Platforms and Cultural Production - Poell, Nieborg & Duffy

CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Introduction
Platforms and Platformization
Cultural Producers and Other Complementors
Argument and Plan of the Book
Notes
Part I: Institutional Changes
2 Markets
Introduction
Old and New Regimes of Economic Power
Platform Economics
Platform Evolution and Ecosystems
Becoming a Complementor
Conclusion
Notes
3 Infrastructure
Introduction
Platforms and Infrastructuralization
Platforms as Components-based Data Infrastructures
Infrastructural Integration by Complementors
Conclusion
Notes
4 Governance
******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks*******

Introduction
Platform Governance
Regulation
Curation
Moderation
Navigating Platform Governance
Conclusion
Notes
Part II: Shifting Cultural Practices
5 Labor
Introduction
Platform Precarity
Invisibility
Individuality
Insecurity
Inequality
Conclusion
Notes
6 Creativity
Introduction
Tensions
Nichi ication
Metri ication
Branded Content
Authenticity
Conclusion
Notes
7 Democracy
Introduction

Democratic ideals and tensions
Access
Diversity
Protection
Truthfulness
Conclusion
Notes
8 Conclusion: Power
Institutional Power
Productive Power
Variations
Note
References
Index
End User License Agreement

Platforms and Cultural
Production
Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy
polity

Copyright © Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy 2022
The right of Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy to be identi ied as Authors of
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First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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Preface
The development and rapid uptake of digital platforms like YouTube,
TikTok, Instagram, and WeChat are profoundly recon iguring cultural
production around the globe. Indeed, recent transformations in the
cultural industries are staggering: longstanding – or “legacy” – media
organizations are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new
industrial formations – live-streaming, social media entertainment, and
podcasting, to name but a few – are evolving at breakneck speed.
Platform companies such as Facebook, Google, and Tencent may not
impact every industry segment or region equally; some are barely
impacted at all, but when they are, changes tend to be swift and drastic.
What follows is our attempt to make sense of these changes, while
being mindful of the continuities with earlier forms of cultural
production.
Although our names appear on its cover, this book is very much the
outcome of an ongoing series of conversations with a global network of
scholars and students. Collaborating with colleagues in workshops,
conferences, and special journal collections made writing the book not
just a process of creation, but an equally inspiring means of learning.
Hence, it seems only itting to start by brie ly recounting this process.
The project began as an attempt by two of us to develop a conceptual
framework to study what we call “the platformization of cultural
production” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). When discussing our respective
research on games and news production, we noticed that the uptake of
digital platforms like Facebook and Apple’s app store was triggering
similar shifts in the creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization
practices of these two industries. Yet, we could not ind a
comprehensive approach that allowed us to study and explain such
changes across these industry segments. We could, however, draw
relevant insights from three research traditions: software studies,
critical political economy, and business studies. By bringing these
literatures into conversation with one another, we developed our initial
framework to study how cultural producers organize their operations
around platforms, foregrounding changes in markets, infrastructures,
and governance.

Owing to the substantial institutional variation between different paths
of platformization, Thomas and David invited Brooke, Stuart
Cunningham, and Robert Prey to join them on a panel dealing with
platforms and cultural production at the 2017 Association of Internet
Researchers (AoIR) conference in Tartu, Estonia. Sharing their
respective research on the in luencer economy, social media
entertainment, and the music industry, these panelists helped to
demonstrate that, while platformization involves similar changes in
markets, infrastructures, and governance, there are also marked
differences in how cultural producers become – what we started
referring to as – platform-dependent (Poell et al., 2017). More
importantly, this conversation demonstrated the limits of our initial
conceptual framework to account for such variation; in particular, it
overlooked the particular labor, creative, and democratic practices that
emerge in platform-dependent modes of cultural production.
To broaden the scope of inquiry, Brooke joined the project. The three of
us decided to solicit research on a wide variety of industry segments
and geographical contexts, as well as on the gendered, classed, and
racialized speci icity of platform-dependent modes of cultural
production. We were fortunate that Zizi Papacharissi, editor-in-chief of
Social Media + Society, agreed to host two special collections in the
journal, which gave us a productive forum through which to vastly
expand the conversation concerning the relationship between
platforms and cultural production. The response to our call for papers
far exceeded our expectations. Given the diversity of contributing
scholars, as well as the urgency of the topic at hand, we sought to bring
the authors together to discuss a irst full draft of their papers. Hence,
in October 2018, we convened at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and
Technology in Toronto. In the intimate setting of the Centre’s historical
Coach House, surrounded by old images and book covers from Canada’s
famed media theorist, we spent two intense days exchanging ideas,
soliciting guidance, and providing feedback. These critical discussions
proved enormously productive in bringing the papers into conversation
with each other. After a year-long process of revisions and external peer
review, the twenty-six contributions were published in two special
collections of Social Media + Society, in November 2019 and August
2020 (Duffy et al., 2019; Nieborg, Duffy, Poell, 2020).

