[...] Institutions are habituated ways of thinking and acting, structured within formal organizations or informal culture patterns (Berger and Luckann 1966). As mediators of social interaction, institutions are biased or coercive toward certain processes and outcomes. They tune consciousness--what we attend to or ignore--toward certain emphases, and they afford certain interests access to levers of power [...]

Having the manufacture of commodity audiences as an organizing principle for a system of communication presupposes and reproduces institutional arrangements that empower industrial capitalists, advertisers, market researchers, and audience surveillance firms and impose constraints over the range of values and ideas conveyed, lionized, or dismissed [...]

[...] audiences, commodified as ratings, do not exist objectively in media use, but rather emerge from a tension between ways of defining valuable audiences and the formal procedures for manufacturing them as standardized commodities [...] the commodity audience is not naturally occurring, like a tree; it is a construction, like a toothpick, shaped by business exigencies and an unequal political economy. Indeed, the very concept of the audience "was hatched largely out of the marketing departments of companies with a stake in selling products through the media (Mosco and Kaye 2000, 32). [...]

[...] The work of the audience for advertisers and media organizations is more concrete now than in Smythe's day (Napoli 2010), and the production of commodity audiences further precedes the free lunch in the sphere of digital publishing, as automated advertising exchanges and programmatic buying practices divert subsidies from journalism and function almost exclusively to satisfy advertiser demand for particular demographics [...]

Dan Schiller (1999a) historicises the corporate seizure of computing networks that form the infrastructure for a global market sytem. "At stake in this unprecedented transition to neoliberal or market-driven telecommunications," Schiller argues, "are nothing less than the production base and control structure of an emerging digital capitalism" [...]