you are the product

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

This is a quote about television advertising from the 1970s. The earliest known reference is from this YouTube video.

The original quote actually is, "The Product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience."

Television Delivers People by Richard Serra

1973 | 00:05:55 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 | Video

Television Delivers People is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power—the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo. While canned Muzak plays, a scrolling text denounces the corporate masquerade of commercial television to reveal the structure of profit that greases the wheels of the media industry. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world. By appropriating the medium he is criticizing—using television, in effect, against itself—Serra employs a characteristic strategy of early, counter-corporate video collectives—a strategy that remains integral to video artists committed to a critical dismantling of the media’s political and ideological stranglehold.