The collections were speci ically focused on the industrial creation,
distribution, marketing, and monetization of cultural content. The
articles, moreover, spanned a wide range of segments and genres that
included live-streaming, booktubing, game and app development, music
streaming, podcasting, social media content creation, webtoons,
internet-distributed television, public service media, and the digital
vintage economy, among others. The geographic terrain covered was
similarly diverse and involved instances of cultural production across
Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the
Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US.
Both roused and energized by our interactions with these contributors
and their work, we realized that we needed to take this project to its
logical conclusion; hence, the idea for this book was born.
Our ambition with this book is to advance the theoretical framework
we introduced in our initial New Media & Society article published in
2018. This framework is developed further in the irst half of the book
and is now recast as an institutional perspective on platformization. At
the same time, we are committed to doing justice to the wide variety of
emerging cultural practices that can be observed across platforms and
regions of the world. These emerging practices are just as much part
and parcel of the processes of platformization as are institutional
changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance. From the
perspective developed in the second half of the book, platformization
involves vital shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and democracy in
the cultural industries. Overall, the book aims to provide researchers
and students working at the intersection of platforms and the cultural
industries with a comprehensive framework to systematically examine
and compare the particular industry segments and practices that they
are studying.
We are thankful to the many colleagues and students who made this
journey with us. We would like to express our gratitude irst and
foremost to a number of colleagues who generously helped us with
their critical comments and generative ideas: Amanda Lotz, José van
Dijck, Bernhard Rieder, and Dwayne Winseck. We are also thankful to
our students, especially Maggie MacDonald and Ouejdane Sabbah, who
read and commented on the irst draft of the manuscript. Furthermore,

we would like to thank the contributors to the Social Media + Society
special collections, who provided us with new insights and rich case
studies on which to draw: Arturo Arriagada, Sarah Banet-Weiser,
Sophie Bishop, Tiziano Bonini, Robyn Caplan, Aymar Jean Christian,
Samantha Close, David Craig, Stuart Cunningham, Faithe Day, Mark
Dı́az, Stefanie Duguay, Karin van Es, Maxwell Foxman, Alessandro
Gandini, Tarleton Gillespie, Alison Hearn, David Hesmondhalgh, Emily
Hund, Francisco Ibá ñ ez, Mark R. Johnson, Ellis Jones, Daniel Joseph, Ji-
Hyeon Kim, Jeroen de Kloet, Tamara Kneese, Jian Lin, Jeremy Wade
Morris, Annemarie Navar-Gill, Victoria O’Meara, Michael Palm, William
Clyde Partin, Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, Caitlin Petre, Robert Prey,
Andreas Rauh, Marc Steinberg, John L. Sullivan, José Miguel Tomasena,
Cynthia Wang, Jamie Woodcock, Chris J. Young, and Jun Yu.
Thanks as well go to the tutorial students, whose feedback helped us to
enhance the focus of the book at an early stage of its conception: Lukas
Beckenbauer, Jueling Hu, Daphne Idiz, Vanessa Richter, and Ziwen Tang.
The students of the research master Media Studies at the University of
Amsterdam, meanwhile, provided rich feedback on the irst draft of the
manuscript in the course of Research Practices in Media Studies (2020–
1). Additionally, we are grateful to Mary Savigar, Sarah Dancy, Ellen
MacDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer from Polity, who patiently
and steadily guided and supported us through the writing and
production process. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity
of a number of institutions that sponsored this project: the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the
Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), the Cornell Center
for Social Sciences (CCSS), the McLuhan Centre for Culture and
Technology, Queensland University of Technology, the University of
Amsterdam, the University of Toronto, and Cornell University.
Collectively, such support made for an all the more generative
collaborative process by allowing us to work together in person – at
least, until most of the world became gripped by COVID-19. To this end,
we would like to close by expressing our appreciation to the family
members, friends, and colleagues who provided support,
encouragement, and patience, especially as the trials of researching and
writing a book intensi ied under the weight of a global pandemic.

Heartfelt thanks, in particular, go to Emma, Jonathan, and Raphael Poell,
Robert Shea Terrell, and Leslie Pilszak.
Amsterdam, Toronto, Ithaca, 2021

1
Introduction
“Big brands fund terror,” read the frontpage of the British daily
newspaper The Times on February 9, 2017; below the arresting
headline was a screengrab of an online ad that – unbeknownst to the
client – appeared in a YouTube video openly endorsing jihadists
(Mostrous, 2017). According to The Times investigation, YouTube’s
automated system of placing ads had paired promotions for consumer
products and charitable organizations with videos championing radical
and terrorist groups, including the Islamic State and Combat 18, a pro-
Nazi faction. Several weeks later, the Guardian followed up with a
report on the six- igure sums that “hate preachers” had generated from
YouTube’s unwitting arsenal of ad sponsors – among them household
brands like L’Oré al, Sainsbury’s, Nissan, and even the Guardian itself
(Neate, 2017). Indeed, the report chronicled a kaleidoscopic range of
extremist content funded through the platform: anti-Western
propaganda from a Sala i Muslim preacher, videos by former Ku Klux
Klan imperial wizard David Duke, and anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic
sentiments expressed by a fundamentalist pastor.
Asked to respond to the high-pro ile social media scandal, Ronan
Harris, a representative for YouTube’s parent company Google, offered:
“We believe strongly in the freedom of speech and expression on the
web – even when that means we don’t agree with the views expressed”
(Neate, 2017). While Harris went on to clarify that Google’s policies
prohibit “videos with hate speech, gory or offensive content” from
appearing adjacent to ads, he conceded that “we don’t always get it
right.” Dissatis ied with Google’s rhetorical de lection, the Guardian –
along with the BBC and the UK government – subsequently pulled all
advertising from the video-sharing platform.
This move was among the catalysts for the so-called 2017
“Adpocalypse” – a term invoked by YouTube creators to describe the
concerted efforts of brands to boycott YouTube advertising. In total, as
many as 250 brands from the US and the UK threatened to halt their
digital advertising campaigns. Confronted with such collective

