Platforms are structured online spaces, made possible through elaborate software, that offer services of various sorts: a space to sell things, meet people, share information, find specialist resources, and so on. But they are also fundamentally spaces for data extraction. As Tarleton Gillespie puts it, platforms are "built on an infrastructure . . . for processing data for customer service, advertising, and profit" that makes them "oriented toward eliciting more data, and more kinds of data, from [their] users." Platforms generally operate without explicit payment. The actual "payment" that the platform operator receives is usually based directly on the data extracted, though often also in part on data-driven advertising. The data "payment" is more interesting than the advertising payment. It can be either the value that the operator generates by packaging and selling to third parties the data it gathers about transactions and users (the commodity value) or the value that the operator raises by giving others access to its data (what we might call the rent value).

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 128