Transparent inputs, exact math, and cited sources. No black boxes. Here is exactly how the attention loss counter is derived from publicly available data.
Supporting Context (Global)
2 in 3 people on Earth now use social media
The average global user spends 18h 36m/week on social media and video feeds.
Social and video feeds now account for roughly 16% of waking hours for the typical online adult.
The average active user visits 6.75 social platforms each month.
People now spend roughly 33.5h/week consuming online media overall.
Time spent (minutes/day): data.ai app usage averages, as published via DataReportal Digital 2026.
User base (users): platform ad-reach / active-user estimates, as published via DataReportal Digital 2026.
Why this works: minutes/day is per person. We multiply it by users to estimate total human time consumed.
Summary
For the selected region, we estimate total attention time as:
~376,539,833 years per year
Based on average time per person × number of users
Minutes/day comes from public "average time spent" estimates (often Android app averages).
Users uses public "ad-reach / active user" estimates (not perfect; we show sources).
We convert minutes/day × users → hours/year → human years/year.
Important: "Minutes/day" means the average time one person spends on that platform each day — not the total time the platform is online.
We multiply that per-person time by the number of users to estimate how much total human life is consumed each day.
Example: If 100 people each spend 60 minutes per day on an app, that's 100 hours of human life consumed every day — even though there are only 24 hours in a day.
Methodology: These figures use DataReportal's Digital 2026 global reporting. Some values reflect October 2025 measurements published in the 2026 report. Time-spent metrics are based on GWI research and include social networks plus video-centric platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Recent methodology and underlying data revisions mean some values may not be directly comparable with older reports.
Disclosure: These are estimates. Different sources define "users" and "time spent" differently. Attention Leak's posture is transparency: we show the inputs and the math so anyone can challenge or improve them.
• Digital 2026 was published in October 2025 and reflects the latest available figures used in that report.
• Time-spent metrics include social networks and video-centric platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.
• Some 2026 values are affected by revised internet-adoption figures for China and India.
• Some recent GWI media-time figures may not be directly comparable with earlier editions.