Rather than exploiting free labour, the position taken here is that advertising platforms appropriate data as a raw material. The activities of users and institutions, if they are recorded and transformed into data, become a raw material that can be refined and used in a variety of ways by platforms. With advertising platforms in particular, revenue is generated through the extraction of data from users' activities online, from the analysis of those data, and from the auctioning of ad space to advertisers. This involves achieving two processes. First, advertising platforms need to monitor and record online activities. The more users interact with a site, the more information can be collected and used. Equally, as users wander around the internet, they are tracked via cookies and other means, and these data become ever more extensive and valuable to advertisers. There is a convergence of surveillance and profit making in the digital economy, which leads some to speak of 'surveillance capitalism'. Key to revenues, however, is not just the collection of data, but also the analysis of data. Advertisers are interested less in unorganised data and more in data that give them insights or match them to likely consumers. These are data that have been worked on. They have had some process applied to them, whether through the skilled labour of a data scientist or the automated labour of a machine-learning algorithm. What is sold to advertisers is therefore not the data themselves (advertisers do not receive personalised data), but rather the promise that Google's software will adeptly match an advertiser with the correct users when needed.

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, loc. 55