The OOB Social Media Attention Cost: An Hour of UK’s Social Time Costs Brands 25p

The OOB Social Attention Cost is Our Own Brand’s annual measure of what UK advertisers pay for an hour of the nation’s social media attention: a market-average measure, the whole market’s social ad spend spread across the nation’s total social hours, not a price any single advertiser pays. The 2026 edition, covering full-year 2025: roughly 25p for every hour Britons spent on social media, about 0.4p a minute, and up from an implied 21p a year earlier, a rise that essentially restates IAB’s own finding: social ad spend grew 21% in a year while the audience and its hours barely moved. The metric combines the UK market’s two most authoritative primary sources, IAB UK’s Digital Adspend 2025 and DataReportal’s Digital 2026: The United Kingdom, into a number neither publishes on its own.

Last updated 3 September 2026 · Current editions: DataReportal Digital 2026 (UK) · IAB UK Digital Adspend 2025 · Ofcom Online Nation 2025.

Why the price is inflating

At 79.7% penetration, the UK social audience is saturated: DataReportal shows platform growth now comes from platforms taking share from each other rather than from new users. Total UK online time (all online activity, not social alone) grew about 10 minutes a day in a year (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025). UK advertisers spent about a fifth more in 2025 to reach the same pool of hours. Whether that reflects higher auction prices or more ads per hour, the effect for brands is the same: more money chasing static attention. IAB UK forecasts double-digit digital growth through 2027.

UK social attention cost about 25p per hour in 2025, and the money chasing it rose about 21% in a year against a static pool of hours. Our Own Brand’s view: a bigger budget is chasing the same finite pool of hours, and whether that shows up as higher prices or heavier ad loads, the squeeze on attention is the same.

“Attention is only cheap if someone actually gives it to you,” says Sarah Fulford-Williams, co-founder of Our Own Brand. “The way out of attention inflation is work distinctive enough that the platforms distribute it for free. Brave creative is how you beat the inflation, not pay it.”

The numbers

How we calculated it

The method is deliberately simple and fully reproducible from public primary sources:

• Spend: UK social media advertising spend was £11.5 billion in 2025, up 21% year on year and 28% of the £40.5bn UK digital ad market (IAB UK / Oliver Wyman, Digital Adspend 2025).
• Attention: the UK had 55.5 million social media user identities (79.7% of the population), each averaging a self-reported 16 hours 13 minutes per week on social platforms (GWI survey data covering internet users aged 16 to 64; DataReportal, Digital 2026: The United Kingdom, data October 2025). That multiplies to ≈ 46.8 billion hours of UK social attention a year.
• Division: £11.5bn ÷ 46.8bn hours ≈ 24.5p per hour. Per user identity: £11.5bn ÷ 55.5m ≈ £207 a year, or £3.98 a week (identities can exceed real people, so the per-person figure is higher).

Honest limitations: “User identities” from platform ad tools can exceed real people through multi-accounting, and that cuts both ways: fewer real people raises the per-person spend figure, and fewer real hours shrinks the pool, nudging the per-hour price up. The identity count is all-ages while the time average is survey data for 16 to 64 year olds, so the multiplication assumes working-age usage intensity holds across all ages: a known approximation. “Attention” here is shorthand for time spent on social platforms; it is not eyes-on attention as measured by attention vendors, and since not all time on an app is active attention, the true price per attentive hour is higher. Spend (IAB’s social line) and time (DataReportal’s social measure) are also drawn on differing platform definitions; YouTube is the clearest case, with much of its ad spend counted by IAB as video rather than social. All of which is why we treat 25p as an order-of-magnitude floor rather than a precise unit price: carried through the survey-based inputs’ uncertainty, the honest range is the low-to-mid 20s of pence. The spend figure is IAB UK’s methodology and differs from DataReportal’s own ad-spend cut ($12.8bn ≈ £9.8bn); we use IAB throughout as the UK industry standard and do not blend the two. Reassuringly, that independent lineage lands in the same range: DataReportal’s spend estimate against the same hour pool implies about 21p, a different source arriving at the same order of magnitude. None of this changes the order of magnitude or the direction of the trend.

