You will spend as much time with media in your life as studying for 35 college degrees

Digging into the numbers behind our favourite stat

You may have heard some of these other epic stats:

1. You read the equivalent of 174 newspapers a day. [source]

2. You consume 34GB of data every day. [source]

Well, we have one more to add, which we’ve been sharing frequently on our journey the past few years. It’s time it migrated out of private presentations into a permanent place to be shared, and where we can explain our math:

3. You will spend as much time with media in your life as you would studying for 35 college degrees.

So, let’s dig into it.

The Base Data

To be able to make this claim, you need to be able to approximate two things:

1. How much time people spend with media on average or, more precisely, consuming and discussing content.

2. How much time the average person spends studying during a college degree.

Time spent studying during a degree

Average time spent by college students studying (US): 15 hours per week (2022 results)

However this is considered inadequate, versus popular rule of thumb: “​​For each hour you spend in class, you should spend two to three hours studying outside of class.” This can translate to about 15 hours in class, and about 45 hours studying. So total time in class and beyond: 60 hours per week.

Average college degree duration in active weeks, based on 4 years at 2 semesters of 4 months each per year (4 years x 32 weeks): 128 weeks

Therefore, number of hours they should be studying during a standard degree = 60 hours/week x 128 weeks = 7,680 hours

With the more realistic total apparently being 15 hours/week x 128 weeks = 1,920 hours

Time spent consuming content

Average time spent with media every day (US): around 13 hours
Average time spent online every day: 7 hours 
Amount of time with news per day: about 70 minutes (1.17 hours)
Average amount of time on social media daily: 147 minutes (2.45 hours)
% of social media users who use it as a source of news: around 50%

Okay, so how many years will the average person spend like this?

Life expectancy/ how long we’ll be spending this time

Average life expectancy: 72
Average age to start using the internet: 12.6 (assuming that’s also when info consumption is at full levels)

Putting it all together: the calculations

Based on suggested time spent studying, mentioned earlier, people should spend around 7,680 hours studying during their degree, and probably actually spend a quarter of that, 1,920 hours.

Based on life expectancy and active internet use data from the data above, we can assume the average person is consuming content full bore for around 60 years. If we exclude their time in a degree, if we consider it double-counting, we can simplify to 56 years.

Therefore: the lowball estimate

To prove a point, let’s start super small and conservative.

Even though the average data suggests almost 13 hours with media per day, we can conservatively focus on the most specific and conservative measures: time spent with news, and time spent on social media as a representation of content.

Given social media is oriented around content consumption, and half of users explicitly use it for news, we can conservatively ballpark about a quarter of the time on social media is for content: 0.6 hours daily. We can add to this time for news, rounding down to 1 hour daily. This brings us to 1.6 hours daily. A very conservative figure from the 13 hours spent daily with media — and likely very significantly underrepresenting the role of time regularly spent by individuals on subjects they are passionate about, including keeping up, researching, learning, or discussing.

Even with this, this is 1.6 hours per day x 365 days = 584 hours consuming content per year.

For 56 years that means 32,704 hours spent consuming content. If we also use the ideal degree study time of 7,680 hours, that means over the course of our lives, even with this extremely conservative measure, it means 4.25 degrees-worth in our lifetime (though it is likely far more).

Therefore: the middle ground estimate

If, however, were estimate using the stat of Americans spending 13 hours per day with media, using the same calculations:

13 hours per day x 365 days = 4,745 hours consuming content per year.
x 56 years = 265,720 hours in an average lifetime.

265,720 hours spent/ 7,680 hours ideally per degree = 34.6 degrees-worth of time

Therefore: the provocative estimate

As if 35 degrees-worth wasn’t enough, remember that we used the ideal study time figure, not what is apparently the one based on actual student behaviour. If we were to use that one, the calculation becomes:

265,720 hours spent/ 1,920 hours per degree = 138.4 degrees-worth of time!

138.4 degrees-worth of time per person!

It’s astonishing, isn’t it? We don’t use this figure because it’s so dramatic that it’s hard to take seriously, and don’t want to have to pull out our calculators to get our point across. We initially started out with the 4 degree claim and settled on the middle ground figure — but we’re glad we can put it out there for people to know the maddening upper bounds of what these numbers suggest.

… so how much is that worth?

Now, given people are spending over $1 trillion annually trying to prove their knowledge through traditional systems like degrees, certificates, and memberships, and learning industries amount to over $1.6 trillion, it begs another question: how much is this time worth?

That’s a subject for our next post.

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