Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers

Evidence

Since communication scholar Dallas Smythe’s classic analysis of the political economy of advertising, published in the 1970s, it’s been widely accepted that the “consumers” of ad-subsidized, “free” media are mislabeled. With commercial television and advertising-sponsored newspapers and magazines, Smythe argues, audiences are not consumers of media. The newspaper article, the television show—the “content,” in other words—is not a product that is consumed. Rather, audiences and readerships are themselves the commodities, manufactured through a complex set of factors that relies on content as a lure (the ability of television, newspapers, and magazines to attract attention). The audience—or more accurately, the audience’s attention—is fabricated into a salable commodity through marketing research, which demographically sorts the members of an audience as a statistically generalizable and predictable mass of people with shared interests and tastes. This “audience commodity” is then sold to advertisers. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219

Categorization

• DEFINE: The audience-commodity thesis (Smythe) — a precise named framework the reader can deploy as a precursor to the influencer-as-commodity.
• XREF: Conceptually adjacent to the reader’s prior reading on trust and the attention economy; the audience commodity is the pre-influencer version of the self-as-firm. — connects to: Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40; Advertising-saturated media itself demonstrates the flattening of critical thought. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 101; Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 251 (+11 more)