pushback, Google quickly changed YouTube’s policies to be more
“advertiser-friendly” (Kumar, 2019). Among the changes in YouTube’s
governance framework was an option for advertisers to exclude broad
categories of content from appearing alongside their ads. These
categories ranged from the descriptive – “live-streaming video” – to the
eminently subjective “sensitive social issues,” de ined as
“discrimination and identity relations, scandals and investigations,
reproductive rights, irearms and weapons, and more” (YouTube,
2020a).
While these changes appeased advertisers – at least temporarily – they
introduced considerable angst and uncertainty into the professional
lives of cultural producers, in particular those creators vying with one
another to earn income from the oft-elusive YouTube Partner Program.
Many creators abruptly found their content “demonetized,” meaning
they would receive limited or no ad revenue in exchange for audience
attention (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). Creators who provided mere
commentary on “sensitive” social issues were especially susceptible to
inancial retribution. The same applied to creators whose content
contained “strong profanity used multiple times … even if bleeped or
for comedy, documentary, news, or educational purposes” (YouTube,
2020b).
In addition to demonetizing content deemed contentious, YouTube
substantially raised the threshold for participation in the Partner
Program: only channels with at least 1,000 subscribers that had
ratcheted up more than 4,000 public watch hours in the preceding year
were allowed to participate (YouTube, 2020c). This policy update made
it especially dif icult for newcomers to generate income, while barring
creators with smaller followings altogether. The exclusionary nature of
YouTube’s advertising program was exacerbated by a new rule which
stated that demonetized clips were only eligible to be reevaluated by a
human reviewer if they had a minimum of 1,000 views within a week
(YouTube, 2020c). For context, given the mind-blowing amount of
material on YouTube – 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute1 –
content categorization and labeling take place through automated,
rather than human, systems of content moderation (Covington et al.,
2016; see also, Kumar, 2019; Roberts, 2019).

Some of YouTube’s most visible creators publicly vocalized their
indignation over the revised guidelines (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). For
instance, Philip DeFranco, Ethan Klein, and Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg,
who run popular commentary channels catering to more than 115
million subscribers, all claimed to have lost a major part of their
advertising earnings (Weiss, 2017a). Adding to their frustration was
YouTube’s failure to share information about the demonetization
process. As Ethan and Hila Klein of the popular sketch comedy channel
h3h3Productions maintained in an interview: “There’s no report like,
‘This video that you made got demonetized because you did this, this,
or this’” (Weiss, 2017b).
To be sure, the impact of YouTube’s changed advertising policies and
Partner Program guidelines went beyond these vocal superstars. The
stricter criteria for joining the Partner Program meant that creators
with relatively small audiences were demonetized en masse. Moreover,
the automated iltering of anything that the system deemed “advertiser-
unfriendly content” put entire categories of videos at risk. All video
clips of the popular game series Assassin’s Creed, for instance, were
instantly demonetized because they contained the term “assassin”
(Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 112). Similarly, The Great War channel,
which provides educational videos about the First World War, saw
many of its videos lagged for review (Burgess & Green, 2018: 150). An
especially fraught dimension is the issue of viewpoint bias, wherein
YouTube’s automated iltering unfairly targets creators who produce
“culturally progressive content”; in the case of LGBTQ creators, this
means that “any representation of their identity could be deemed
sexually suggestive and ad-unsafe” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 113;
see also Duguay, 2019). Similarly, in June 2020, a group of Black
creators accused YouTube of racist practices, claiming that the platform
uses its automated iltering mechanisms to “restrict, censor and
denigrate” Black creators (Solsman & Nieva, 2020; see also Parham,
2020).
With their revenues dwindling before their eyes, some beleaguered
YouTubers shifted their time and attention to other platforms. Ethan
and Hila Klein, for instance, announced they would redirect their
programming to the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform Twitch,

which offers creators more dynamic mechanisms of monetizing their
content (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). Others started to use Patreon,
which allows fans to support creators directly through subscriptions
(Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). But even though some creators managed to
generate revenue across multiple platforms, the creator community can
scarcely afford to ignore YouTube completely. In terms of reach and
revenue, Twitch and other competing video-sharing and live-streaming
platforms remain in YouTube’s hulking shadow.
The reason to retell the story of the Adpocalypse is because of both its
speci icity – that is, it illustrates the evolution of a new industry
segment, ostensibly emerging at the interface of Hollywood and Silicon
Valley (Cunningham & Craig, 2019) – and its broader import. The case
thus testi ies to a wider movement wherein cultural producers become
dependent on platforms and, consequently, struggle to defend their
position and interests. Like many other platforms, YouTube is subject to
powerful network effects, meaning that an increase in viewers,
advertisers, and creators makes the platform more valuable to each of
the other groups, which in turn further in lates the number of viewers,
advertisers, and creators. Because of its entrenched position, when
YouTube exerts power by unilaterally deciding to reward and/or punish
particular types of videos, it directly impacts thousands – if not
hundreds of thousands – of cultural workers. At the same time, the
combination of YouTube’s business model and the implementation of
its governance framework are one of a kind. Not all platforms rely on
advertising revenue, nor do their systems of moderation adhere to
uniform content standards.
In this book, we examine how the relations between platforms and
cultural producers emerge and take shape throughout key phases of the
production process: namely cultural creation, distribution, marketing,
and monetization. Indeed, platform-wrought shifts in cultural
production raise many questions, among them: how are the activities of
cultural producers – from individual content creators and game app
developers to news organizations and record labels – recon igured
when they integrate platforms into their operations? How does
alignment and integration with platforms impact the economic
sustainability of particular forms of cultural production? What types of

content and services can and cannot be created, distributed, and
monetized through platforms? What kinds of cultural content are made
more or less visible by platforms? How does this affect the horizon of
cultural expression – and for whom? And, inally, what are the
consequences for the democratic character of cultural production and
the distribution of power in the cultural realm?
Addressing these questions, we will show how the interactions
between platforms and cultural producers unfold in ways that differ
markedly across cultural industry segments and geographic regions.
Platformization is not a single process of transformation, but, rather,
constitutive of a wide variety of shifts shaped by the interactions
between particular platforms and speci ic cultural producers. This book
provides the conceptual tools to both examine these interactions and
re lect on their implications. In so doing, we aim to develop a common
language for scholars from different disciplines to compare and connect
their research on speci ic instances of platform-based cultural
production.

