The mechanism of commodification involves platforms transforming online and offline objects, activities, emotions and ideas into tradable commodities. These commodities are valued through four different types of currency: attention, data, users and money. Commodification is intensified by mechanisms of datafication, as the massive amount of user data is collected and processed by online platforms.

This provides insight into users' interests, preferences and needs at particular moments in time. It also ties into mechanisms of selection, as these users are connected with personalized services and advertisements. Commodification includes, but does not equal, the business models of singular platforms.

Rather, the mechanism plays out in the multi-sided markets created through the platform ecosystem, which connects the infrastructural core with sectoral platforms. Commodification mechanisms are simultaneously empowering and disempowering to users. The connector platforms allow individual users to market their personal assets or experiences online, be it their apartments, ride, eyewitness report or video.

They help commodify users' activity, enabling users to become entrepreneurs in their own right. On the other hand, the same platform mechanisms of commodification involve the exploitation of cultural labour, the labour of users and on-demand service workers. Furthermore, these mechanisms lead to a concentration of economic power in the hands of a few platform owners and operators who act as aggregators and gatekeeping mediators.