Time
Tax.

§ 1The single number.

The personal meter runs at £0.00001 per active second. The global meter runs at roughly £24,300 per second. Both numbers are reductive; both are defensible. This page is how we got there, and where we have rounded toward conservatism rather than drama.

§ 2Personal rate.

The UK figure for advertising revenue per user, averaged across the major ad-funded platforms — Meta, Google, TikTok, X, YouTube, broadcast VOD — sits at time of writing between £36 and £52 per active user per year. We take £40 as a working midpoint. Spread that across the roughly 1,200 hours an average UK adult spends on ad-funded digital platforms in a year, and the implied rate is about £0.033 per active hour, or roughly £0.00001 per active second.

It is a proxy. The meter on this page does not run an ad; it runs a count. The argument is that the time you are giving us by reading is the same kind of time you would otherwise be giving to a platform that does run ads — and that on that platform, that time would be priced. We price it here only to make the priced thing visible.

§ 3Global rate.

There are roughly 5.4 billion people online. Not all are online at once. A reasonable steady-state estimate of concurrent active users is 40–50% of the addressable base. Multiplied through the personal rate, that yields a global per-second figure between £20,000 and £28,000 of extracted attention. Our headline of £24,300 sits inside that range and corresponds to a global digital advertising market in the region of £750 billion per year — consistent with independent estimates from GroupM, Magna, and the IAB.

§ 4What is included.

We include advertising revenue collected against attention that the user did not affirmatively price. That is: pre-roll, mid-roll, interstitial, banner, sponsored placement, native promotion, retention loop, and dark pattern that resolves to an advertised outcome. We include attention captured by features whose purpose is to keep the user on platform past the point at which they would otherwise have left.

§ 5What is excluded.

We exclude subscription revenue. A subscription is a priced transaction; whatever its merits, it is not unpaid attention. We exclude commerce conducted on platforms where the user came specifically to transact. We exclude time spent on tools whose value to the user is direct — communication with a known person, navigation, search whose result is the intended outcome — even if the tool also serves ads. The frame is not all platform time is bad but a specific subset of platform time has been monetised without consent. The calculator is conservative on this. We suspect the true rate is materially higher.

§ 6Caveats, in plain English.

The rate is a national average. Your personal rate, depending on what you use and how much of your attention is captured by paid surfaces, is almost certainly higher or lower than the displayed number. The global rate assumes a purchasing parity that does not exist; an extracted second from a user in Lagos is priced differently from one in London, and the difference is itself part of the story. The aggregation hides distributions that matter.

These numbers are the worst lies we will tell you on this site. Every other claim in the framework is more careful.

§ 7How to reproduce.

The spreadsheet behind the meter is open. Write to editors@timetax.info for the working file. The inputs are six: regional ARPU, active hours, addressable base, concurrent fraction, included surfaces, and the global market estimate against which we cross-check. We will publish a versioned, open-source release of the model once a quarter, alongside the publication.

§ 1What it is.

A chronological feed of first-hand sources, each described as narrowly as the source warrants. Three buckets only — regulation, research, critique. Each entry is a regulator's filing, a journal paper or working paper, or a piece of serious longform from an established critic. Each carries a date, a source, a two-sentence description, and one italic line on why we logged it. We do not editorialise where the source already speaks for itself.

§ 2How it is selected.

The brief is researched twice a week and curated against the same standard as the evidence library — first-hand sources where possible, links that work, claims described narrowly. Items that turn out to be PR fluff, listicles, or undated commentary do not make the cut. Items that surface a real underlying paper or filing do. The feed is browsable by month, and the older months are kept open in the archive rather than rolled off.

§ 3Read it, contribute to it.

The chronicle lives at /newsfeed. Submissions are read on a rolling basis at submissions@timetax.info — send the citation and a one-paragraph note on why it belongs. The newsfeed is open by design; the more first-hand sources we can hold in one place, the harder the argument is to dismiss.

§ 1The principle.

If a platform monetises the attention of a user, the user is owed a share. We are not arguing for a new tax. We are arguing that an existing transfer — invisible, unpriced, and entirely one-way — should be declared, costed, and partly returned. The proposal is restitution rather than imposition; platforms are already levying a de facto tax on attention, and the policy is to make that levy visible and route some of it back.

Two per cent of UK digital advertising revenue, redirected on this basis, would total in the region of £1 billion per year — enough to fund a modest annual statement for every UK adult and a serious public infrastructure for digital wellbeing. The same rate applied globally would sit close to £15 billion. We use the UK figure as the working anchor for the rest of this proposal because it is the figure the political conversation in the United Kingdom can actually carry; the global figure is a reference, not a programme.

§ 2The mechanism.

