Abstract:This article contributes to a political economic theory centred on the concept of "audience labour". First, the previous use of the concept of audience labour is briefly traced and the process of rethinking the concept as the basis of a political economic theory is begun. Second, a theory of the audience labour process is developed, drawing on previous theories of audience activities of cultural consumption as productive activities of signification and adapting Marx's theory of the human labour process to the audience labour process. Third, a political economy of audience labour is outlined. As a theory of the basic processes through which communicative capital can control and extract value from audience labour, it describes the exploitation of audience labour and accumulation of communicative capital through distribution relationships of rent and interest. Finally, the continuing centrality of audience labour exploitation in the digital era is discussed.

This article analyzes the business of news in the early 21st century through a case study of the US newspaper company MediaNews Group. It examines the company’s efforts over the past decade to create sources of revenue while the US newspaper industry faced a growing financial crisis. This article argues it is necessary to rethink the political economy of news to see that power over news consumption is the foundation of the business of news. The concepts of an attention economy and audience labor are used to reframe the process of capitalizing on news as, fundamentally, a process of gaining power over attention in order to treat it as an exploitable form of audience labor and thereby generate revenue from news consumers or advertisers. This article then presents a study of the strategies for generating revenue used by MediaNews Group from 2006 to 2016, focusing on its clusters of newspapers in California. Ownership consolidation was the company’s key strategy until its debt and the industry’s crisis forced it into bankruptcy. The company then pursued a series of digital strategies: digital advertising, paywalls, mobile distribution, citizen journalism, copyright infringement lawsuits, and Google Consumer Surveys. None proved profitable enough, and in 2016, the company returned to ownership consolidation. MediaNews Group’s efforts over the past decade demonstrate the inescapable truth that power over attention is the key to the business of news: Capitalizing on news requires power over news consumption as a form of attention that can be exploited as news audience labor.

This article argues that the quality that defines critical political economy is its critical method. Definitions of the critical political economy of culture are considered and shown to focus on specific theoretical concerns while not fully addressing the fundamental issue of method. Method is here discussed in terms of the way human reason is used to produce knowledge. A critical method for Marx is a historical materialist dialectical method, thus this paper argues for a deeper consideration of the Marxist dialectical method in relation to critical political-economic theorizing. Sources for methodological consideration from Marx to 20th-century Western Marxists are outlined. The potential contribution of the Marxist dialectical method in the continued development of the critical political economy of culture is demonstrated by showing the possibility of developing a complementary critical political economy of consciousness. Smythe's theorizing of audiences as workers is considered as a useful starting point, and its potential development through incorporation of the work of other critical scholars of media and culture is outlined.

Digital labor and its role in the profitability of digital media companies have received increasing attention from scholars. However, digital audience labor has not been analyzed or recognized as the most important to digital media companies' profit-making ability. Digital audience labor is here conceptualized as the use of digital media to consume culture and make meaning. Most digital media companies must control the activities of their users as cultural consumers in order to generate revenue, just as most 'old media' companies have long done. Google is an exemplary case: 'The Googlization of Everything' is primarily a process of trying to gain control over numerous activities of digital cultural consumption. Those activities can be understood as digital audience labor, and Google uses its control to extract value, that is, to exploit digital audience labor. Google Search, Google Books, and YouTube are examples of this effort to exploit digital audience labor.