Abstract: The prosperity of Internet sports industry has led to the change of users' communication behavior and identity, as a result, their communication behavior has changed into the labor behavior of sports digital capital appreciation and expansion, and their identity has also changed from users to laborers. Taking the research path of Marxist political economy, this study explores the user labor issue in Internet sports communication, then constructs a political-economic research paradigm of sports communication in the Internet Era.The results show that: sports digital labor is a process that Internet sports media occupy sports users' digital labor products free of charge and turn users into goods and labor. In the form of user labor, media platforms integrate users' labor behavior into the structure of platform commercialization to obtain labor value by means of crowdsourcing, game laboring, emotional commercialization. In view of this, this study can provide some enlightenment for sports users to seek the strategy of free struggle and realize the healthy development of sports platform.

Key words: sports communication, sports user, digital labor, the Internet Era, political economy of communication