Platforms and Platformization
The interaction between platforms and cultural producers generates a
process that Anne Helmond (2015) has described as platformization. In
the context of cultural production, platformization can be understood
as the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and
governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the
organization of cultural practices of labor, creativity, and democracy
around these platforms (Nieborg & Poell, 2018).2 This section and the
next will discuss how platforms and cultural producers are involved in
the shifts in institutional relations and cultural practices at the heart of
platformization. We start by focusing on platforms before directing
attention to cultural producers and cultural production. The inal section
of this chapter lays out the central argument of the book and previews
its organization.
Given the book’s conceptual focus on the cultural industries, it seems
important to irst delineate what is and what is not a platform in the
context of cultural production. Building on business studies, critical
political economy, and software studies, we de ine platforms as data
infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern
interactions between end-users and content and service providers (Poell
et al., 2019).3 Following this conceptualization of platforms, we
therefore understand platformization from an institutional perspective
as the evolution of platform markets, infrastructures, and governance
frameworks.
How platforms operate as institutions can be clearly observed in the
case of YouTube, which allows for “frictionless entry,” or “the ability of
users to quickly and easily join … and begin participating in the value
creation that the platform facilitates” (Parker et al., 2016: 25). In this
way, YouTube constitutes a market – one that aggregates and monetizes
interactions among content creators, advertisers, and end-users (i.e.,
viewers). These interactions are, in turn, afforded by YouTube’s data
infrastructure, which allows creators to seamlessly upload their content
to be hosted on Google’s servers, while simultaneously enabling
advertisers to target particular audience segments. This level of

openness is distinctly different from the gatekeeping strategies
employed by legacy media companies, which, in the words of Clay
Shirky (2008: 98), revolve around “ ilter-then-publish,” as opposed to
the platform strategy of “publish-then- ilter.” The notion of iltering
brings us to the crucial dimension of platform governance. To reduce
friction that may emerge from unclear rules and regulations, YouTube
has set out a governance framework. In its attempt to control and
standardize platform-based interactions, YouTube provides codi ied
rules (e.g., terms of service and creator guidelines) and developer
documentation, as well as stipulations over who can access its tools and
data infrastructure. YouTube, in other words, meets all the criteria of a
platform.
There are also companies in the cultural sector that display
characteristics of platforms and have been referred to as such by
scholars and journalists; we argue, however, that they should be
categorized differently. It is worth bearing in mind that digitization does
not equal platformization. While the New York Times, Net lix, and The
Walt Disney Company collect endless reams of data and use
sophisticated algorithms to curate content, they are not platform
companies (Lobato, 2019; Lotz, 2017). Instead, they should be labeled
as media or entertainment companies, which primarily produce or
license original content and are not directly economically and
infrastructurally accessible to third parties. Video producers – whether
big or small – cannot freely upload their clips to Net lix; the New York
Times primarily uses its own website and apps to distribute its own
news content; and The Walt Disney Company uses its vast library of
intellectual property – from Mickey Mouse to Marvel superheroes –
across its theme parks, TV stations, and digital outlets.
Unlike media companies, platforms give way to what business scholars
call multisided markets, acting as “matchmakers” by connecting
consumers or “end-users,” a wide variety of businesses (advertisers,
content creators, etc.), governments, and nonpro its (Evans &
Schmalensee, 2016). Each group of actors, including end-users,
represents a “side” in the platform market (Gawer & Cusumano, 2002;
Rochet & Tirole, 2003).

Implicit in this economic perspective is the assumption that a platform
is necessarily a for-pro it institution. Of course, there are plenty of
platforms that are not pro it-oriented; this includes those owned and
operated by governments, co-ops, nonpro its or individuals that are not
inevitably based on creating economic value (Sandoval, 2020; Scholz,
2017). However, by virtue of their market valuation, unprecedented
pro its, large userbase, and transnational footprint, platform companies
are widely considered to be “digitally dominant” (Moore & Tambini,
2018). Particularly in the media sector, commercial platforms play a
signi icant role. For this reason, in the remainder of this book we
assume platforms to be for-pro it businesses. We are primarily
interested in the following companies: Google, Apple, Facebook,
Amazon, ByteDance, Spotify, and Tencent. And to be even more precise,
we pay particular attention to the speci ic platforms operated by these
companies, such as Apple’s and Google’s app stores, Amazon’s Twitch,
and Google’s YouTube, as well as the digital advertising ecosystems of
Google and Facebook, the social networking and connectivity apps of
Facebook (Instagram, Messenger), Tencent (WeChat), and ByteDance
(Douyin/TikTok), and the cloud hosting services provided by Amazon,
Microsoft, and Google.4
Next to the lens of platforms as markets, software and business studies
scholars have theorized the unique status of platforms as
infrastructures through the notion of “platform boundaries” (Gawer,
2020; Helmond et al., 2019). In line with their for-pro it mandate,
platform companies invariably seek growth and can do so by opening
up the boundaries of their infrastructures. To that end, they have to
“resource” external producers by providing tools, allowing for
technological integration and, in some cases, the marketing and
monetization of content (Eaton et al., 2015; Ghazawneh & Henfridsson,
2013). By providing outsiders access to their data infrastructure, via
plug-ins, for example, platform companies enable external producers to
extend a platform’s functionality far beyond its own boundaries and
into wider web and app ecosystems (Helmond, 2015; Nieborg &
Helmond, 2019). At the same time, to retain control over what is
distributed and by whom, platform boundaries need to be “secured”
(Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013). Platform companies do this through

