see in SEC filings are so dramatic. Meta's US ARPP is $268. The same company's ROW ARPP is $14. Same infrastructure, same targeting, same company — different markets.
Where the money concentrates
Five platforms absorb the majority of the $600B: Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok/ByteDance, and Alibaba. Google alone is $264B (44%). Meta is $160B (27%). Amazon Ads is $56B. TikTok's parent ByteDance is estimated at $50B+ in ads. Alibaba around $30B.
Five companies, nearly 90% of the pie. The rest of the industry — Snap, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, every streaming service, every ride-share, every news site — splits the remaining 10-15%.
Your per-capita share of the pie
The typical US user shows up in most of the big five: Google (~$95/yr), Facebook (~$160/yr), Instagram (~$107/yr), Amazon (~$109/yr), YouTube (~$43/yr). That's $500+ of industry spend attributable to one person. Add TikTok ($82), Pinterest ($27), Snapchat ($28), Reddit ($18), and you're over $650 — close to the $680 per-capita figure.
But again, what you're worth (raw data value) is different from what the industry spends on you. Most of that spend pays for platform infrastructure. Your raw data's share is around 20%.
The takeaway
The attention economy is $600B. Per US user, it's about $680/yr. Per your raw data specifically, it's closer to $100-200 — still meaningful, but an order of magnitude below the viral screenshots.
For the exact math, see the methodology page. To see your share across specific platforms, run the calculator.