Economizing attention: Markets and barter in video advertising platforms

Digital video advertising has become the world's largest platform-economized form of visibility, yet it remains strikingly opaque to viewers and underexamined by social scientists. This paper examines how digital video advertising economies are produced and maintained across platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Meta, and Netflix. Drawing on a multi-method study, it analyzes how impressions are assembled, stabilized, and monetized within the computational supply chains of digital video. The paper argues that video ad platforms are not mere multi-sided markets but stacked economization processes. At their base lies barter, through which viewers exchange attention, behavioral data, and cognitive labor for access and entertainment. To specify the objects exchanged in these asymmetric relations, the paper introduces the concept of the dyad: paired goods that supply the raw materials of digital video advertising markets. Building on this foundation, marketization processes transform fleeting attention into measurable, comparable, and tradable impressions through technical rules, visibility thresholds, and device-level constraints. The paper concludes that digital video advertising is best understood as a set of stacked-economization platforms organizing contemporary visibility, with significant regulatory and environmental consequences.