Dan Novaes (speaker) argues that a large portion of waking life is spent on smartphones—citing 168 total hours per week, 8 hours of sleep (112 waking hours), average phone usage ~35 hours/week, and Gen Z at ~50–60 hours/week. He presents a business model where brands pay platforms for attention and his company acts as an alternative distribution channel that shares ad/revenue with users. Examples include paying users to play games (Candy Crush cited as valuing a week-long user at $10, shared per-minute up to a daily cap), trading apps, email opens, streaming, phone unlocking/charging, etc. The stated goal is to effectively make the phone "free or better" by returning value to users.
Questions this video answers
168 hours
112 hours
~35 hours/week
~50–60 hours/week
$10 per week
Chapters
There's 168 hours a week. Doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk or the guy barely scraping by on the street. If you're sleeping eight hours a day, there's 112 left. The average phone usage right now amongst all generations is around 35 hours a week, and Gen Z is closer to 50 to 60 hours a week. So we're talking about anywhere from one third to one half of your waking life is being spent on your smartphone. And it's only getting more because the phone is becoming the first screen. It's no longer the desktop. The phones are faster, they're better, they're cheaper. And so the way we started thinking about it is like, if you think about your data and specifically, more importantly, your attention is your most prized asset for a lot of people. What are these brands paying, who they're paying? They're paying TikTok, they're paying Facebook, they're paying Google. They're paying the big tech that's making trillions of dollars for your attention when you're doing these things that you like doing, and then these brands are getting in front of you. So what my business model effectively does is we work with these brands and then we provide these opportunities and then just share the revenue with you. So, you know, the brands are still going to be buying from Facebook and all these other services, but we're just another distribution channel. And that's essentially how we operate more simplistically. You know, if you want to play Candy Crush, people like to play that game. Candy Crush is willing to say $10 for someone that plays their game for a week, and we will share a portion of that revenue back to the consumer per minute. They play Candy Crush up to a certain cap a day, and then you develop a habit playing Candy Crush. Candy Crush gets a new user that does, you know, X, Y, Z, and we take a portion of that revenue, but we will just do that for every facet of your life, anywhere from trading stocks with, like, services like Robinhood, reading and opening your email, streaming music, charging your phone, like, unlocking your phone, literally anything you could possibly think of. My goal is to basically make the phone free or better. Sick of wasting all this. Follow us and get all of our hacks for free.
