Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads

Evidence

But while the old media are themselves the advertising vehicles, the kind of value creation that has provoked criticism of ‘surveillance capitalism’ feeds on commercially exploitable information that is randomly ‘snagged’ by other services and in turn enables individualized advertising strategies. Through these processes steered by algorithms, social media are also promoting a further advance in the commodification of lifeworld contexts. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40

Categorization

• XREF: ‘Commodification of lifeworld contexts’ is the Habermasian concept par excellence — same colonized-lifeworld thesis as his earlier work and Adorno’s culture industry. — connects to: Algorithmic platforms made ad revenue independent of brand quality or gatekeeping; The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 18; Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource (+23 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of how economic systems extract value — here attention and personal data are the extracted commodity.

Related

• Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers (similarity 0.84)
• Platform profit does not come from exploiting labor but from commodifying social life itself (similarity 0.83)
• Advertising platforms sell analysed targeting promises, not raw data (similarity 0.83)
• Digital platforms hijack life into data whose insights are sold back to us (similarity 0.83)
• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers (similarity 0.81)
• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers (similarity 0.80)
• Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users (similarity 0.79)
• Audience exploitation arises from users becoming commodities, not from literal work (similarity 0.79)
• Attention merchants profit by colonizing previously uncommercialized spaces of awareness. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource #expands (0.85)
• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers #qualifies (0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219
• The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity #expands (0.78) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18
• Algorithmic platforms made ad revenue independent of brand quality or gatekeeping #complicates (0.75)