On YouTube the real commodity exchanged for profit is the influencer’s self

Evidence

Content is a particularly ironic term to describe whatever it is we see on YouTube because what the market reveals is the primacy of a particular formal economy. Any specific instance of content—that we are looking at a specific object or a specific commodity—is subsumed by the infinite perpetuation of more content to come. In the market that is YouTube, the specificity of content never matters, only the formal perpetuation of more, more, more objects that, at a level of individuality, are thus “de-formed” beyond their ability to become subsumed in the overarching stream of more. And it is on this indistinct stream of more—this stream that is the embodiment of the market on YouTube—that the “real” commodity appears: the influencer as a particular subject and a particular “self” that can be exchanged for profit. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 218

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The formal economy of ‘more’ and how the influencer’s self is the commodity — the exact payoff of the reader’s central thesis, worth sitting with.
• XREF: This is the linchpin connecting corporate personhood to the influencer-as-firm — the self becomes the company.