This text is part of an experiment I undertook with Ben Guzovsky; the cited texts are mine, but the material linking those citations is not. If you have landed on this page directly, click here for an introduction and a little context. Thank you! —DGB

How Much Is Your Attention Worth? The Numbers Behind “Free”

Your attention is worth whatever advertisers will pay for it: hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the biggest platforms alone. Historian D. Graham Burnett calls the business built on it “human fracking,” and argues that “free” apps are paid for twice, once by the advertisers who buy your eyes and again by users, especially young ones, in the damage done to their attention.

Color night photograph of Times Square with illuminated billboards for Four Roses, Bond, and Woolworth. — Times Square at night, around 1941. Selling attention is old; what is new, Burnett argues, is doing it everywhere, at every hour, through a device in your hand. *Credit: Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. No known restrictions on publication.*

What does “free” actually cost?

“Never before in history,” Burnett told De Volkskrant in 2024, has there been a thing “that could convert something as essential as attention into money,” and do it “at any time of the day.”

The thing is the phone. In their 2026 New York Times essay, Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt describe “the war for consumers’ attention” now “being waged on the portable computer in your pocket.” Its machinery “works to monetize tiny movements of our eyes and minds.”

The Friends of Attention, the collective Burnett works with, locate the battlefield precisely in their 2026 book Attensity!: “a deck-of-cards-sized patch of space approximately eight inches from your face.” The attention frackers won it “with oodles of money and unimaginable computing power.”

Who pays? “That’s how companies like Facebook and TikTok work,” Burnett told De Volkskrant: “they make money from advertisers who make their customers unhappy.” His image for the arrangement: “locking children in digital boxes.”

How do free apps make money?

Mostly by selling you. Reporting on Burnett’s work for Die Zeit in 2025, Johanna Jürgens laid out the figures: Alphabet, parent of Google and YouTube, “makes 76 percent of its revenue from ads.” Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, “makes 98 percent.” Their “combined advertising revenue last year: $425.22 billion.” Her conclusion: “Attention is the currency we mostly pay with” when things seem to be “free.”

Burnett and Peter Schmidt lay out the business in their 2026 essay “How AI Fracks Our Minds” for Peace & Riot:

In the end, though, the underlying business models are pretty simple: sell people stuff (retail); sell the eyeballs of the people to the companies that want to sell them the stuff (advertising); where possible, directly take the money from the people, while trying to steer clear of the law (financial flim-flam, online betting, prediction markets, etc.). All of these require time on device—and that means getting your AI hooks into as many eyeballs as possible.

— D. Graham Burnett and Peter Schmidt, “How AI Fracks Our Minds”, Peace & Riot, 2026

How big is the attention economy?

“An industry estimated to be worth $7 trillion,” the Times essay calls it, one that “views attention in the narrowest possible way.” The same mechanical understanding of attention “fuels the six largest corporations on the globe,” the authors write, “representing $19 trillion in market capitalization.”

The Peace & Riot essay measures it another way, “in terms of global inputs and outputs.” The digital system “takes about 40 billion barrels of crude oil each year” and “converts it into something like a metric ton of human dopamine.”

The numbers in one place

Figure	Number	Source (venue, year)	Note
Alphabet revenue from advertising	76 percent	Johanna Jürgens, Die Zeit, Nov 2025	Press reporting about Burnett’s work, not his own claim; the article does not name the fiscal year.
Meta revenue from advertising	98 percent	Johanna Jürgens, Die Zeit, Nov 2025	Same caveat.
Alphabet and Meta combined ad revenue	$425.22 billion	Johanna Jürgens, Die Zeit, Nov 2025	Described as “last year” in an article published in 2025.
Estimated worth of the attention industry	$7 trillion	Burnett, Loh, Schmidt, The New York Times, 2026	The essay calls it an estimate; the LARB interview (2026) repeats “seven-trillion-dollar.”
Market value of the six largest corporations	$19 trillion	Burnett, Loh, Schmidt, The New York Times, 2026	Market capitalization at the time of writing.
Rise in US youth mental-health hospital admissions	20 percent	Burnett and Sargent, JAMA Pediatrics, 2026	Covers 2009 to 2019; the authors cite a 2023 JAMA study.
Attempted suicide or self-injury, as share of those admissions	From 30 percent to 60 percent	Burnett and Sargent, JAMA Pediatrics, 2026	Same period, 2009 to 2019.
Rise in adolescent suicide mortality rate	70 percent	Burnett and Sargent, JAMA Pediatrics, 2026	The piece does not state the period; it cites a 2023 JAMA commentary.
Meta lobbying spend	$24 million	Burnett and Sargent, JAMA Pediatrics, 2026	For 2024, the single largest lobbying spender in the piece’s account.

