Platform Capitalism and Digital Labour: Value Extraction in the Contemporary Digital Media Economy

Abstract

Digital capitalism is often described either as a clean break with the past or as a continuation of older markets. This article takes a third position: digital capitalism is a reorganisation of capitalist accumulation around platforms, data, attention and digital labour, not a departure from capitalism’s basic logic. The study uses a critical narrative review approach, drawing on Marxian value theory and recent work on platforms, datafication and surveillance. It is anchored by a curated set of publicly reported indicators from institutional and market sources, used as context rather than as a causal test. These show a platform environment that reaches most of humanity, highly concentrated advertising and cloud markets, platform labour as a global phenomenon, and a supposedly weightless economy resting on dense physical infrastructure. The article traces four contradictions: the commodification of unpaid user activity, the material basis of immaterial production, the concentration of market power, and the gap between participation and algorithmic control. The contribution is conceptual. It shows that media business models usually treated as separate, including advertising, subscriptions, creator monetisation, in-game spending and platform commissions, share one logic: user activity is captured as attention, measured as data and converted into revenue. New media therefore function as economic infrastructures for value extraction.