Ad-supported television produces audiences as commodities that are sold 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. “The material reality under monopoly capitalism is that all non-sleeping time of most of the population is work time,” Smythe tells us. This “work,” which involves the fashioning of audience attention into “products” to sell to advertisers, is not performed by “workers” themselves, if we think of workers as “people” who make up the working class. Smythe continues: “Who produces this commodity? The mass media of communications do by the mix of explicit and hidden advertising and ‘programme’ material, the markets … which preoccupy the bourgeois communication theorists.” Or, as more simply and directly stated in Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s 1973 work of video art, Television Delivers People, produced several years before Smythe’s essay, “The Product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience. Television delivers people to an advertiser.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Smythe’s ‘audience commodity’ concept — the labor theory of value answer to who produces value and who realizes it in ad media.
• QUESTION: For the Corpocene analysis: does YouTube flip Smythe’s model so the influencer’s self, not the audience, is the commodity sold?
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose’s labor theory of value question: the audience commodity is what is sold, distinguishing viewers as producers of value from the influencer as realized surplus.
• CANDY: The Serra video art line — ‘Television delivers people to an advertiser’ — is a sharp elevator summary of the audience commodity.