a variety of governance strategies, which we conceptualize in Chapter 4
as regulation, curation, and moderation.
Platformization involves not only what we call institutional shifts in
markets, infrastructures, and governance, but also changes in the
practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. Platforms allow cultural
workers to ind new avenues to audiences and visibility. Yet, like
traditional labor markets in the cultural industries, labor in platform
markets is also characterized by precarity and inequalities in terms of
gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and more (Christian et al., 2020;
Gerrard & Thornham, 2020; Patel, 2020). Moreover, while platforms
regularly generate new genres and engender diverse business models,
it is also clear that they constrain the creative process in various ways –
not the least of which is through the iltering of content and by
privileging particular forms of cultural expression. Finally,
platformization opens up new spaces for contestation and cultural
diversity, but simultaneously exacerbates problems of discrimination,
hate speech, and disinformation – all of which undermine democratic
politics.
A main contribution of this book is to show how these shifts,
continuities, and tensions in cultural practices are intricately entangled
with changes in the institutional relations of cultural production. The
chapter’s opening example illuminated some of these entanglements.
For instance, the abrupt modi ications in YouTube’s advertising policies
and monetization programs directly impacted creators’ visibility and,
consequently, revenue. Here, we can see how cultural producers’
dependence on platforms leaves them at the mercy of the latter’s
decision-making, thus enhancing the precarity of their labor. At the
same time, the Adpocalypse revealed laborers’ expressions of agency,
particularly when they felt incentivized to develop alternative means of
content distribution and revenue generation through sponsorship deals
or subscriptions. More broadly, the Adpocalypse showed the complex
balance cultural producers have to maintain on platforms between self-
expression, audience interests, advertiser needs, and platform
governance. How exactly the balance between these different forces is
organized deeply affects the nature of cultural content and the space for
creative expression. And directly related to this is the balancing act that

touches on crucial dimensions of democratic politics by shaping public
processes of identity construction and representation.

Cultural Producers and Other
Complementors
As the preceding section suggests, platformization is not merely a top-
down process dictated by platforms. It is also steered and driven by the
tactics of cultural producers, both individually and in networked
formations. The Adpocalypse illustrates how creators were able to
contest platform policies by publicly and collectively voicing their
discontent, seeking alternative forms of income, or simply abandoning
the platform altogether. Within platform ecosystems such as YouTube’s,
different stakeholders – cultural producers, advertisers, and data
intermediaries, among others – struggle to defend or promote their
interests, pushing the platform operator – Google in this case – to adapt
its infrastructures and governance framework accordingly.
Examining these kinds of interactions, the relationships that are most
relevant to us are those between platform companies, cultural
producers, advertisers, intermediaries, and the billions of end-users
who consume, share, and engage with cultural products through
platforms. We will de ine these actors in relational terms, allowing us to
explore how platform power is challenged and negotiated, and how
cultural producers gain agency in relation to platforms. Developing
such a relational perspective, this section starts by de ining cultural
producers and cultural industries, followed by introducing other
stakeholders. After that, we will look at the differences between
cultural industries and between geographic regions.
Building on David Hesmondhalgh’s (2019: 15) de inition of cultural
industries, we focus on the “industrial production and circulation of
texts.” Traditionally, these industries include, among others,
broadcasting, ilm, music, print publishing, games, and advertising. The
industrial mode of cultural production is often distinguished from
“vernacular creativity,” which refers to the “everyday practices of
material and symbolic creativity” (Burgess, 2007: iii). As the opening
example of YouTube creators illustrates, the boundary between
industrial and vernacular forms of cultural production is often luid and

dif icult to draw on platforms. We will return to this thorny analytical
issue at the end of this section.
Cultural producer is a similarly fraught term, but we use it to refer to
the broad range of actors and organizations engaged in the creation,
distribution, marketing, and monetization of symbolic artefacts
(Bourdieu, 1984). An individual can be a cultural producer, but so, too,
can traditional, or what we will hereafter refer to as “legacy,”
institutions, such as newspapers, ilm and television producers, record
labels, and game publishers. We are mindful of the fact that each of
these industry segments has its own histories and institutional
practices (Benson & Hallin, 2007; Herbert et al., 2020; Miè ge, 2011;
Holt & Perren, 2011). Traditionally, individual cultural producers or
“creative workers” – for example, journalists, musicians, authors –
played a vital role in these industrial formations. Platforms potentially
enable individual producers to igure even more prominently, as the
former furnish new markets for cultural goods, which are not only
accessible to legacy institutions, but also to individual cultural
entrepreneurs. An example of the latter are, of course, the “creators”
who populate YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch.
The book aims to critically examine the implications of platformization
for the position and precarity of creative workers. Similarly, we are
concerned with the creative autonomy and economic sustainability of
legacy industry actors and institutions. What happens to newspapers,
record labels, and game publishers as platforms become more
dominant? These institutional actors have been considered vital for
democracy, enabling cultural, economic, and political participation
(Hermes, 2006).
A second category of industry actors active on platforms are cultural
intermediaries, a term used to describe the range of participants that
broker and facilitate cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization through platforms. As Timothy Havens (2014: 40) points
out, cultural intermediaries “serve as one of the prime vehicles through
which organizational priorities ind their way into representational
practices” (see also Lobato, 2016: 350). Some of these intermediaries –
such as advertisers, data intermediaries, and talent agencies – existed
well before the advent of platforms; others, meanwhile, appear to be

