Tech Knows You

A public service announcement

Tech companies are watching you.

the algorithm's got nothing here 🤷
no read on you yet ✨
targeting… nothing found 🫧
the algorithm is still thinking 💭

The world spends about $1 trillion a year advertising to you.

spent on ads worldwide since you opened this page

$0

≈ $25,000 every second · from ~$800B/yr in digital ad spend (sources)

Why we built a page of ads, on purpose

Advertising's scale is engineered to be invisible. You're never shown the bill, the auction, or the profile — only the winning ad, slotted into your feed as if it grew there. The only way to look the machine in the eye is to put a frame around its output. So that's the entire product: four frames, a meter, and you.

How the algorithm filled your frames just now:

  1. Profile. The network gathers what it has on you — device, language, the sites you've wandered through, the interest segments you've been quietly sorted into (“in-market for a compact SUV”).
  2. Auction. Advertisers bid for people like your profile. The whole thing clears in under 100 milliseconds — faster than your blink.
  3. Render. The winner appears in your frame, exactly as it has thousands of times this week. It's just never been labelled “Exhibit A” before.

And yes: this PSA about ad money is funded by the very slots it exhibits. We'd call that a conflict of interest if it weren't the entire thesis — there was no way to show you the machine without plugging into it. The grid is for looking at and thinking about; the refresh button deliberately cools down between reads.

The full story → About

The number behind the number

Four figures worth sitting with. All real, all cited, all ticking up while you read this.

$1.17T

Total worldwide ad spend forecast for 2026 — every billboard, jingle and banner on Earth, in one year.

~$800B

The digital slice alone — roughly three-quarters of all advertising money now goes to screens like the one you're holding.

$25,367

Spent on digital ads every single second, around the clock. That's a decent annual salary, per second.

~$140

Digital ad spend per internet user per year — about $140 for each of the world's ~5.6 billion people online. You're the product, and you're not cheap.

How we got this number

The live counter at the top of this page uses one anchor figure: global digital advertising spend of approximately $800 billion per year (2025–26 forecasts commonly land in the $740–800B+ range, with digital making up roughly 75% of a ~$1 trillion total ad market).

Divide that by the number of seconds in a year — 31,536,000 — and you get $800,000,000,000 ÷ 31,536,000 ≈ $25,367 per second, which we round to "≈ $25,000 every second" on screen.

The counter itself is computed from elapsed time since you opened the page (rate × seconds elapsed), not a fake incrementing timer — so it stays accurate even if you switch tabs and come back. It's an even-pacing illustration of a yearly total, not a live feed of actual transactions; real spend pulses with time zones, auctions and shopping seasons. The yearly total, however, is very real.

We revisit the anchor figure annually and keep the citation list below in sync.

Sources

Figures current as of June 2026. We never see, store or touch the ads served above — they render inside Google's own sandboxed frames and are personalised by the algorithm, not by us. More in About.