“The productive of audience labor” is a key point of audience labor theory, which caused debates among western academe. In order to fgure out this question, this article combs through the “active audience” concept from the perspective of political economy of communities, aims to describe the theoretical supposition, demonstrating methods, arguments and debates of audience labor theory. This article considers that it is a misinterpretation that audience labor theory is a kind of economic determinism with passive audience argument. Actually, the theories of audience labor emphasis the activeness of audiences, and regard audiences as the “true producers of meaning”. The theories of “Prosumer commodity”, “You media” and “Philia” reveal that audiences are involved in the new digital economy circulation, working for digital production, consumption and marketing. Meanwhile, digital audience labor is productive labor that produce surplus value. Ads produce the “use-value promise” of commodity, and implement value practice by affecting practical consciousness. However, this theory emphasis the binary opposition between working individuals and oppressive powers from political economy, which ignore that working individual himself has to determine its own meaning in the capital logic mediated society