The old media business in the new: ‘the Googlization of everything’ as the capitalization of digital consumption

Abstract

Digital labor and its role in the profitability of digital media companies have received increasing attention from scholars. However, digital audience labor has not been analyzed or recognized as the most important to digital media companies' profit-making ability. Digital audience labor is here conceptualized as the use of digital media to consume culture and make meaning. Most digital media companies must control the activities of their users as cultural consumers in order to generate revenue, just as most 'old media' companies have long done. Google is an exemplary case: 'The Googlization of Everything' is primarily a process of trying to gain control over numerous activities of digital cultural consumption. Those activities can be understood as digital audience labor, and Google uses its control to extract value, that is, to exploit digital audience labor. Google Search, Google Books, and YouTube are examples of this effort to exploit digital audience labor.

Transgressing between consumption and production: Materialistic outlook on the digital labour of prosumers

“…Prosumers are the producers of this commodity, as they perform free labour, and so they are exploited. Brice Nixon (2015) goes in the Fuchs’s footsteps claiming that the political economy of Google can then be understood as a matter of accumulating capital by extracting value from digital audience labour. ‘Primarily as a process in which Google lends digital space to advertisers in return for a money payment that (…) is similar to an interest payment’ (Nixon 2015: 4).…”

Capital accumulation and work in China’s internet content industry: Struggling in the bubble

“…Milberg and Winkler (2013) have highlighted the role of outsourcing in global value chains in capitalist development and they pay attention to workers’ conditions in the outsourcing model that also applies to China. Likewise, there is some research on the labour costs of accumulation by dispossession in high-tech industries, with some, on the one hand, exploring the way audiences are being subsumed into the accumulation process as ‘free labour’ (Barbrook, 2005 [1998]; Hills, 2002; Jenkins, 2008; Nixon, 2016; Wittel, 2014). For example, Terranova (2004) defines active users in the ‘digital economy’ as ‘free labour’, who build a community without great financial rewards and in return obtain ‘the pleasures of communication and exchange’ (p. 91).…”

“…There are two tendencies revealed in the existing research exploring this expansion process. First, some scholars (Fuchs, 2016; Nixon, 2016; Wittel, 2014) argue that capital accumulation occurs from exploiting a number of non-waged labourers’ surplus value, such as Internet users’ time spending on Internet and contents they created online. Nixon (2016) in turn has argued that digital media companies, such as Google, are generating revenue via controlling over numerous activities of digital audience labourers.…”

The business of news in the attention economy: Audience labor and MediaNews Group’s efforts to capitalize on news consumption

“…These provided a means for MediaNews to exploit the labor of its readers as ‘citizen journalists’ by freely appropriating and capitalizing the news they produce. MediaNews could then use that freely appropriated news as the basis for exploiting print and digital news audience labor – a strategy for accumulating capital that is typical of digital media companies like Google that capitalize on user-generated content (Nixon, 2016).…”

“…That scholarship has also generally ignored audience labor as a specific aspect of digital labor: It has argued newer media industries capitalize on user-generated content, user data, or users themselves (e.g. Andrejevic, 2002; Fuchs, 2010), while the audience labor of paying attention or consuming has been overlooked or conflated with those other uses of media (Nixon, 2014, 2016). The analysis in this article shows digital audience labor is an essential concept for understanding the business of digital news.…”