How much money do Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, and Snapchat make from you?

We’ve all been on the internet long enough to know that when the product is free, you are the product. Some people are understandably very angry about Big Tech hoarding our data to prey on our conscious (or more commonly our subconscious) insecurities and desires. Most of us don’t care enough to stop.

But how much is your doomscrolling actually worth to the Mark Zuckerbergs and Evan Spiegels of the world? That answer, of course, depends on a few key factors.

Users from lower-income countries tend to be a lot less valuable to advertisers. But which platform you’re on matters a lot, too. Just this week, Reddit said its revenue was booming thanks to AI-powered ads. Pinterest shares, meanwhile, are sinking this morning on the exact opposite — AI’s influence underwhelmed investors. At Snap, it was the same story, with shares diving 17% on Wednesday as the company is somehow barely growing while its peers leap forward.

For all three of those companies, the average revenue per active user (ARPU) was about $2.40 to $2.80 a month for a user in the US or North America. (They define their geographies slightly differently.) So, not a whole lot to split them.

But what about Meta?

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant is a little harder to pin down, after it inconveniently decided to stop splitting out its daily active users by geography. But, based on our best estimate that it has 250 million daily active users in the US and Canada (more on this below), combined with the fact that Meta reported $20 billion in ad revenue in the US and Canada, implies that the typical Meta user is worth somewhere around 10x as much: about $26 and change.

Put another way, Meta is making more money from you than Netflix charges for its most expensive tier ($24.99).

Of course, Meta does have both Facebook and Instagram to monetize your eyeballs, but even if we split the figure in half, it’s miles ahead of its peers.

Napkin math-ing Meta’s DAUs

So, Meta doesn’t tell us exactly how many unique daily active users it has in the US and Canada — but we can make a decent guess based on a few facts we do have.

Per a filing for the last quarter of 2023, the company said it had 205 million daily active Facebook users in the US and Canada. That number had been growing in the quarters previous to it.

Now, we could charitably say that those figures were likely to continue growing. However, companies tend to like showing things when numbers are going up, so the fact Meta no longer discloses them gives some weight to the idea that it might have gone backwards since. Also, with 205 million active users, there just can’t be that many adults left in the US and Canada who have internet access and aren’t yet on Facebook. So, let’s say that the Facebook figure has stayed broadly flat at 205 million.

Now we need to account for Instagram. Or, more specifically, the daily active Instagram users that aren’t already included in the Facebook figure.

Per a Pew Research survey from last year, the number of people who say they use Instagram has been rising, but is still below Facebook overall, with ~50% of US adults saying they use Instagram.

Given that we knew Facebook had 205 million DAUs at a similar time to when 68% of people told Pew they used Facebook, we can make an educated guess that there might be ~150 million Instagram DAUs in the US and Canada. (Here we’re assuming a fair amount about the relative uptakes of both and placing a lot of weight on the Pew survey, but intuitively it feels broadly correct, and is in the ballpark of other estimates.)

Now, assuming there’s a decent amount of overlap — say, 70% — between the two services (some estimates suggest it might be as high as 80%, but gut feeling tells us that younger users don’t want to be seen dead on Facebook, so that feels a little high) and we arrive at our final figure: an incremental ~45 million DAUs.

Put it all together and we’re estimating that Meta has 250 million unique daily active users in the US and Canada.

Let’s sense check that: there are about 265 million adults in the US, and another ~35 million in Canada, so ~300 million in total. Our math suggests that about 80% to 85% of those use a Meta platform every day.