The Price of Entertainment

In 1995 I calculated the average hourly costs for various media platforms, including music, books, newspapers, and movies. There was some variation between media, but the price stayed within the same order of magnitude, converging on a mean of $2.00 per hour. In 1995 we tended to pay, on average, two bucks per hour for media use.

Fifteen years later, in 2010, and then again in 2015, I recalculated the values for a similar set of media using the same method. When I adjusted for inflation and translated in 2015 dollars, the average cost to consume one hour of media in 1995, 2010 and 2015 is respectively $3.08, $2.69, and $3.37. That means that the value of our attention has been remarkably stable over 20 years.

Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable

Highly unscientific, but it seems to line up with what I generally pay for media