Page 164 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Marketing communications and media 143

‘stories’ can be generated by corporate pages’ activities and distributed to net-
works of friends to appear in news feeds. Sponsored stories have been described
as a way in which Facebook ‘turns users into spokespeople for companies and
products in ads that are broadcast to their friends’ (Hill 2012). In October 2012
Facebook offered $20 million to settle a class action privacy lawsuit challenging
the legality of sponsored stories, offering up to $10 each to nearly 125 million
users. 2
For Mosco (2009: 137) Smythe’s audience commodity concept must be
updated for digital systems ‘which measure and monitor precisely each infor-
mation transaction’ and represent ‘a major refinement in the commodification of
viewers over the earlier system of delivering mass audiences’. Behavioural
advertising is based on web browsing activity conducted over a period of time,
while contextual advertising is allied to particular content viewed online, and
includes retargeting, when advertising is delivered based on website content that
a user has just viewed (Internet Advertising Bureau 2009). In behavioural
advertising the audience is a commodity in the precise sense of a product that is
bought and sold. Yet instead of the aggregated, imprecise ‘audience’ of cost-per-
thousand targeting, now the commodity is a selective profile of an individual
user for which behavioural advertising opportunities are sold. Digital users have
been mostly unaware of behavioural advertising as corporations have lobbied
successfully for automatic opt-in mechanisms to be applied so ‘to suggest users
are willing collaborators in their own subjection is a difficult position to maintain
in this particular regard’ (McStay 2011: 316).
Andrejevic argues there is power imbalance between those who control the
circuits of surveillance and ordinary users who trade personal information for
customised offers and in doing so provide an invaluable source of labour in the
form of market research. There is increased capacity for economic monitoring,
that is tracking activities for commercial purposes. On platforms like Google or
Facebook ‘monitoring becomes an integral component of the online value chain
both for sites that rely upon direct payment and for user-generated content sites
that rely upon indirect payment (advertising)’ so that ‘user activity is redoubled
on commercial platforms in the form of productive information about user
activity’ (Andrejevic 2012: 84).
There are numerous objections to basing an account of media consumption on
Marxian theories of labour, value and exploitation alone. Alienation and social
reproduction do not describe the totality of user engagement with social media,
nor encompass the media literacies involved in navigating ‘free’ services and
benefits, albeit in structurally disadvantaged ways. Yet, for a critical study of
advertising, the concept of Internet prosumer commodification addresses key aspects
of advertising processes and the consequences arising from different forms of
monetisation.
Many media operate in what economists call a ‘dual product market’, selling
goods (‘content’) to consumers but also selling media audiences to advertisers
(Doyle 2002b: 12). One consequence is that ad-financed media respond to