The Hidden Economic Cost of Clickbait and How It Affects Global Prosperity

How much do you value your own life? I need you to think about it carefully because only then can we answer the question in the title of this video? Now, to maybe help you out a bit here, I can actually tell you exactly how much I value your life as you sit here watching this video. To me, it's worth about $50,000. So yeah, maybe this is a good time to bring up that there are some people who argue that a lot of modern economists have become almost sociopathic in their pursuit of rigid mathematical and transactional precision, sucking the humanity out of the humanities. It sounds almost silly, but this is genuinely one of the biggest

debates in economics at the moment. After all, economics is a study of how people interact with things of value, and the most logical measurement for value is a medium of exchange like money. For a lot of economies, it's assumed that as long as numbers like unemployment, inflation, productivity, and incomes go in the right direction, that automatically the human experience is also improving. But more and more, people are seeing that these simple assumptions don't necessarily hold in reality. This has resulted in terms of phrase that have become very popular, like a vibe session, where headline economic figures look good, but most people still feel like they are going backwards. So, with that in mind, that

$50,000 figure wasn't me trying to be mean. It was based on the most accurate hard data I have about you right now. Thanks largely to a video I made bullying our poor old neighbors over in New Zealand last month. This channel got around 5 million views in total, which roughly worked out to be a little over half a million hours of watch time. 567,000 hours of watch time works out to be about 62 years or effectively the total waking hours of a nice long human life. And at this point, if you've already left a comment about me saying 67, we're discounting the value of your life even further. For anybody else, in return for the equivalent of a combined human lifetime, we made about $50,000 between

AdSense and video sponsors with a share of that going to our team at DE and a share going to YouTube as part of the partner program. Now, hopefully most of you watching don't consider our videos clickbait. But also hopefully most of you think a human lifetime should have much more value, even if it's hard to explain exactly why. One human lifetime was spent watching these videos and $50,000 was paid by advertisers to feature on those videos. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, as always, this simple little thought experiment can expose a lot about the nature of modern economics. And to find out why, we need to answer three simple questions. So, why is this straightforward assumption about the

value of a human life wrong? In turn, what does that reveal about the true value of properly wasted time? And finally, what do these silly little thought experiments tell us about how to properly manage economic value? But before we answer that, I need to convert some more human lifetimes into revenue with this message from our sponsor. Your attention is not the only way large companies monetize your life. They also track your every move, selling your data to all sorts of corners of the internet. I have personally had social security accounts opened in my name. That's why I use private internet access.

Whenever you browse online on an unprotected device, it transmits a large amount of information into the open, which can be seen by various entities before it reaches the intended website. Private Internet Access is a VPN that hides your IP address, encrypts your internet connection, and keeps your data private and secure at all times. One of my concerns with most VPNs is trust. What if they are just taking my information and telling me they are protecting me? PIA eliminates that insecurity as they are one of the few VPNs that legally do not track any of your internet activity. and this has been proven in court and by a third

party audit. We use their services for our entire team as they offer unlimited devices on a single account. Their service also allows you to watch content from all over the world that would not be available without a VPN which helps us extend and deepen our research as well as watch shows that are normally unavailable in our region. The Economics Explain team arranged an exclusive deal for you. Go to PVPN/economics expplain to receive 83% plus extra months for free and you can protect your data for as little as $2 a month. Okay, so if the value of a human life isn't actually $50,000, why is that wrong? And is there a better solution if we're dedicated to answering this rather grim question? Well, the reason why most

economists would hopefully argue that this is wrong is because it assumes that all of this time spent watching these videos was completely wasted by the viewer. In reality, and hopefully, all of you watching are getting some utility value out of these videos. Maybe they might teach you something about economics that you find interesting. Maybe they might make you a better informed voter. Or maybe the sweet sound of my bogan draw helps you relax after a long hard day of work. To each their own. This means that only a tiny share of the value enjoyed by these thousands of spent hours is being captured and transacted by advertisers. Now what that share is becomes as much about philosophy as it does rigid economic

