24th September 2026
How much of the internet would exist if ordinary people stopped creating things for it?.
It is an interesting question because millions of people spend hours every week posting photographs, writing comments, sharing news stories, making videos, recommending products, reviewing restaurants, discussing football, arguing about politics or simply telling friends what they have been doing.
Most people would not describe themselves as content creators.
But in a sense, that is exactly what they are.
And much of what they create sits inside businesses whose main source of income is advertising.
We create the material that keeps people coming back
Take Facebook as an obvious example.
Someone posts a photograph of their holiday. Another person comments on it. Someone else shares a local news story. A group discusses a community problem. Another person posts a video of something amusing.
None of those people necessarily set out to make money for Facebook.
But collectively they are producing the material that makes the platform interesting enough for other people to keep visiting.
That creates something extremely valuable to the platform: people's attention.
Advertisers are prepared to pay to put their messages in front of those people.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, reported advertising revenue of $196.2 billion in 2025. Advertising accounted for almost all of its total revenue. At the end of 2025, Meta said its family of apps had 3.58 billion daily active people.
That does not mean Facebook is secretly employing billions of unpaid workers.
The relationship is quite different from employment.
Users receive a service in return for their participation. We get communication, entertainment, information, communities and the ability to publish to an audience without paying for a printing press, television station or newspaper.
But there is another way of looking at the bargain.
We supply much of the material and attention that makes the service commercially valuable.
The same principle goes much further
Google operates differently, but the basic economics are also built around attention and information.
Google's advertising business generated $264.6 billion in 2024, including Search, YouTube advertising and its advertising network. Alphabet says more than 75% of its total revenue came from online advertising that year.
YouTube is an even clearer example of the changing relationship between users and advertisers.
Some people deliberately make videos as a business and earn money from them.
Millions of others simply upload videos because they want to share something.
The platform can then place advertising around that enormous collection of material and use the resulting audience to generate revenue.
There is nothing particularly new about the idea. Newspapers have always relied on readers to create an audience which advertisers want to reach. Television companies build audiences around programmes and sell advertising around them.
The difference is the scale and the amount of participation.
We are increasingly part of the advertising system
The distinction between a consumer and a content creator has also become blurred.
A person who posts a review of a product may influence somebody else to buy it.
Someone who makes a popular video can generate millions of views.
A person sharing a photograph of a restaurant may send customers through its doors.
Someone recommending a product can effectively become part of its marketing.
The UK Government has researched the growing social-media creator economy and found that people use several different ways of making money, including platform advertising, subscriptions, brand payments, affiliate links and gifts.
At the professional end, this has become a serious industry.
But there is a huge grey area between someone who earns a living making videos and someone who simply posts something that happens to attract thousands of views.
And then there is our attention
Perhaps the most valuable thing we give the platforms is not actually the content.
It is our time.
If you spend an hour scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, that hour has commercial value because advertisements can be shown to you during it.
The more interesting the content, the longer people may stay.
The longer people stay, the more opportunities there are to show advertising.
This helps explain why the apparently trivial photograph, comment, joke or argument can become part of a very large commercial machine.
It also explains why platforms are so interested in what keeps people engaged.
Should we be more aware of this?
Probably.
Not because people should stop using social media. These services provide real benefits and have become an important part of modern communication.
But it is worth understanding the bargain.
When a service is free, we are not necessarily the customer in the traditional sense.
Sometimes we are the audience being sold to advertisers.
Sometimes our attention is the product.
And increasingly, the things we create help provide the environment in which that advertising takes place.
There is another important qualification. People who deliberately create content for commercial purposes can and do get paid. The creator economy has created opportunities that simply did not exist in the same form 20 years ago.
But the vast majority of people posting photographs, comments and videos are not being paid for each piece of content they create.
They are contributing to platforms that can be worth billions of pounds or dollars.
That does not necessarily make the arrangement unfair. We are getting something in return.
But perhaps the next time we spend an hour scrolling through social media, it is worth remembering that we are not simply passing the time.
We are also supplying something that has become one of the world's most valuable commodities: attention.