Journal Articles

You Media : audiencing as marketing in social media

---

Recent scholarship has offered a modification to audience labour theory in the context of social media, suggesting that rather than merely working by watching advertisements, social media users also produce data, which is commodified by social media companies. This article offers a further analysis of audience labour in social media using Facebook’s Sponsored Stories as a case study. Sponsored Stories are ads rendered from naturally occurring users’ communication on Facebook. I argue that the value generated by users is based on two additional types of labour: the ‘self’ of users, who are mobilized as ‘celebrity’ avatars to advertise a brand, and the construction and maintenance of networks, or media channels through which ads are disseminated. Such analysis suggests that the audience is involved in three moments along the value chain of social media: consumption, production, and marketing. Put differently, valorization on social media takes place also through the work of the audience as marketers, entailing the construction and maintenance of targeted channels of communication, and the mobilization of ‘selves’ for the promotion of brands. The article suggests a comparison between the mass media and social media, along the coordinates of audience labour and advertisements as theoretical and empirical constants, respectively.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Media Culture & Society

Call Number

-

Publisher

Thousand Oaks : Sage Publications., 2015

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0163-4437

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Volume 48, Issue 1 January 2015, 50-67

Subject(s)

Advertising
Capitalism
Audience labour
Media theory

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment