From Audience Commodity to Promotion Struggles: A Political Economy Approach to YouTube
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Abstract
Although YouTube presents itself as a platform for participatory communication and creative self-expression, it has also become one of the most profitable infrastructures in the global digital advertising economy. This transformation reveals a fundamental tension between YouTube’s participatory discourse, often summarized by the slogan Broadcast Yourself, and its underlying political economic logic. Building on the tradition of the audience commodity thesis, this article argues that YouTube represents a new stage in the commodification of participation in digital capitalism. While existing scholarship has largely explained this process through the framework of digital labor and prosumer commodification, this perspective does not fully capture how platforms organize competition among users for visibility and attention. To address this limitation, the article introduces the concept of promotion struggles, defined as competitive processes through which users attempt to capture and monetize scarce attention within algorithmically structured platform environments. Using a conceptual political economy analysis of YouTube as a case study, the article shows how recommendation systems and advertising infrastructures transform participation into continuous competition for visibility. In this environment, the promise of Broadcast Yourself increasingly evolves into a new imperative: Promote Yourself.
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