# The OOB Social Media Attention Cost: About 25p an Hour of UK Social Time (and Rising)

> 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: about 25p in 2025.

Source: https://ourownbrand.co/oob-social-media-attention-cost  
Published: 2026-09-23  
Updated: 2026-09-23  
Author: Sarah Fulford-Williams

## Key takeaways

- The OOB Social Attention Cost 2026: UK brands paid ≈25p for every hour Britons spent on social media in 2025, about 0.4p per minute
- That is ≈£207 of ad spend per UK social media identity per year (£3.98/week)
- The price is inflating: about 25p in 2025 vs an implied 21p in 2024, as spend grew 21% into a near-flat pool
- Method: IAB UK £11.5bn social ad spend ÷ 46.8bn UK attention-hours (DataReportal). CC-BY, free to cite

Every year we run one calculation. Take everything UK advertisers spent on social media, then divide it by every hour Britain spent scrolling. For 2025, that’s **about 25p an hour**.

That’s the **OOB Social Attention Cost**. A market average, not a rate card. No single advertiser pays 25p, and no user ever sees a penny of it. It’s the price of the nation’s attention, boiled down to one number you can actually feel.

It’s up from an implied 21p the year before. The reason is blunt: social ad spend grew **21% in a year** while the audience, and the hours it gives, barely moved. We built it from the two sources that carry the most weight here, [IAB UK’s Digital Adspend 2025](https://www.iabuk.com/news-article/digital-adspend-2025-uks-digital-ad-market-reaches-ps405bn) and [DataReportal’s Digital 2026](https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-united-kingdom). Neither publishes the figure on its own.

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

![The OOB Social Attention Cost 2026: UK brands paid about 25p per hour of social media attention in 2025 — £11.5bn social ad spend divided by 46.8bn UK attention-hours — with social ad spend up 21% while the audience stayed flat.](https://jhcajza95gocyyrb.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/media/oob-social-attention-cost-2026-card.jpg)

## Why the price is increasing

The UK is basically full. At 79.7% penetration there aren’t many new people left to reach, and DataReportal shows the platforms now grow by taking time off each other, not by signing up newcomers. Total time online crept up about ten minutes a day last year ([Ofcom, Online Nation 2025](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/media-use-and-attitudes/online-habits/from-apps-to-ai-search-how-the-uk-goes-online-in-2025)). Social barely shifted.

So when advertisers spend a fifth more to reach the same pile of hours, something gives. Maybe it’s higher auction prices. Maybe it’s more ads jammed into every hour. For whoever’s paying the bill it doesn’t matter which: it’s the same money buying less attention.

**Our view?** This only goes one way. Attention is the one thing in this market you can’t manufacture. You can print more budget; you can’t print more hours in the day. Everyone piling in is bidding for a slice of the same fixed thing, and the bids keep climbing.

**Spend grew 21%. The audience barely moved.**

Full-year 2025 growth in UK social ad spend vs UK social audience growth (Jan–Oct 2025, annualised). On 2025 inputs spend growth is running about 12 times audience growth; the robust statement is the gap itself.

| The inflation mechanism | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Social ad spend growth | 21% |
| Audience growth (annualised) | 1.7% |

Source: IAB UK Digital Adspend 2025 (spend, full year); DataReportal Digital 2025 → Digital 2026 UK editions (identities +1.3% Jan→Oct 2025, ≈1.7% annualised)

“Attention’s only cheap if someone actually gives it to you,” says **Sarah Fulford-Williams, co-founder of Our Own Brand**. “You can’t buy your way out of this one. The brands that win are just making things people want to watch, and then the platform does the distribution for free. Everyone else is paying more to shout louder.”

So what do you actually do about it? You don’t outspend it. You can’t. Everyone’s bidding into the same pot of hours, so a bigger budget just pays the going rate. The only real move is to be worth watching: make something good enough that the algorithm carries it for nothing. Boring brands rent their reach, and the rent goes up every year. The good ones don’t pay it.