Where this sits: the method has a lineage we’re glad to stand on. Kevin Kelly priced an hour of blended US media attention at about $2.50 back in 2011, dividing industry revenue by national attention-hours. The OOB Social Attention Cost is, as far as we can find, the first to isolate UK social media specifically, price it from current ad spend against current usage hours, and commit to tracking it annually.

Tracking the Attention Cost over time

This 2026 edition is the baseline year of the OOB Social Attention Cost. We looked hard at publishing a 2023–2025 back-series and chose not to, because it cannot be built honestly. IAB UK published no standalone social ad-spend figure before its 2025 report, and DataReportal changed how it measures time on social between editions. Any multi-year UK attention-cost series you see elsewhere therefore rests on estimated inputs.

One prior-year figure can be derived honestly, and we label it for what it is. IAB’s 2025 report publishes both the spend level (£11.5bn) and its growth (+21%), which implies a 2024 base of about £9.5bn. DataReportal’s Digital 2025 edition measured 54.8m UK identities on the same weekly-hours method, an attention pool of about 46.2bn hours. Together those put the implied 2024 cost at about 21p an hour (20.6p), against 24.5p in 2025: a rise of roughly a fifth. We publish 21p as an implied figure rather than a measured one, because IAB never itself published a standalone 2024 social line. From here, each annual edition measures the change on a consistent, stated method, and future editions will extend to platform-level, sector and US cuts.

The wider dataset

This analysis is one output of our maintained UK social media statistics hub: headline figures, the full platform league table and demographics, all from primary sources. The companion analysis the Attention Value Gap values this same attention pool at wage rates. Per-platform deep dives: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and influencer marketing.

Notes for editors

• The story in one line: UK social ad spend grew 21% in 2025 while the audience barely moved; Our Own Brand’s analysis prices an hour of British social media attention at about 25p, up from an implied 21p a year earlier.
• Two common misreadings to avoid: (1) 25p is what advertisers pay platforms to reach the UK’s social attention, not money users receive: users are paid nothing. (2) Two numbers travel with this release and they are a deliberate contrast, not two versions of one figure: 25p is the cost to advertisers of an hour of social time; £12.21 is that hour’s notional worth at the wage floor.
• Free to use: all figures, the headline chart (SVG) and the dataset (CSV) are CC-BY 4.0 with attribution to “Our Own Brand analysis of IAB UK and DataReportal data, 2026” and a link to this page.
• Spokesperson: Sarah Fulford-Williams, co-founder of Our Own Brand, available for comment and interview. Sarah spoke at The Drum in 2025 on brand bravery on social.
• Custom cuts: we can run the numbers by platform, sector or demographic for your piece on request via our contact page.
• Methodology: full method, inputs and limitations on this page and in the one-page methodology note. This is the baseline edition of an annual benchmark; a new edition publishes when each IAB and DataReportal report lands.
• About Our Own Brand: a social-first creative marketing agency in London, working with brands brave enough to earn their distribution rather than rent it.

Using this data

The analysis is published under CC-BY 4.0: journalists, researchers and marketers are free to reuse the figures with attribution to “Our Own Brand analysis of IAB UK and DataReportal data, 2026”, including a live link to this page wherever the medium permits. Download the headline chart (SVG) and the full dataset (CSV), both free to reproduce with the same attribution. This licence covers Our Own Brand’s derived analysis only; the underlying IAB UK and DataReportal data remain subject to their own terms. The OOB Social Attention Cost is an annual benchmark: we publish a new edition when each IAB and DataReportal report lands. Sarah Fulford-Williams, co-founder, is available for comment. If you’re writing about UK attention economics and want a custom cut by platform, sector or demographic, get in touch; we’re happy to run the numbers. Later this year we’re releasing the OOB Bravery Index, our original scoring of the UK’s most recognisable brands on social. Watch OOB Labs.