It is not your phone.
It is a
business model.
Nobody built the feed to hurt you. They built it to sell you. Once you can see the machine, you cannot unsee it, and it stops working on you the same way.
Four companies. Almost one source of money.
These are not estimates and they are not from a news article. Every figure below comes from an annual report the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, signed by its own executives, under penalty of law.
- Meta
- 97.6% $196.2B of $201.0B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.1
- 94% $2.06B of $2.20B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.2
- Snap
- 87% $5.19B of $5.93B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.3
- Alphabet
- 73% $294.7B of $402.8B in 2025 revenue came from advertising.4
Read that again. You are not the customer of any of these companies. You have never paid them. Somebody else pays them, and what they pay for is access to you.
How the machine turns an hour into a dollar.
There is no single algorithm. Instagram says so itself: “Instagram doesn’t have a singular algorithm. We use a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose.”5 That sounds like a defense. It is actually a description of an assembly line. Here is the line.
- 01
Intake
Everything you do is measured. The Federal Trade Commission studied nine major platforms and found they each tracked between 5 and 135 distinct measurements of user behavior, an average of 28 per company.6 Not what you post. What you pause on.
- 02
Prediction
Those measurements train a model whose job is to guess what you will react to next. Engineers on Facebook’s own ads team published the reason plainly: “Online advertising allows advertisers to only bid and pay for measurable user responses, such as clicks. As a consequence, click prediction systems are central to most online advertising systems.”7
- 03
The auction
Every slot in front of your eyes is sold, in the fraction of a second before it loads. Google’s own documentation describes the pricing machinery: “Ad Rank is a set of values that are used to determine whether your ads are eligible to show and if eligible, where on the page your ads are shown.”8 Your attention has a live price. You have never seen it.
- 04
The loop
More time means more slots, and more measurements to sharpen the next prediction. The FTC put the incentive in writing: these companies “generally have an interest in serving content that drives User Engagement, because it can lead to more time on the service and greater advertising revenue.”9
- 05
Payout
The money leaves at the back. Meta reports what it calls average revenue per person. Worldwide, in 2025, that figure was $57.03, up fifteen percent in a single year.10 The company got better at this while you were using it.
We did not have to interpret anything.
You do not need a theory about this. Attorneys general, a former engineer under oath, and the companies’ own filings describe the same machine in almost the same words. Two of the three quotes below are allegations in an active lawsuit, which means they are claims a court has not yet ruled on. We say so, because that is the rule here.
“Meta’s core business model across its Social Media Platforms is monetizing user information and attention by increasing engagement, otherwise known as time spent, on its Platforms.”33 states, complaint filed in federal court October 2023, paragraph 54. Forty-two attorneys general moved in total, counting the ones who filed in their own state courts. An allegation.11
“TikTok’s business model is to increase advertising revenue by maximizing young users’ engagement. The more time young users spend on the platform, the more ads they can be served.”New York Attorney General, complaint filed October 2024, paragraph 49. An allegation.12
“The longer they keep ’em, the more money they make.”Arturo Bejar, former Facebook and Instagram engineering director, sworn testimony to the United States Senate, November 2023.13
Your mother is inventory too.
This is the part that makes the campaign make sense. The machine does not check your age before it prices you. It runs on everyone in the building. Every adult who tells you to put your phone down is standing in the same line you are, and most of them have never once looked at the price tag.
- Teens are priced as adults
- The FTC studied nine companies and reported that no company treated data collected from a user known to be aged thirteen to seventeen differently from an adult’s.14 There is no youth tier. There is one machine.
- They could tell, and did not look
- The FTC found some platforms’ own systems could identify users likely aged thirteen or fourteen, and the companies chose not to act on it. The FTC’s own word for this is willful blindness.15
- Where you live changes your price
- Reddit reports $10.79 of revenue per user in the United States in a single quarter, against $2.31 per user across the rest of the world.16 Same app. Same scroll. Your attention is worth roughly 4.7 times more than someone else’s, because advertisers here pay more to reach you.
- The under-eighteen line item
- Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health modelled US advertising revenue earned from minors across six platforms in 2022 and estimated nearly $11 billion in a single year, of which over $2 billion came from children aged twelve and under.17 This one is a model, not a disclosure, and we flag that every time we print it.
Meet the Hog.
A business model is hard to be angry at. So the crew gave it a body. The Hog is a machine, not an animal and not a man. It eats hours at the front and drops coins at the back. It is not clever and it is not evil. It is efficient, which is worse.
The Hog is not a person. It has no name behind it, no chief executive, no face. If a poster in this campaign ever points at a human being, the poster is wrong and it comes down. The target is always the machine. That rule is not decoration. It is the only thing keeping this campaign honest.
- The snout
- Intake. Wide, indifferent, always open.
- The eyes
- Glass. There is nobody behind them.
- The drawer
- Where your hour comes out as a number.
- What it never eats
- Anything you did not give it while it had your attention.
Every number, and where it came from.
Not one claim on this page rests on a news article about a study. Every link below opens the original document. If a number here does not match what you find, that is a mistake and we want it.
Notes. 1. Meta 10-K, fiscal year 2025, revenue $200,966M, advertising $196,175M. 2. Reddit 10-K, fiscal year 2025. 3. Snap 10-K, fiscal year 2025. 4. Alphabet 10-K, fiscal year 2025. 5. Instagram, “Instagram Ranking Explained”. 6. FTC staff report, 19 September 2024. Company data covers 2019 and 2020. 7. He, X. et al., “Practical Lessons from Predicting Clicks on Ads at Facebook,” ADKDD 2014, ACM Digital Library. This paper documents click prediction. It does not claim time spent is the target, and we do not say it does. 8. Google Ads Help, “About Ad Rank”. 9. FTC staff report, page 63. 10. Meta Form 10-K, fiscal year 2025. Meta’s own sentence: annual worldwide average revenue per person in 2025 was $57.03, an increase of 15 percent from 2024. Worldwide, not United States. 11. Multistate complaint, N.D. Cal., 24 October 2023, paragraph 54. Filed by 33 states in federal court. Eight more attorneys general filed in their own state courts and Florida filed separately, for 42 in total (Minnesota Attorney General, 24 October 2023). Unproven allegations. 12. New York complaint, 8 October 2024, paragraph 49. Unproven allegations. 13. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing transcript, 7 November 2023. 14. FTC staff report, page 17. 15. FTC staff report, page 73. 16. Reddit 10-K, average revenue per user, fourth quarter 2025. A quarterly figure, not an annual one. Reddit’s own label for the second number is “rest of world.” 17. Raffoul A, Ward ZJ, Santoso M, Kavanaugh JR, Austin SB, PLoS One, 27 December 2023. A simulated revenue model, not company-disclosed revenue. It combines census data, survey estimates of platform use by age, and third-party usage data, and assumes revenue per minute is constant across ages.
Rate: $116.58B paid for American attention in 2025. Meta US revenue $74.78B (Meta 10-K, FY2025), YouTube US ads about $19.46B (derived from Alphabet 10-K), Snap North America $3.47B, Pinterest US and Canada $3.05B, Reddit US $1.79B, TikTok US about $14.03B (third-party forecast). Divided by 254 million active US social media identities (DataReportal, October 2025) at two hours a day (EMARKETER, 2026), or 730 hours each. That is $0.6288 an hour. We round down and print $0.60. Every assumption in that chain pushes the real number up, never down. This rate replaces the $0.90 we published before. See the correction.
Now go find out what your hour sells for.
Seeing the machine is step one. Step two is a number with your own handwriting on it. Run your receipt, print it, and put it on a wall where an adult has to read it.