The Attention Economy

Seven companies. One mission. It isn't yours.

The most powerful corporations in history all profit the same way — by keeping you alone, in front of a screen, away from the people you care about. This is how they do it.
Read on ↓

This is the largest attention capture operation in human history.

Their revenue is not tied to your happiness, your health, or your relationships. It is tied to one metric: minutes per day. Every feature, every notification, every algorithm is optimised to maximise that number.
2 hrs 41 min

the average person's daily social media use, globally. Every day.

4 hrs 48 min

daily social media time for teenagers aged 13–19 in the US.

$234 billion

spent by advertisers in 2024 to purchase your attention.

“You get a show you're dying to watch and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep. And we're winning.”

Reed Hastings

CEO of Netflix — said proudly, at a conference, in 2017

The Mechanism

They're not addictive by accident.

Behavioural psychologists, game designers, and former casino engineers were hired specifically to make these products as hard to put down as possible.
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Variable reward loops

Infinite scroll, likes, and notifications are engineered on the same principle as slot machines: unpredictable rewards trigger compulsive checking. The interval matters more than the reward. This was not discovered accidentally. It was designed.
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The outrage engine

Conflict generates 6× more engagement than joy. Platforms discovered early that emotionally aroused users stay longer. Algorithms were tuned accordingly. Rage, fear, and indignation became the product's fuel — not a side effect.
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The facsimile

They gave you a server full of usernames instead of friendship. Reels instead of an experience. Swiping instead of a date. Something close enough to the real thing that most people stopped noticing they'd never found it.
The Inflection Point

2012. The year everything changed.

Before — 2003 to 2011

  • → Americans spent an average of 6 hrs 30 min per week in person with friends
  • → Teen in-person socialising was stable — 44% of high school seniors gathered with friends almost daily
  • → Youth mental health indicators were at their normal 30-year baseline
  • → Smartphone ownership below 50% in the US

After — 2012 to 2024

  • → In-person friend time: 2 hrs 45 min per week — down 57% from a decade earlier
  • → Teen face-to-face socialising: down 45% since smartphones became ubiquitous
  • → Teen depression: up 134%. Anxiety: up 106%. (US college data, 2012–2020)
  • → 80% of Gen Z reported feeling lonely in the past 12 months

The US Surgeon General declared a formal public health advisory on youth social media use in 2023 — an act historically reserved for tobacco and opioids.

The Seven

They all have the same business model.

Each company below generates revenue in direct proportion to how many minutes per day it can hold your attention. Not your satisfaction. Not your wellbeing. Minutes.

Meta

$160B in ad revenue (2024). Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads. 3.27 billion daily active users across its family of apps.

Alphabet

$265B in revenue (2024). Google Search captures intent. YouTube captures everything else. $36B from YouTube ads alone.

ByteDance

$155B in revenue (2024), up 38% year over year. TikTok is the fastest attention-capture product ever built. Teens average 1.5 hrs/day on it alone.

Netflix

$40B in revenue (2024). Its CEO said their biggest competitor is sleep — and said it proudly. Pivoting aggressively into advertising.

Amazon

$56B in advertising revenue (2024) — its fastest-growing segment. Prime Video, Twitch, and the everything store all feed the machine.

X

$2.5B in revenue, 68% from advertising. Designed from its first day to maximise the time you spend arguing with strangers.

Snap

$5B in revenue. Architected specifically around the anxiety of impermanence. Streaks, scores, and stories designed to require daily check-ins.

What they share

None of them charge you money. You pay with time. The advertiser is the customer. You are the product being sold.

The bill arrives. You pay it in isolation.

Nobody consented to this. Most people don't notice it happening in real time. That is by design. The product only works if you believe you're choosing freely.
158 hours

fewer hours per year spent with friends since smartphones became ubiquitous. More than 6 full days, every year.

80%

of Gen Z reported feeling lonely in the past 12 months — compared to 45% of Baby Boomers.

3× more risk

of depression and anxiety for teenagers who spend 3+ hours per day on social media. (US Surgeon General, 2023)

“Your loneliness is a line item in someone else's quarterly earnings report. Your real life doesn't have to be.”

Wombie

Built to reverse this.

The Antidote

Wombie is built on the opposite principle.

We measure success by showing up, not by staying on.

Our north star metric is one thing: events attended per user per month. Not session length. Not daily active users. Not content created. We win when you close the app and go somewhere.

2.1×

Events attended per user per month

The only number we track. Did you actually go somewhere?

No algorithm. No feed. No outrage.

We don't have an algorithmic feed because we don't want to optimise for session length. You see events near you, from people you know, in chronological order. We make no money from keeping you on the app.

This week · Warsaw

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Blue Note Sessions

Fri 7 Mar · Praga Koneser · 8pm

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Tuesday Film Night

Tue 11 Mar · Kinoteka · 7:30pm

No sponsored posts. No promoted content. Ever.

Come back to real life.

Wombie connects you to events worth attending and people worth attending them with. No algorithm. No feed. No outrage. Just what's near you and who you know.
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