Platforms above a defined threshold would be required to declare, per impression, the price paid by the advertiser and the country of the impression's recipient. Our working thresholds are those of the existing UK Digital Services Tax — £500 million of global digital revenue and £25 million of UK revenue — which together capture roughly twelve firms. A small share of the declared revenue, set by regulation with our working figure of two per cent, is collected by HMRC and remitted into a hypothecated fund. The fund is administered as a public utility with audited disbursement.

Governance is an open question, and we say so plainly. Our working proposal is a tripartite board — civil society, platform representation, and users themselves through a randomly selected citizens' assembly that rotates annually. The closest live precedent at scale is the music collecting-society model (PRS, MCPS, DACS in the United Kingdom), which is rights-holder-controlled rather than tripartite; a revision toward that pattern is on the table. The principle the governance must protect is that the fund cannot be captured by any one of the three constituencies, and that the rules of allocation are decided in public.

§ 3What the fund does.

The proposal contemplates three uses, in working proportions of fifty, forty, and ten per cent of the fund respectively. These proportions are a starting position for debate, not a settled allocation.

First, direct return (50%). Each registered user receives an annual statement of the attention extracted in their name and the Dividend remitted. The statement is itself part of the point — a bill makes a tax visible. Direct payouts are modest, in the region of £15–£40 per user per year at a 2% rate, but the statement matters more than the cheque.

Second, public-interest digital infrastructure (40%). The next-largest share funds: ad-free public-service media accessible by all; non-commercial search, mapping, and identity infrastructure; digital literacy programmes for primary and secondary education; and rigorous, independent research on the harms documented in the evidence library.

Third, regulatory enforcement (10%). A small share funds the regulators whose existing capacity to enforce the rules they have already written is widely understood to be inadequate. Enforcement is part of the redistribution.

§ 4Why this and not a ban.

We do not propose to ban advertising. Advertising, declared and priced, is older than the internet. We propose to declare and price the extraction the industry has so far been allowed to leave undeclared. The Dividend is the smallest intervention compatible with the diagnosis. Anything less and the transfer continues unaccounted; anything more and we are in territory the politics of the present will not bear.

A further word on what this is not. The United Kingdom already operates a Digital Services Tax — a two per cent levy on platform revenues attributable to UK users, paid into HMRC as general revenue. The Conversion Dividend uses the same base and the same rate, and it is reasonable for a reviewer to ask whether the two are duplicative. They are not. The DST is a general tax with no relationship to the activity it taxes, paid into the general fund, spent on whatever the Chancellor decides. The Dividend is a hypothecated redistribution from the people whose attention produced the revenue to a fund that pays them back, builds public goods on their behalf, and underwrites the enforcement of the rules already in place to protect them. Our preferred operational form is for the Dividend to sit alongside the DST in the short term, with the DST eventually reabsorbed into the Dividend once the redistribution mechanism is institutionally trusted. The DST has demonstrated that the tax is collectable; the Dividend asks what we do with what we collect.

A more searching counter-argument, articulated most clearly by Tim Wu in The Age of Extraction (2025), is that any payment regime — even one as conservative as this — legitimises the underlying extraction. The case for predistribution over redistribution is that the prevention of harm is structurally preferable to its accounting. We agree, in principle. In practice we are choosing the smallest intervention that can pass, and predistributive remedies — antimonopoly action, structural separation, banning attention-capture surfaces outright — have not, in the past two decades, passed at scale anywhere. The Dividend is an intermediate move; the visible bill that, in our reading, makes the predistributive arguments politically possible later. It is not a substitute for them.

§ 5Objections, briefly.

"This is a tax on innovation." The Dividend is paid out of advertising revenue platforms already collect, not from research budgets. If a two per cent share of revenue ends innovation, the innovation was thinly capitalised. We accept that consumer prices for some products may rise slightly; we believe the transfer is worth it.

"Platforms will leave the jurisdiction." They will not. The Dividend is levied on revenue earned from impressions delivered to users in the jurisdiction, regardless of platform domicile. Compare the VAT treatment of digital services since 2015; the mechanism is well understood and well litigated.

"Users will not value the Dividend." Some will not. The statement matters more than the payout. We are making a transfer visible that has been invisible. Visibility is half the work; politics is the other half, and politics only begins once a thing is visible.

"This will deepen the digital divide." The most serious version of this objection — articulated by Joshua Adams in OneZero and by the Centre for International Governance Innovation — runs that paying users for attention pressures the people with least to surrender most, and legitimises the underlying extraction. We accept the diagnosis; we differ on the remedy. The largest share of the fund, by design, is not direct payment but public-interest infrastructure available to all, weighted toward the people who currently absorb the most of the extraction. Direct payouts are deliberately small so that no household becomes economically dependent on the Dividend, and the public-goods spend is deliberately large so that the people who do not see themselves as users still benefit. The bill matters more than the cheque, on this objection most of all.