exchange of value. And this opens up some interesting ideas. According to GDP, the only thing that would be measured from you spending time watching this video is the advertising revenue because that's the only transaction that actually took place in the market. So now consider two different theoretical economies. Both have a single studio making movies. But in the first economy, those movies are streamed for free to households, maybe with some commercial breaks. But in the second economy, the movies are only shown on paid subscription services or in actual paid movie theaters. In this very oversimplified scenario, life would probably be better for most people in the first theoretical economy, where

entertainment was free to access, but GDP would be significantly higher in the second, where everything was behind some kind of pay wall, forcing market transactions. A more tangible application of the same kind of idea would be things like smartphones replacing dozens of individual pieces of technology from decades prior. Theoretically, GDP would look better if companies produced and sold a digital camera, a music player, cellular phone, navigation system, pager, and pedometer separately instead of in one single device. But clear tangible value is higher when we can enjoy all of these functions using our smartphones, even if perhaps their convenience sometimes goes too far. But again, we'll get to that.

This logical failing of such an important economic metric has actually inspired some economists to propose what they call GDPB, a measure of gross domestic product, which in addition to measuring the value of goods and services produced and sold into the market, also accounts for the value of free goods as well. Now again, actual hard data on these simultaneously free but valuable services are significantly harder to collect because without transaction data, how much they are actually worth is open to a lot more interpretation. What the economists did was effectively question what people would need to receive in order to give up services like Facebook, YouTube or the inbuilt features in their smartphones. And what they generally

found was that largely there was a huge amount of value being created by these services that wasn't being captured by headline macroeconomic figures. Now this is really important stuff because it means if the supply of these free services falls, it can have a large impact on our experienced well-being while being completely invisible from most economic data. We have arguably seen this play out in most economies over the last decade. Back 10 years ago, there were a lot of digital services in particular that were either free or heavily subsidized by a combination of investor dollars and advertising. The value to users was higher than the prices they were charging, which was

used as a way to grow market share. But in the meantime, we all got to enjoy some cheap services. Today, that has changed. The price of things like Uber rides or food delivery has risen to introduce a profit margin. And even for the services that have remained free to use, overwhelmingly people have noticed a trend towards more ads, more upsells, and more nuisance to use. And look, of course, big disclaimer time. We, as a YouTube channel, directly benefit from this trend. Back when this channel first really started 7 years ago, we roughly made about half as much for every,000 views as we do today. Largely, that is because the platform shows more ads at more regular intervals. Partially, it's

because it's cut down on ad blockers, and partially it's because more of you are using YouTube Premium to pay away this annoyance. Had we been making this video back then, we would have opened with a, let's call it a joke about the value of human lifetime being worth around $30,000 by using the same basic calculations. So, ironically, by valuing your time less, recent economic trends have made your time more valuable. But then it becomes a question of valuable for who? Whom? Whomst? editor. Just put whatever the smart one is. And this is where we get to a discussion of how much something like clickbait has truly cost the global economy. Don't worry, I wasn't going to clickbait you in a video

about clickbait. Now, the simple solution would be to take studies estimating how much time people spend on their devices outside of work. Find the portion of that time wasted on misleading content and multiply it by the national average productivity for those workers. That is the calculation of how much economic value they create for every hour of work. Now, we actually have all of those numbers from reliable enough sources to make a pretty good estimate. Global GDP was about 110 trillion US in 2024 and will most likely be slightly higher in 2025. That value was created by a collective global labor force of roughly 3.7 billion people who on average spent 1,800 hours a year doing work to produce value for the

market. At the same time, a study of the same year found that on average, people from most measured countries, which did exclude places like North Korea and active war zones, were using their phones for about 5 hours a day on average. This was roughly backed up by similar studies that found that people in the USA in particular were using their phones on average for 5 hours and 16 minutes every day. And it also found that an average of three of those hours were spent on a phone during work hours on work days. But before you judge, make sure to ask yourself, are you supposed to be working right now? Don't worry, I won't tell as long as you're subscribed.

