Theories Of Audience Labour

Audience labour

Introduction
The Canadian scholar Dallas.W. Smythe presented the audience commodity theory in his book Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism (1977). The demand of advertised goods is created by audience labour, and this is the purposes of monopoly capitalism advertisers. Time away from work, but not asleep is sold as a commodity to advertisers. This is the audience commodity, which perform marketing functions and work at the production and reproduction of labour power.
There, Smythe put stress on the three parts in his theory: Media only create one commodity, and that is the audience; All media are in the collection, packaged and sold to advertisers the audience. In this process, the content is the second; Media industry

Are audiences

These products are just to lure the audience came to the production site, and the most important product is actually the audience . Media to charge advertisers based on the amount and quality of the audience (age, gender, education, income and other demographic indicators) purchasing power level.So what media company doing is setting the audience and packaged to sale. For the audience, as the free lunch sharers. They are not only just spend time in, but also creating value, which is ultimately achieved by pay the advertising surcharge when they purchase of goods. At the same time, the audience paid work in their spare time, and created value for medium. However, audience did not get any financial compensation, but to bear the economic consequences(Smythe, D.W. 1977). Subsequently, someone adding that he production of radio and television audience is not the actual commodity, but only information about the audience (the number of visitors to form categories, using the media form)(Eileen R.M.). During the transaction of radio and television rating, there are triple market structure which are including the rating market, the advertising market and program market. The routine of trading in these three markets rely measurement ratings. Under the effect of various structural forces, ratings are subject to