## The numbers

**The OOB Social Attention Cost: 2026 edition (full-year 2025 data)**

| Metric | Figure |
| --- | --- |
| Cost of one hour of UK social media attention | ≈ 25p (24.5p) |
| Implied cost per hour, 2024 (derived) | ≈ 21p (20.6p) |
| Cost per minute of UK social attention | ≈ 0.4p |
| Ad spend per UK social media identity, per year | ≈ £207 |
| Ad spend per UK social media identity, per week | ≈ £3.98 |
| Total UK social attention pool (hours per year) | ≈ 46.8 billion |
| Annual inflation of the attention price | ≈ a fifth: 25p vs an implied 21p in 2024 |

## 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](https://www.iabuk.com/news-article/digital-adspend-2025-uks-digital-ad-market-reaches-ps405bn)).
- **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](https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-united-kingdom), data October 2025). That multiplies to ≈ 46.8 billion hours of UK social attention a year.
- **Division:** £11.5bn divided by 46.8bn hours is **about 24.5p an hour**. Per identity, £11.5bn across 55.5m works out at roughly £207 a year, or £3.98 a week (identities can outnumber real people, so the true per-person figure is higher).

**Honest limitations:** “User identities” from ad tools can outnumber real people, one person with three accounts. That cuts both ways. Fewer real people pushes the per-person figure up; fewer real hours shrink the pool, which nudges the per-hour price up too. 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. That is 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) also use different platform definitions; YouTube is the clearest case, with much of its ad spend counted by IAB as video rather than social. That’s why we treat 25p as an order-of-magnitude floor rather than a precise unit price: given the uncertainty in the survey-based inputs, the honest range is the low-to-mid 20s of pence. The spend figure is based on IAB UK’s methodology and differs from DataReportal’s own ad-spend cut ($12.8bn, about £9.8bn); we use IAB throughout as the UK industry standard and don’t blend the two. And the two lineages agree: DataReportal’s spend estimate against the same hour pool implies about 21p. A different source, the same ballpark. None of this changes the order of magnitude or the trend direction.

**We ran these numbers**

OOB makes social-first creative that earns its own reach, because buying attention gets more expensive every day.

[See how we think about attention](https://ourownbrand.co/services/social)

**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](https://kk.org/thetechnium/your-attention/), dividing industry revenue by national attention-hours. As far as we can tell, ours is the first to put a market-level price on the UK’s social attention. We price it off current spend and current usage, and we’ve committed to running it every year.

## 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 we can’t build it 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 as such. IAB’s 2025 report publishes both the spend level (£11.5bn) and its growth (+21%), which implies a 2024 base of about £9.5bn. For the 2024 pool we take DataReportal’s Digital 2025 identity count (54.8m) and hold weekly hours at the 2025 figure, because the two editions don’t measure time on a comparable basis. That gives about 46.2bn hours and an **implied 2024 cost of about 21p an hour** (20.6p), against 24.5p in 2025. Worth stating plainly: because we hold time-per-user constant, the year-on-year rise is driven by spend (up 21%) against a near-flat identity count, not by any measured change in hours. We publish 21p as an implied figure, not a measured one, because IAB never published a standalone 2024 social line. From here each annual edition measures change using 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](https://ourownbrand.co/social-media-statistics-uk) hub: headline figures, the full platform league table and demographics, all from primary sources. The companion analysis, [the Attention Value Gap](https://ourownbrand.co/attention-value-gap), values this same attention pool at wage rates. Per-platform deep dives: [Instagram](https://ourownbrand.co/instagram-statistics-uk-global-insights-for-marketers), [TikTok](https://ourownbrand.co/tiktok-statistics-global-uk-insights-for-marketers), [YouTube](https://ourownbrand.co/youtube-statistics), [Facebook](https://ourownbrand.co/facebook-statistics-uk-global-insights-for-marketers) and [influencer marketing](https://ourownbrand.co/influencer-marketing-statistics-uk-trends-spend-compliance).