new or provide services that are highly speci ic to platform-based
cultural production.
First, there are marketing and monetization intermediaries, including
those that support cultural producers’ efforts to generate income via
advertising. The digital advertising ecosystem is notoriously complex
and features a diverse cast of third party services, including advertisers,
advertising agencies, advertising networks, data intermediaries, and
media buyers (Crain, 2019; Helles et al., 2020). Such diversity makes it
dif icult to assess how these different types of companies shape
particular marketing and monetization practices. Owing in part to this
opacity, creators may turn to revenue streams outside advertising –
from subscriptions and microtransactions (e.g., in-app purchases, tips,
and donations) or any number of entrepreneurial ventures (Duguay,
2019; Johnson & Woodcock, 2019; Partin, 2020). Each of these revenue
models is associated with their own categories of intermediaries, such
as payment providers and crowdfunding platforms.
Second, new industrial formations have emerged to help cultural
producers optimize their offerings across various platforms. As with
marketing and monetization, optimization has a longer history with
lineages in legacy media organizations’ efforts to “know the audience”
(Ang, 1996; Baym, 2013; Turow, 1997); however, platforms compel
cultural producers to anticipate the incessant revision of cultural
content (Arriagada & Ibá ñ ez, 2020; Morris et al., 2021). Of particular
relevance is a range of companies that employ platform data for search
engine and social media optimization (Halavais, 2017; Ziewitz, 2019).
Many news organizations, for example, use audience analytics tools
provided by companies such as Chartbeat, NewsWhip, Parse.ly,
Outbrain Engage, and CrowdTangle, which cull data from the dominant
social media platforms and search engines. These tools support
editorial decision-making and content distribution strategies by
providing detailed insight into how users engage with their content
(Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016; Petre, 2018). Also of interest are the many
talent management agencies and what were brie ly known as
“multichannel networks,” which have sprung up around platforms such
as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to assist creators in organizing

content creation and distribution, and managing their contacts with
brands and platforms (Abidin, 2018; Lobato, 2016; Stoldt et al., 2019).
This great diversity in institutions and actors is con lated when cultural
producers and other third parties become dependent on platforms.
From the perspective of platform companies, cultural producers,
cultural intermediaries, and advertisers are all considered to be
complementors. This term, which we will use throughout this book, has
emerged from business studies and refers to “independent providers of
complementary products to mutual customers” (McIntyre & Srinivasan,
2017: 143). Delivering content and services to end-users and other
third parties means that these actors “complement” the products and
services provided by the platform.
Since the 2010s, in their role as complementors, cultural producers
have played an important role in the growth of many platforms. For
instance, newspapers, game publishers, social media creators, and
other cultural producers have made platforms more relevant
destinations for end-users. Some platforms, such as YouTube, are fully
dependent on cultural producers. Yet, for other platforms such as
Facebook, the importance of speci ic cultural industry segments, such
as journalism and games, has changed over time (Nieborg & Helmond,
2019). One important lesson coming out of recent analyses of platform
economics is that the more dominant a platform company becomes, the
less bargaining power cultural producers – game publishers, creators,
and news organizations – seem to have (Rietveld et al., 2020).
Crucially, while our central focus remains on cultural production, it is
important to acknowledge the role of cultural consumption in the
process of platformization. Indeed, one of the unique aspects of
multisided markets is that they allow consumers to enter markets as
part of seamless “side switching,” or “when those who consume goods
or services produced on the platform begin to produce goods and
services for others to consume” (Parker et al., 2016: 25). This is by no
means a novel practice in the cultural industries; neologisms like “co-
creator,” “pro-am,” and “produsage” capture some of the early euphoria
surrounding the digitally enabled melding of production and
consumption (Banks, 2013; Bruns, 2008). On platforms, the distinction
between end-users and cultural producers remains ambiguous, in

terms of economics and incentives, as well as in practices of labor,
creativity, and democracy.
While such blurred boundaries can in part be attributed to increased
access, they can also be understood through the economics of
information: digital content is a “public” or “nonrival” good; “its
consumption by one person does not make it any less available for
consumption by another” (Benkler, 2006: 36). Historically, to monetize
content, cultural producers have been quite aggressive in creating
arti icial scarcity by exerting their copyrights. Platform companies,
however, have made the “sharing” of content one of their key features,
undermining attempts to maintain scarcity (John, 2016). Second, for all
of the novelty ascribed to user-generated content, it is more apt to
recognize that the occupational boundary between an amateur and a
professional cultural producer has always been rather fuzzy
(Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Platforms have only made it easier to switch
between these two roles. Today’s TikTok user could, theoretically at
least, become tomorrow’s viral sensation. Because the barriers to enter
platform markets are considered to be so low, those who ind fame
online seem to do so overnight. A never-ending stream of aspirational
stories feeds into the powerful meritocratic myth that any talented
individual who can design an app, create a TikTok dance, or produce a
podcast has a chance to become a star (Duffy & Wissinger, 2017).
For platform companies, there is a clear incentive to keep the boundary
between unremunerated end-users and paid professionals vague.
Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok thrive on user-generated
attention and data, while the companies that manage these platforms –
Facebook and ByteDance – typically do not pay creators in advance, nor
do they license intellectual property.5 Doing so would introduce
signi icant risk and uncertainty into their business models, let alone cut
deep into their bottom line. Consequently, users collectively engage in
billions of hours of unpaid or “free labor” (Terranova, 2000). Or, put in
stark political economics terms, all platform-based activity creates
value, and all vernacular creativity is commodi ied by the platform (van
Dijck, 2013). To facilitate this business model, platform corporations
systematically collect and process user data, which they selectively feed
or sell to complementors or other platforms (Couldry & Mejı́as, 2019;

