The real commodities are the audience and the influencer, not the toys

Evidence

The popularity of Kaji’s egg videos, his most viewed by a significant margin, indicates precisely what we are suggesting: the true pleasure of these videos is in their representation of excess, in which constant, mediocre objects emerge from nowhere and are discarded for the next thing, videos in which it is the stream of more that attracts attention. These videos are “interesting” in the sense described by Ngai, though the interesting nature of the video is necessarily excessive. They depend on the spectacle of seriality, in which the “sale” of a commodity—a toy, in this case—is so much less important than the stream of objects, in which the real commodities produced are both the audience and the influencer who brokers their attention. The audience is commodified unconsciously, but the influencer works to become a commodity, to become worthy of exchange, worthy of interest. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 234

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies what the commodity actually is in the influencer economy: audience and influencer, not the displayed product.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s labor-theory-of-value analysis: the displayed toy is use-value while the influencer’s self is the commodity.
• QUESTION: Who realizes the surplus value here if both audience and influencer are ‘produced’? This needs tracing through the creator’s earnings chain.