These figures date. Revenue shares, market values, and industry estimates change every year; refresh this table annually.

What is “human fracking”?

“If your grandmother had designed the iPhone,” Burnett told the Los Angeles Review of Books, “you’d use it to call your grandmother.” Then the analogy:

The actual problem isn’t the technology—it’s the business model. It is the heedless, greedy, seven-trillion-dollar commitment to a hyperintensive extraction of the money value of human attention. That’s what we call “human fracking.” Fracking the earth for hydrocarbons involves pumping high-pressure, high-volume abrasives and detergents into deep tectonic structures—to break up the foundational architecture of those layers and force the oil and gas to the surface. Human fracking isn’t even analogous. It’s more like homologous. It involves pumping into human faces high-pressure, high-volume abrasives and detergents (in the form of algorithmically determined rage-bait and high-affect “content”) to break up our attention and force it to the surface, where it can be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

— D. Graham Burnett, interviewed by Matthew Clemente, “Fighting the Frackers”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2026

A black oil-well pump jack standing in a brown field under a pale sky. — An oil-well pump jack in northeastern Colorado. Burnett's term "human fracking" borrows from the oil industry: when the easy deposits are gone, extraction takes pressure. *Credit: Photo: Greg Goebel. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.*

He told an audience at the American Library in Paris in 2023 how the analogy works. Once there were “big zits of oil” you could squeeze; now there are “no more big zits of oil.” His conclusion for the room: “you are all being fracked now.” What comes up is the “vaporous money value of attention.”

Burnett and Schmidt explain the choice of words in Peace & Riot. Some call it the attention economy, “but we prefer more honest language”: “the profit model of AI-powered platforms like Instagram and TikTok” “is a form of human fracking.” The companies “extract hidden profits from our very consciousness.”

How did eyeballs get a price?

Burnett’s 2023 Asterisk essay “Fracking Eyeballs” opens flatly: “Our eyes are worth money.” The question is “how did eyeballs come to look like dollar signs?” His answer starts with “the original Faustian Bargain,” struck between the sciences of perception and “those who move the money around.”

Early twentieth-century magazine advertisement for Libbey glassware with an illustration of cut glass. — A 1917 magazine advertisement for Libbey glassware. Early advertising psychologists tested pages like this one for their "attention value." *Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-38419. No known restrictions.*

One thread runs through the Drake University psychologist Herman Brandt and his eye camera. Reading Brandt’s patent filing, Burnett found:

It turns out that Herman Brandt was, in this filing, assigning a financial interest in his system to “Look, Inc.” of Des Moines. That company was indeed the recently-founded Cowles brothers company, which in February of that very year had launched the first issue of the large-format, highly visual Look magazine — a publication that would give the market-dominant Life a run for its money across the decades that followed, reaching nearly three million readers with biweekly issues in the 1940s.

— D. Graham Burnett, “Fracking Eyeballs,” Asterisk, 2023

Brandt’s laboratory, Burnett concludes, “was effectively an internal corporate R&D facility at Look magazine.” Eye tracking had become a way of “measuring the money value of human attention.” The result, in his phrase: “our eyeball-fracking economy.”

Who coined “the attention economy”?

The economist Herbert Simon, a future Nobel laureate, as Die Zeit tells it: in 1971 Simon observed that a wealth of information creates a scarcity of something else, the attention of those who receive it, and called the competition for that finite resource the attention economy. The phrase is old. The business that now runs on it is new, and Burnett and his co-authors would rather call it by “more honest language.”

What does “free” cost young users?

The bill comes due in a 2026 commentary in JAMA Pediatrics by Burnett and the Dartmouth pediatrician James Sargent. “Between 2009 and 2019,” they write, “US hospital admissions for mental health diagnoses among youth grew by 20%.” Hospitalizations for attempted suicide or self-injury rose “from 30% to 60% of mental health hospitalizations.” And “the suicide mortality rate for adolescents increased by 70%.”

