C' = Internet prosumer commodity (user-generated content, transaction data, virtual advertising space and time) most social media services are free to use, they are no commodities.
User data and the users are the social media commodity.
FIGURE 13.2 Capital accumulation on corporate social media platforms that are based on targeted advertising
large number of prosumers that are sold as a commodity to third-party advertisers. A product is not sold to the users, but, rather, the users are sold as a commodity to advertisers. The more users are on a platform, the higher the advertising rates can be set. The productive labor time that is exploited by capital involves the labor time of the paid employees and all of the time that is spent online by the users. For the first type of knowledge labor, new media corporations pay salaries. The second type of knowledge is produced completely for free. The formula for the profit rate needs to be transformed for this accumulation strategy:
$$
p = s / ( c + \nu _ { t } + \nu _ { 2 } ) ,
$$
where $s =$ surplus value, $c =$ constant capital, $\nu _ { { } _ { 1 } } =$ wages paid to fixed employees, and $\nu _ { 2 } =$ wages paid to users.
The typical situation is that $\nu _ { _ 2 } = > 0$ and that $\nu _ { _ 2 }$ substitutes $\nu _ { _ { I } } \left( \nu _ { _ { I } } = > \nu _ { _ { 2 } } = 0 \right)$ If the production ofcontent and the time spent online were carried out by paid employees, the variable costs would rise and profits would therefore decrease. This shows that prosumer activity in a capitalist society can be interpreted as the outsourcing of productive labor to users (in management literature, the term crowdsourcing has been established to describe this phenomenon; see Howe
Class and Exploitation on the Internet
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