"This will not pass." It will not pass this year, or the next. The history of comparable redistributions — broadcasting fees, droit de suite, the music collecting societies — suggests the right time horizon is two decades. We are early. We are not wrong.

§ 6Precedents.

The Dividend is not a novel design. It has antecedents in the broadcasting licence fee, the music performance-rights societies, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund (which redistributes a natural-resource rent), the artists' resale right (droit de suite), and the universal-service obligations imposed on telecoms operators since the 1980s. The internet is younger than most of these. It is not too late to add it to the list.

It has, also, two near-precedents worth dwelling on. The Brave browser's Basic Attention Token, live since 2018, implements a closely related mechanism — users opt in to advertisements and receive a share of the revenue. The split is far more generous than this proposal contemplates, at roughly seventy per cent to the user rather than the two per cent of platform revenue we propose; yet per-user payments at platform-economy scale settle around forty pence per user per year. The Dividend's larger per-user figure is defensible because it is paid as a share of total UK platform advertising revenue rather than of an incremental opt-in ad slot. The lesson from Brave is sobering all the same — the case rests on the statement, not on the cheque.

The second near-precedent is the political graveyard of Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project (United States, 2020) and California's Data Dividend proposal under Governor Newsom (2019). Both contemplated a similar transfer; neither produced legislation. On our reading, each was structured around individual property rights to data rather than around platform-side declarations of attention, and so left both the collection mechanism and the redistribution mechanism unspecified. The Conversion Dividend differs in both respects, deliberately.

§ 1What this is.

Time Tax is a framework, a publication, and — we hope — a movement. The framework is a working set of definitions and principles for the economics of digital time. The publication is a primer, an evidence library, a glossary, and a quarterly. The movement is, at present, an experiment: an attempt to give a name to a transfer that has been happening for two decades without one, and to build the institutions that could, eventually, return some share of what has been taken.

We are an independent project. We are not affiliated with any platform, advertiser, regulator, or political party. We hold no commercial interests in the outcomes we propose. We accept no advertising and run no tracking. The work is, and will remain, free to read.

§ 2What this is not.

We are not against advertising. Honest advertising, declared and priced, is older than the internet and serves a useful function. We are against the particular arrangement in which platforms have organised the extraction of unpaid attention into an unaudited industrial process, and have named the people producing the value users.

We are not against the open internet. We are against the version of it that has been built. The two are not the same.

We do not believe that screen time is bad, that social media is bad, or that the past was better. We believe that a particular structural arrangement has produced measurable harms, that those harms are concentrated among people with the least capacity to absorb them, and that the remedy is institutional rather than personal. The argument is not about willpower. It is about systems.

§ 3Who writes this.

The work is published under the collective byline The Editors. This is not a literary affectation. The framework belongs to no individual; the byline reflects that. Where individual authorship matters — peer-reviewed work, named policy submissions — it is given on the document itself.

Contributors include researchers, policy analysts, product designers, and a small number of people who have spent careers inside the systems being described. New contributors are welcome on the terms set out in Support.

§ 4Contact & correspondence.

Editors

editors@timetax.info

Submissions

submissions@timetax.info

Press

press@timetax.info

Errata

Corrections to factual claims are welcomed and acted on. Please cite the page, the paragraph, and the source of the correction.

§ 5Licence & governance.

All work published here is released under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. You may copy, adapt, translate and republish, including for commercial purposes, provided you attribute and share-alike. Translations into any language are explicitly welcomed; we will host them here if asked.

We retain no rights to your participation. Comments, corrections and submissions remain yours; we ask only for permission to publish them with attribution when appropriate.

Governance is, at present, light: a small editorial committee makes decisions about what is published. If the work scales to a point where lighter governance becomes inadequate, the committee will publish a constitution and a board. We expect that point to arrive; we are not there yet.

§ 1Subscribe.

The quarterly costs nothing. Four times a year you will receive: new evidence indexed, the policy briefs we are circulating, the product specs we are writing, and the cleanest prose we can manage on the economics of digital time. One email per quarter. No tracking. Cancel by replying once. The subscribe form is in About, above.

§ 2Donate.

We accept individual donations from £5. Donations are used to commission peer-reviewed work, pay contributors, and host the site. We do not accept donations from advertising platforms, advertising trade bodies, advertising-funded media, or political parties. We publish our donor list annually: donations above £500 are listed with name and amount; donations below are aggregated. To donate, write to editors@timetax.info for instructions.

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