Turow, 2011). As we will see in following chapters, platforms blur the
boundaries between end-users and cultural producers not only in
economic terms, but also in an infrastructural and governmental sense.
Different industries and regions

While the relations between platforms, complementors, and end-users
can be analyzed in broad terms, the particular ways that
platformization unfolds across the various segments comprising the
cultural industries, as well as within speci ic geographic regions, are
markedly diverse. This diversity is in part due to the strategic choices of
cultural producers, but it also owes much to the “nature” of speci ic
modes of cultural production, including the historical trajectories of
particular industry segments in particular cultural contexts (Miè ge,
2011). Platformization is by no means an all-encompassing logic; nor
does it affect all industries equally. The companies that operate major
platforms, such as Alphabet Inc., Facebook, and Apple, are among the
highest valued in the world, but they still compete with, or in some
cases are outmatched by, legacy conglomerates, media companies, and
telecommunication companies.
Platform ecosystems, moreover, evolve unevenly, as do the practices of
their inhabitants. By providing examples from different industry
segments and regions around the globe, this book will illuminate the
considerable variation in the relations between platforms and cultural
producers. Exploring these relations, we make a basic distinction
between platform-dependent and platform-independent cultural
producers. Platform-dependent producers rely on platforms in the
creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization of content and
services. By contrast, platform-independent producers pursue these
activities separately from platforms. As will become clear in the
following chapters, many cultural producers are positioned on the
spectrum somewhere in between platform-dependence and
independence. For example, a digital news organization can be
dependent on platforms for the distribution and marketing of its
content, but they operate independently for the creation and
monetization of content. Thus, when we say either platform-dependent
or platform-independent, we will work to qualify these labels.

Throughout this book we will use three industry segments – social
media, games, and news – to illustrate our analysis and argument. For
instance, the social media creators described in the chapter’s opening –
YouTubers experiencing career uncertainty amid changed platform
guidelines – have tended to be highly platform-dependent. Indeed, as
the Adpocalypse case showed, those creators reliant on YouTube’s
advertising revenue are integrated with its data infrastructure and
subject to its governance frameworks. In this way, many YouTubers are
closely tied to the platform on which they found their main audience –
similar to live streamers on Twitch, fashion and style in luencers on
Instagram, and creators on TikTok. Yet there is evidence that such
extreme forms of platform-dependence are becoming less common,
particularly as content creators seek out new avenues to mitigate the
uncertainty of a platform-dependent career (Cunningham & Craig,
2019; Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021; Glatt, 2021). A few prominent social
media creators have even achieved a semblance of platform-
independence through cross-platform distribution and monetization
strategies, such as working with legacy media companies or talent
management agencies (Abidin, 2018).
The digital games industry, meanwhile, might be thought of as a
prototype of platform-dependence. Before the advent of digital
distribution, platform companies were involved in most aspects of
game development and circulation; as software, games are always
infrastructurally integrated with the hardware or software platform on
which they run (Montfort & Bogost, 2009). Simply put, if you insert a
PlayStation disc into an Xbox, you will not be able to play that game.
Over time, the relationships between tool developers, game publishers,
game developers, and game platform operators changed substantially.
In the early 1980s, individuals and small teams had the ability to
develop and publish titles. However, game publishing formalized
“aggressively” to become a major industry (Keogh, 2019). This
transformation was spurred in part by the development of dedicated
game consoles, such as the Atari VCS and Nintendo Entertainment
System, followed in the 1990s by the PlayStation and Xbox (Kerr, 2017).
While dedicated game consoles are still a key pillar of the game
industry, a number of other platforms have emerged, enabling the
development of entirely new game genres, business models, and

audiences. For instance, a decade ago, Facebook enabled the rise of so-
called “social games,” such as FarmVille and Texas Hold’em Poker. At the
same time, mobile app stores have become an even more lucrative
distribution outlet for game developers of all stripes; in fact, they now
account for nearly half the global games market.
In comparison with social media and games, the news industry, our
third central case, has historically been fully platform-independent. For
decades, major news organizations functioned as so-called “two-sided”
markets themselves, as they connected readers, on one side, with
advertisers, on the other side of the market. In charge of content
creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization, as well as
controlling their own audience data, news organizations could be
considered autonomous (Argentesi & Filistrucchi, 2007). Still, like any
other commercial content producer, news organizations were and still
are subject to external pressures, including market demands and
advertiser expectations. Further – as key intermediaries in public
debates – news publishers have been constantly beleaguered by
political actors (Bennett et al., 2007; McChesney, 2015). In these ways,
autonomy within the news sphere has always been relative. The growth
of platforms presents a new challenge to the independence of news
organizations. Search engines and social media platforms in particular
have taken over the market for digital advertising. At the same time,
news organizations have tried to generate advertising revenue and
capture readers and viewers through platforms. There are, however,
large differences in the level of platform-dependence across the wider
news ecology. Born-digital publishers, such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost,
are highly dependent on platforms, having fully integrated and aligned
their distribution, marketing, and monetization practices with them
(van Dijck et al. 2018). Legacy newspapers have a much more fraught
relationship with platforms. These differences among news
organizations make clear that the relationship between platforms and
cultural producers is both highly contingent and profoundly variable.
Finally, considerable variations in the relations between platforms and
cultural producers can also be observed across geographic regions.
While this book does not systematically explore these variations in
depth – if only because we lack the necessary regional expertise – it

