This article discusses the many distinct conceptions of labor at play in the digital media and communication literature. Joining recent studies, it critiques the scarcity of research on the gendered dimension of digital labor and suggests communication as a missing link to understanding the role of everyday interactions in the digital economy. In doing so, it specifies relational communication as a particularly important but also under-researched aspect of social reproductive labor and argues for a re-conceptualization of the sociological concept of “the second shift”, by introducing “the digital shift”. Lastly, the article charts the implications of increasingly datafied digital communication, and debates if and how the commodification and monetization of relational communication can be understood as exploitation that reproduces and reinforces existing inequalities. Thereby, the article pushes feminist critiques from the outskirts to the center of critical data studies.