The puzzle, they write, is timing. The crisis tracks the rise of “the most extensive and intensive system of connectivity in the history of humanity.” Their diagnosis: “We call it attention fracking.”

In attention fracking, high-pressure, high-volume content is pumped into the eyes and minds of the user, fracturing the durational coherence of sensation and cognition—and forcing a monetizable slurry of attention to the surface, where it can be aggregated and auctioned to the highest bidder in the continuous advertising market that powers the online economy. Whereas petroleum fracking compromises air, water, and the biotic ecosystem, attention fracking compromises users’ relations with themselves and the world around them, affecting psychological well-being, social ties, and the perception of the world itself, as their reality is increasingly shaped by the algorithms designed to maintain, at all costs, their online attention.

— D. Graham Burnett and James D. Sargent, “Digital Media, Attention Fracking, and Youth Mental Health”, JAMA Pediatrics, 2026

The smartphone, in their phrase, is “an intimate social-cognitive prosthetic.”

Peace & Riot draws the environmental parallel. “Human fracking pollutes our inner world and destabilizes our sense of reality.” Spiking rates of mental illness among adolescents are “the psychic equivalent of spiking cancer rates” in polluted neighborhoods.

The grandparents thought experiment

Burnett and Sargent test the claim with a thought experiment:

If our cellphones had been designed by a consortium of grandparents commissioned to run a network for strengthening intergenerational relationships, we might well have a much smaller total wireless communications system, but it stands to reason that whatever those grandparent-designed devices looked like, they would not have been tuned to maximize time on device as pure return on investment. To push the point still further, if our social media platforms had been programmed by a hackathon of noncommercial artists and mindfulness advocates, the resulting applications might or might not be as popular, but it is unlikely that the resulting creations would be generating the adverse psychological externalities currently observed in the platforms produced and tended by Meta and Alphabet.

— D. Graham Burnett and James D. Sargent, “Digital Media, Attention Fracking, and Youth Mental Health”, JAMA Pediatrics, 2026

“It is not complicated,” they conclude: “the problem is the business model, not the smartphone and not social media itself.”

Is it like tobacco, or lead in gasoline?

Both, the JAMA Pediatrics authors argue. Fracking systems acting on children are “like lead in gasoline, a widely dispersed toxic contaminant.” And the industry behaves like tobacco:

Vintage cigarette advertisement with a smiling man in a doctor's head mirror beside a pack of Camel cigarettes and the slogan More Doctors Smoke Camels. — "More Doctors Smoke Camels," a 1948 cigarette advertisement. Burnett and Sargent compare today's attention business to the tobacco industry, which once enlisted doctors to reassure smokers. *Credit: Ladies' Home Journal, 1948, via Internet Archive Book Images and Wikimedia Commons. No known copyright restrictions.*

When corporations have a successful business model, they resist change. Broad consensus on the harms of smoking antedates 1960; however, the industry still produces about 5 trillion cigarettes per year. Social media companies, like their tobacco industry forebears, have been shown to veil and marginalize research on the harms of their products. Similarly, Big Tech lobbies heavily to avoid regulation (Meta was the single largest lobbying spender in 2024, at $24 million).

— D. Graham Burnett and James D. Sargent, “Digital Media, Attention Fracking, and Youth Mental Health”, JAMA Pediatrics, 2026

Their widest comparison is to empire, when powers declared much of the earth “terra nullius,” land belonging to no one. This time, they write, the land being claimed is neither Africa nor the Americas: “It is human consciousness.” Their proposals are collective: regulation, taxation, transparency. For the organizing side of that work, see the School of Radical Attention.

Frequently asked questions

How much is my attention worth?

There is no single price. The best guide is ad revenue: Die Zeit reported “$425.22 billion” in one year for Alphabet and Meta combined. Burnett and his co-authors put the whole industry at “$7 trillion.”

How does Instagram make money off me?

By selling your attention. Meta “makes 98 percent” of its revenue from ads, Die Zeit reports. In Burnett and Schmidt’s words, the model is to “sell the eyeballs of the people.”

What is human fracking?

Burnett’s name for the attention economy’s business model: pumping “rage-bait and high-affect ‘content’” into users to break up their attention and sell it.

Is social media like tobacco?

Burnett and Sargent think so. “When corporations have a successful business model, they resist change,” and the industry “still produces about 5 trillion cigarettes per year.”