Now, if we assume that these numbers are roughly accurate and the average person works 4 days a week to account for the part-time workers, that means 12 hours out of an average of 35 weekly hours of phone time are done in lie of work. Now, either way you shake it, that is probably too much time spent staring at a screen, especially when this number doesn't even include TVs, computers, smart fridges, and everything else that people have put screens onto. But we aren't here to judge. We're here to extrapolate. 12 hours a week is 624 hours a year. And assuming the average person takes 2 weeks off a year, let's call it a nice round 600 hours of onthe-clock phone time. Now, 600 hours multiplied by the average hourly productivity of $18 multiplied by $3.7

billion workers around the world means that this lost time is worth about $40 trillion or more than a third of all current GDP. That is already a huge number, bigly even. But when making calculations like this, it's good to look for some basic sanity checks. And since 12 hours is slightly more than a third of the average work week, the basic arithmetic does work out. However, some further refinements of our assumptions could show that this might actually be an underestimate. Hourly productivity in most advanced economies is closer to $70 an hour. Particular standouts like the USA are almost $100 an hour in generated market value. Now, these economies also generally have a

higher share of white collar work where people are sitting in front of a screen anyway. So, it's not unreasonable to assume that a higher share of their time is spent looking at some cheeky brain rot. So, does that mean we could double global output if only we put down our phones and didn't waste a single second of company time? Well, no, of course not. For starters, this is making the same flawed assumption of the value of human life. relaxing, even if it is on the job, has value to the people doing it, even if that value can't be directly captured by the market. On top of this, it's not like people before smartphones didn't waste time in the office either. And in most roles where people are doing

this, there is often only so much work that needs to be done. In this instance, the real waste of human time probably comes more from keeping people there for a set 40 hours a week, but we've already made an entire video about that. So again, we need to look specifically at what amount of time is just spent reading or watching things that are completely a waste of time and only extract value from all participants, as in clickbait. Now, fortunately, a lot of smart people also spend a lot of time tracking this as well. Not necessarily because they want you to spend your time better, but rather because they want marketers to spend their budgets better. A now relatively infamous report by the Association of National Advertisers

found that as much as 23% of programming ad spend was effectively squandered on what they politely called lowquality websites. This report also looked at other pitfalls like bot traffic and excessively high ad loads. And additionally, people generally spend less time on a site or watching a video once they realize it's just clickbait. But even still, it's fairly safe to assume that at least 5% of this time was just wasted on zero value content. That would mean around $2 trillion of productive time is wasted every year on clickbait. Throwing in the hundred billion from the advertisers, and this is taking more from global GDP than Australia is contributing. Beyond providing no value in exchange for the

time and money it sucks up, some of this content could actually be actively causing harm. Oxford's word of the year for 2025 was rage bait, which is not a word, and that by itself makes me angry, but it also does show how pervasive the push to get something negative in front of our faces has become. Now, of course, this was just a thought experiment to tackle some often forgotten fundamentals of economics. At the end of the day, it's supposed to be a study of how people interact with things of value. And not to get too sappy here, but time really is the ultimate scarce resource. Now, this has real implications beyond just motivational go out there and make the best of your day type talk. Paying

more attention to what people value rather than things that are just valuable can help us get a much better understanding of the true prosperity our economic systems deliver. Just making numbers go up by harvesting more hours or converting them into transactable assets more efficiently isn't necessarily the economic success that a lot of economic metrics would have us believe. The opposite side of that same idea is that economists arguably could do a better job of accounting for things that heighten the human experience but aren't necessarily transactable or easily measurable. Now this doesn't need to be as extreme as something like Bhutan that's assued traditional GDP and introduced a gross national happiness

metric in its place. But there are still ways to track these indicators and use them to provide muchneeded context on how well people are actually living. Now, we've actually made an entire video on one particular economy that got this so badly wrong, it undermined regular economic performance as well. You should be able to click to that on your screen now. Thanks for watching, mate. Bye.