Social media's growth era is over, and the attention economy is hardening around a shrinking set of winners

Steven Bartlett, citing a Financial Times report, puts a specific date on the inflection: 2022 was the peak, and usage has plateaued ever since, with younger generations showing the steepest decline. That finding is no longer a contrarian take. Public reporting from CNBC describes a “quiet revolution” of young people deleting social media apps, and a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media finds overall platform reach declining across the United States, driven in part by growth in the share of Americans who report using no social media at all. The direction is consistent across sources.

What is harder to convey is how thoroughly the plateau is locking in existing hierarchies. Jake Paul, who has navigated the creator economy at its highest level for years, is direct about the consolidation at the top: “With brands that have stuck around at the highest level in social media, it’s me, Mr. Beast, and my brother, and really no one else.” That is a remarkable statement about a media category that was, not long ago, celebrated for its capacity to mint new stars from nothing. The mobility that defined the early social era has stalled.

Cliff Weitzman adds a telling detail: even Mr. Beast’s YouTube views, which reached their highest point last year, are now slightly declining. If the platform’s most dominant creator is losing ground at the margin, the ceiling for anyone below that tier is effectively fixed.

There were something like 40,000 new games launched last year in the app store and zero, you know, became top 10 hits and zero even sustained top 25 or 50. Mark Pincus

The consolidation is not limited to creator fame. Mark Pincus reports that the average number of app installs per user per month is now zero, and that of roughly 40,000 new games launched in the App Store last year, none became a top-10 hit or even sustained a top-25 or top-50 ranking. That figure describes an attention economy that has, for practical purposes, stopped accepting new entrants in entire categories. The pipeline of discovery that once made the App Store a viable launch platform has closed.

The advertising side of the equation reflects the same pressure from a different angle. Claus Lauter reports that customer acquisition cost on Meta has grown 20 to 30 percent on average over the last five years. Fewer new users entering the funnel, combined with more advertisers competing for the attention of those who remain, produces exactly that kind of sustained cost inflation. Brands that built their growth models on the assumption of an expanding social audience are now paying significantly more to reach a static or shrinking one.

Tim Ferriss offers a frame that cuts to the individual level. The ability to single-task on important work for two hours a day without interruption, he argues, places a person in the top one percent of the attention economy. The bar is low by any historical standard. It is low precisely because the infrastructure of social media has been optimized, at scale, to prevent exactly that kind of sustained focus. The scarcity is manufactured, and the manufacturing has been extraordinarily effective.

A Stanford neuroscientist who appeared alongside Bartlett predicts that this manufactured scarcity will eventually create a market opening. The prediction is specific: by 2026, widespread awareness of how engagement-maximizing algorithms operate will be enough to support a new social media company built on different terms. Whether that opening materializes into a durable business is an open question. What the evidence does support is the diagnosis behind the prediction: users are not ignorant of the problem, and dissatisfaction is no longer a niche position. The structural question for the next several years is whether that dissatisfaction translates into a viable alternative or simply into less time spent overall, with the existing platforms and their existing hierarchies absorbing the remainder.