by
Lee McGuigan
archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a measure was needed to demonstrate that the right product was being produced that the audience for which advertisers expressed a demand was in fact being delivered by broadcasters. Only after agreeing on a basic method for producing measures of productivity and quality could broadcasters and advertisers move to the real business at hand--the buying and selling of audiences according to a rational price structure.
Inherent in the situation, then, is both continuity and discontinuity in the interests of the advertising and broadcasting industries. While continuity rests in the need for an official description of the audience, discontinuity arises from the connection between that description and pricing. [...] neither industry could trust the other to measure productivity and quality, yet both needed some measure in order to transact sales. In this way, despite unified demand for measures of productivity and quality, the situation presented contradictory interests and thereby the possibility for independence for any ratings producer that could successfully manipulate those differences. [...]
think about how this applies to digital advertising? where fb/goog have all the data (massive info asymmetry) and both publishers AND advertisers have to simply trust
remember that time, summer 2013, when doubleclick fucked up and accidentally paid publishers twice? like massive deposits (thousands, at least) doubled for publishers like the NYT. and it took a while to notice
also: nielson is partnering with these companies where they dont themselves have the ability to gatekeep the ratings process (like FB / Nielson partnering for TV shit), but obvs they would prefer to absorb that vertical on their own
Let's begin with the advertising-supported commercial media as part of the whole economy. How do they make a profit? A short answer would be that the media speed up the selling of commodities, their circulation from production to consumption. Hence, they speed the realization of value (the conversion of value into a money form) embodied in commodities produced everywhere in the economy. Through advertising, the rapid consumption of commodities cuts down on circulation and storage costs for industrial capital. Media capital (e.g., broadcasters) receives a portion of surplus value (profits) of industrial capital as a kind of rent paid for access to audiences. The differences between this rent and its costs of production (e.g., wages paid to media industry workers) constitute its profit.
[...] there is much wasted watching by irrelevant viewers. Specification and fractionation of the audience leads to a form of concentrated viewing by the audience in which there is (from the point of view of advertisers) little wasted watching. Because that advertising time can be sold at a higher ate by the media, we can say that the audience organized in this manner watches harder and with more intensity and efficiency. In fact, because the value of the time goes up, necessary watching-time decreases, and surplus watching-time increases, thus leading to relative surplus value.
The other major way in which relative surplus value operates in the media is through the division of time. [...]
reminds me of a tweet by Ben Tarnoff (drawing on his & Moira's article about SV being unable to fix itself?) about FB needing to deepen extraction of value (since they cant spread beyond a certain point of penetration - limited by pop growth at their current scale)
for the division of time thing - think about how ads are shown every x tweets/posts/messages. the longer you scroll the more ads you see. they cram in a lot of diff ads rather than forcing you to linger on each (more profitable for them? cus more competition)
[...] the early history of industrial capitalism is tied up with attempts by capital to extend the time of the working day in an absolute sense, thus manipulating the ratio between necessary time and surplus time. [...]
However, as Marx realized, this absolute extension of the working day cannot go on indefinitely. Unions and collective bargaining limited the length of the working day, forcing capital to increase the intensity of labor. The concept of relative surplus value initially meant the cheapening of consumer goods that reproduce labor-power, so that the amount of necessary time would be decreased. [...]
connects very nicely with the increased ratio of ads-to-content (Google search - find diagram; FB news feed and messenger)
diss: relevant to abolition (union of users?)
[...] Despite the fact that huge amounts of money (much more than programming) are spent on producing attractive commercials, people do all they can to avoid them. [...]
These findings have not been lost on the advertising or television industries, who have increasingly recognized that the traditional concept of a ratings point may no longer be valid. Ratings measure program watching rather than commercial watching. Indeed, it seems that there is much disparity between the two, and advertisers are starting to voice their discontent at having to pay for viewers who may not be watching their ads at all. [...]
AD BLOCKING!! so much to say on this. think about the war between FB and adblockers, and cus FB (etc) has much greater resources, it'll always win. try to find sources claiming that adblockers either sell data or collude?
also: find the bit in Chaos Monkeys where he talks about adblocking as being theft, lmao
Up until now, we have made a rather strict distinction between programming and advertising. In the historical development of the commercial media system, however, the boundaries between the two were very often blurred. The function of programming is much more than merely capturing the watching activity of a specific demographic group of the market. Programming also has to provide the right environment for the advertising that will be inserted within it. Advertisers seek compatible programming vehicles that stress the lifestyles of consumption. [...] At a more explicit level, advertisers sought to have their products placed within the program itself. In all of these ways, we can see a blurring between the message content of the commercials and the message content of the programming.
ahhhh influencer marketing! and also native advertising?
We purposely describe these practices as surveillance, as this highlights the focused and sustained collection of personal information (Lyon 2001). Our discussions are also intended to further the conception that the use of social media constitutes a form of participatory (Albrechstlund 2008) or collaborative (Pridmore 2013) surveillance. Of course this connects with what has been described as a political economy of personal information (Gandy 1993; cf. Gandy 2009) or the personal information economy (Elmer 2004; Pridmore 2013). In addition, the use of social media for marketing purposes can also be seen as aligned with the study of audience labor (Smythe 1981) and political economic concerns in the age of new media (Dyer-Witheford 1999).
good way of framing it, possibly useful as references
The political economic approach to communication conceptualizes technology as a commodity produced by corporations. The goal of corporations is to maximize profit. Political economist study the process of capital accumulation and examine the evolution and renewal of capitalism. [...]
aw man this is fire
[...] Both stories seem to reinforce that Brin and Page, like many America inventors, deserve their great fortune because they have something useful and unique to offer. In popular thinking, because of the raw talent and grand vision of these inventors, their companies should not be criticized. Instead, their inventions should be viewed as technology that positively impacts society, and as knowledge that leads humankind one step away from darkness. [...]
stories: Google's name being a misspelling, and not being incorporated when they received a 100k check
[...] By rewarding advertisers who can successfully predict the keywords that users type in and by punishing those who cannot, Google hopes that AdWords can be relevant and useful to online search.
Nevertheless, AdWords is only profitable because it is a vertically integrated system in which Google controls every step of the process by providing search results to users, by selling "keywords" to advertisers, and by providing statistics to marketers. [...]
Despite Google's claims, a vertically integrated advertising system may not be that objective because it is difficult to determine what the exchange value of keywords is. [...] Internet search creates unlimited time because millions of searches take place at any given moment even though only a small number of users see the same ads. In addition, keywords are not exclusive; a number of advertisers can bid for the same keywords. Because of the non-exclusivity and non-scarcity of keywords, their exchange value should be very low, if not close to zero. This is clearly not the case for Google ads [...]
The concept of the audience commodity is crucial to understanding why Google is able to charge advertisers for keywords even though they are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. [...] the exchange value of the audience commodity is imaginary.