Timothy Taylor: The renaissance of this sentiment seems to trade back to a comment from the Metafilter website back in 2010:
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.posted by blue_beetle at 1:41 PM on August 26, 2010.
Taylor: But the first clear enunciation of the aphorism that the audience of mass media is the product, not the customer, seems to date back to a 7-minute 1973 movie by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman called "Television Delivers People" (and watchable with the magic of YouTube). The movie is almost entirely a slow scroll of text, one sentence at a time, with spaces between the sentences (to allow time for your deeper contemplation) and muzak playing in the background. It's the kind of movie you would watch in modern art museum. The scroll starts like this:
"The product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience.
Television delivers people to an advertiser.
There is no such thing as mass media in the United States except for television.
Mass media means that a medium can deliver masses of people.
Commercial television delivers 20 million people a minute.
In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold.
It is the consumer who is consumed.
You are the product of t.v.
You are delivered to the advertiser, who is the customer.
He consumes you.
The viewer is not responsible for programming------
You are the end product.
You are the end product delivered en masse to the advertiser.
You are the product of t.v."
Keep in mind also Derek Powazek's elegant dismantling of this truism:
https://powazek.com/posts/3229
and
https://powazek.com/posts/3250
"You are not the product. You’re a smart person making an educated decision about which companies you trust with your time, attention, and contributions"