I recently came across a statistic that the average TikTok user globally watches 95 minutes of content per day. I'm not sure if that's higher or lower than I thought it would be, but it did get me thinking about how different spending 95 minutes can feel across different mediums (I should note: I don't use TikTok, but this is not meant to judge anyone who does, Reddit just happens to be my usual way of wasting spending my internet time).
For one, you don't know what you're going to see next on a platform like TikTok. Industry data suggests that up to 96% of TikTok watch time is spent on the For You page, which is consistent with the extremely algorithmic design of the platform.
You're also engaging with far more discrete pieces of content, prioritizing breadth over depth. It's hard to find exact data on the average time spent per video, but we can put a ceiling on it. Statista estimated in 2024 that the average TikTok video is 43 seconds long, and I suspect with rapid skimming, it's likely a fraction of that.
But I still wanted another, more visceral metaphor. With a physical book, I can gauge how much I've read by the number of pages I've turned. There is no equivalent for TikTok, which motivated the somewhat silly premise of this piece.
Enter: CVS Receipts
Receipts from CVS are, for whatever reason, notoriously long. The idea of this piece is: how long would someone's CVS receipt be if each video they watched was printed as a static image?
It's an ironic melding of a physical construct known for being absurdly long with a digital medium known for being addictive and opaque.
The standard receipt is 3.125 inches wide, and TikTok videos are 9:16 portrait videos. So if we were to print TikTok videos on CVS receipts, they would be 5.56 inches tall:
Adding a bit of padding in between videos gives us 6 inches per video.
Laying it all out
With our receipt dimensions in hand, the rest is just a matter of plugging in some numbers. You can use the map below to visualize the distance of the receipt paper for any given number of years, minutes per day, and average time per video.
The receipt above is for one person. TikTok is estimated to have around 1 billion daily active users globally. Any earthly analog of this is going to fall short, so to complete the thought experiment, let's imagine the universe's longest CVS receipt.
At 10 seconds per video, TikTok's roughly 1 billion daily users would collectively unspool enough CVS receipt paper to make 106 round trips between Earth and the Sun in a year.
Parting thoughts
This thought experiment is lighthearted on its face, but I found it to be a helpful way to map a medium whose scale is so unintuitive (infinite feed, tiny screens, etc.) to a physical medium whose scale is intuitive, to the point of being a meme.
Social media is an inextricable part of our lives, but I think these platforms that are designed from the ground up to be addictive need to bear more responsibility for the way they affect us, even if that starts with simple timers that help you notice how much time you're spending. Third-party apps help with this, but I think they should be regulated into the platforms themselves.
If platforms have enough information about everything we click, how long we spend on each video, and how we interact with each video, it's clear they have the data on hand to help us notice how much time we're spending on their platform. They just choose not to. Until then, it's on us to be as aware as possible.
We're just getting started.
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