Check our math.
Tell us where
we are wrong.
Every figure on every wall is here, with the arithmetic, the source, and the places we had to estimate. A number without a source is a rumor.
How we got to ninety cents.
- 1. Revenue
- $92.67 billion. Meta's reported revenue from the United States and Canada across the four quarters from Q2 2025 through Q1 2026, taken from the revenue-by-user-geography table in the company's own earnings presentation.
- 2. People
- About 270 million. Estimated North American users. This is our assumption. Meta no longer publishes regional user counts, so we say “estimate” on every asset that carries this number.
- 3. Revenue per person
- About $343 per year. $92.67B divided by 270 million.
- 4. Hours per person
- About 383 hours per year across Meta's platforms. Also an estimate, derived from published time-spent reporting.
- 5. The rate
- About $0.90 per hour. $343 divided by 383. This is the number that goes on the wall at the size of a door.
From 43 minutes to 4.05 years.
- In-school use
- 43 minutes, median. Not eight hours. We use the median in-school figure and nothing larger, because the larger numbers measure something else.
- Per student, per year
- 43 minutes x 180 school days = 129 hours.
- Revenue denied, per student
- 129 hours x $0.90 = $116.10.
- Across 275 students
- 129 x 275 = 35,475 hours, which is 4.05 years of continuous human life, and $31,927.50.
- Which number leads
- The years. Always. The dollars are how they measure you. The hours are how we measure ourselves, and the two totals never get merged into one line.
The honest weak points.
A campaign built on evidence has to publish its own soft spots. If somebody attacks one of these, they are right to, and the answer is to fix the number rather than defend it.
Estimated, not reported
- The 270 million user count. Meta stopped publishing it.
- The 383 hours per user per year. Derived, not disclosed.
- Therefore the $0.90 rate is an order-of-magnitude figure, not an invoice.
What we do not claim
- We do not claim phones cause depression. That research is correlational and we build nothing on it.
- We do not claim our four weeks will match a national campaign's results. We are copying a mechanism, not a budget.
- We do not claim any individual student owes anybody anything.
Go read them yourself.
Rate: Meta US & Canada revenue, Q2 2025 through Q1 2026, totalling $92.67B (Meta Q1 2026 earnings presentation, revenue by user geography), divided across an estimated 270 million North American users and roughly 383 hours per user per year. The user count is our assumption. Meta stopped publishing regional user counts, so this number is an estimate and we say so every time we print it.
Time: 97 percent of students use a phone during the school day and the median in-school use is 43 minutes (Common Sense Media, “Constant Companion,” 2023, n=203, ages 11–17).
Bring it to the crew. We will reprint the wall.
Show us where the number is wrong and we will fix it in public, with the correction printed at the same size as the mistake. That is the standard we are asking of the other side, so it is the standard we hold ourselves to first.