In a 'publish or perish' culture, scholarly communication is inextricable from the mechanisms of prestige and precarity that define and shape academic labour. Today, the labour of scholars is made valuable in new ways as informal practices of sharing research are made profitable and measurable as data. This presentation focuses on the business models of platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate to explore these processes of datafication and their impact on methods and metrics of scholarly communication. The success of these platforms reminds us that scholars are not exempt from the pressures of platformed sociality and the new forms of visibility it produces.