## Using and citing this analysis

This is derived analysis, not a new survey. We combined two public primary sources, IAB UK’s ad spend and DataReportal’s usage data, into a figure neither publishes on its own. It’s free to reuse under [CC-BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), with attribution to **“Our Own Brand analysis of IAB UK and DataReportal data, 2026”** and a live link to this page. Download the headline chart ([SVG](https://ourownbrand.co/data/oob-social-attention-cost-2026.svg) or [JPG](https://ourownbrand.co/data/oob-social-attention-cost-2026.jpg)) and the [full dataset (CSV)](https://ourownbrand.co/data/oob-social-attention-cost-2026.csv). The licence covers our derived analysis only; the underlying IAB UK and DataReportal data remain subject to their own terms. This is the baseline edition of an annual benchmark, updated as each IAB and DataReportal report lands.

Two things worth getting right if you quote it: (1) 25p is what advertisers pay to reach the UK’s social attention, not money users receive, and users get nothing; (2) 25p (the cost to advertisers of an hour of social time) and £12.21 (that hour’s notional worth at the wage floor) are a deliberate contrast, not two versions of one figure. The full method and its limitations are set out above and in the [one-page methodology note](https://ourownbrand.co/data/oob-social-attention-cost-methodology.html). Want the numbers cut by platform, sector or demographic, or a walkthrough of how the metric is built? [Get in touch](https://ourownbrand.co/contact).

## The OOB Social Attention Cost: FAQs

### Is the OOB Social Attention Cost the same as a CPM?

No. A CPM is what one advertiser pays a platform for a thousand impressions served at auction: the price of reaching people. The OOB Social Attention Cost divides the entire UK market’s social ad spend by the nation’s total social media hours, pricing time rather than impressions. It converts the whole market into one human-legible unit: an hour of a person’s life. The two move together: when the market’s spend rises 21% into a near-flat pool of hours, that is the same pressure a media buyer feels as climbing CPMs and heavier ad loads. Read the Attention Cost as the macro backdrop your CPMs sit inside: the market-wide price of the time your impressions are competing for.

### What is the OOB Social Attention Cost?

The OOB Social Attention Cost is Our Own Brand’s annual measure of what UK advertisers pay per hour of the nation’s social media attention. For 2025 it is roughly **25p per hour** (24.5p precisely; an order-of-magnitude floor, not a transaction price): £11.5 billion of UK social media ad spend (IAB UK) divided by ≈46.8 billion hours of UK social media attention (derived from DataReportal’s 55.5m UK user identities × 16h13m weekly usage). That equals about £207 per user identity per year, on Our Own Brand’s analysis.

### Why is the price of attention rising?

UK social ad spend grew **21% in 2025** while the audience (79.7% penetration) and its time barely moved. More money against the same near-flat pool of hours means each hour absorbs more spend, whether through higher auction prices or more ads per hour.

### What did an hour of UK social media attention cost in 2024?

About **21p, on an implied basis**. IAB UK’s 2025 report publishes both the £11.5bn spend level and its +21% growth, implying a 2024 base of about £9.5bn; for the attention pool we hold weekly hours at the 2025 figure (the two editions don’t measure time on a comparable basis), giving about 46.2bn hours. So the year-on-year move reflects spend and the identity count, not measured hours. The figure is labelled implied rather than measured because IAB never published a standalone 2024 social spend line.

### Can I cite these figures?

Yes. The analysis is CC-BY 4.0. Attribute it as **“Our Own Brand analysis of IAB UK and DataReportal data, 2026”** with a live link to this page wherever the medium permits. For custom cuts of the data, contact us.

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Our Own Brand (OOB) is a social-first creative agency in London, founded in 2018: social, creative, influencer, brand and paid social for 200+ brands. Two UK Social Media Awards 2026 wins. Brief us: https://ourownbrand.co/contact · hello@ourownbrand.co · More for agents: https://ourownbrand.co/agents.md