does draw upon international examples, while also pointing to avenues
for further research. Building on our own research, the book primarily
focuses on platforms and cultural production in the US, Western
Europe, and China. Other regions, especially India, Japan, and Southeast
Asia will be brought in to illustrate vital differences and surprising
correspondences in how platformization takes shape. The reason to
include regional examples is to provide a framework with enough
lexibility to develop further case studies and comparisons.
Having de ined the key actors at the center of this inquiry, as well as
considered the variation in the relationships between them, we can
now turn to the book’s core argument. How do the strategies of
platform operators and the tactics of cultural producers mutually
articulate each other? More speci ically, to what extent – and in what
ways – are creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization
recon igured when cultural producers integrate platforms in their
operations?

Argument and Plan of the Book
There is an important backstory to this concern with cultural
production in the digital age. Platforms – and online communication
more generally – have long been associated with a discourse of
democratized cultural production. In the early 2000s, scholars,
beguiled by the possibilities of the internet, contended that then-new
platforms would engender a shift toward a so-called “participatory
culture,” in which every user could potentially express themselves and
secure audiences – essentially becoming a producer in their own right
(Jenkins, 2006, see also Bruns, 2008; Spurgeon et al., 2009). These
scholars pointed out that individuals, from musicians to journalists,
could become active participants in cultural production by bypassing
traditional gatekeepers such as legacy media organizations. From this
perspective, emerging social media and content-sharing platforms, in
combination with the widespread adoption of mobile technologies,
substantially lowered the bar for individuals to produce and widely
distribute cultural content (Shirky, 2008).
This democratization frame has been fueled by the discursive and
institutional self-positioning of platform companies. More than a
decade ago, Tarleton Gillespie (2010: 353) noticed that YouTube and
other platforms situate themselves in relation to different types of
actors by carving “out a role and a set of expectations that is acceptable
to each and also serves their own inancial interests, while resolving or
at least eliding the contradictions between them.” Platform executives,
such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, are particularly well trained in
corporate double-speak, oscillating between hailing Facebook’s users
both as empowered individuals and “consumptive audiences”
(Hoffmann et al., 2018: 210). As research on social imaginaries shows,
this discursive work is done not only by those who work for platform
corporations, but also by scholars, pundits, and consultants (van Dijck
& Nieborg, 2009). Together, they inform how cultural producers, end-
users, and other social actors envision and understand platforms.
In recent years, these imaginaries, what we have elsewhere called
“platform imaginaries,” have been thoroughly criticized (van Es & Poell,

2020). Critical media scholars, in particular, have noted the profound
unevenness of the relationship between platforms and cultural
producers; in particular, the market valuations of platform companies
have increased signi icantly, while platform-dependent cultural
producers remain in highly precarious situations (Baym, 2018; Jarrett,
2014; Kumar, 2016). Cultural producers, in their role as platform
complementors, can experience the sudden loss of audiences and
income any time a platform changes the curation and monetization of
content (Cotter, 2019; O’Meara, 2019; Petre et al., 2019).
While our own work subscribes to and – hopefully – contributes to this
wave of platform critique, it remains unclear how exactly
platformization reshapes cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization. Thus far, researchers have looked at the relationship
between platforms and cultural production from a variety of
disciplinary perspectives, most prominently media industry studies,
software studies, critical political economy, and business studies.
Although these traditions produce important insights on which this
book builds, these are also partial insights. That is because these
research traditions tend to focus on particular elements of what we call
platformization: changes in market relations, the development of data
infrastructures, new forms of governance, the precarity of labor, the
growth of new creative practices, or the impact on democratic politics.
Individual studies also tend to focus either on particular platforms or
on speci ic modes of cultural production. This makes it dif icult to grasp
the variation within and across cultural industries. What is missing is a
holistic approach to the platformization of cultural production (Poell,
2020).
This book offers such an approach by demonstrating that changes in
markets, infrastructures, and governance are intricately entangled with
shifts in labor, creative, and democratic practices. Transformations in
one dimension of platformization cannot be properly understood
without examining related shifts in other dimensions. By exploring how
this process takes shape in different cultural industries, we show that
there are substantial variations among and within industry segments.
Such variations in platform-dependence have large implications not

only for the day-to-day operations of cultural producers, but also for the
cultural commodities that get circulated to networked audiences.
In the irst half of the book, we examine platformization from an
institutional perspective. We argue that this process opens up new
opportunities for cultural producers to ind audiences and generate
revenue, but simultaneously leads to an unprecedented concentration
of economic, infrastructural, and political-cultural power among a few
platform corporations. Power is understood here not simply as
dominance, but rather as mutual, albeit highly unequal, relations of
dependency. From such a relational perspective, power is not held by a
particular actor, but both emerges from and structures unequal
relations between actors (Emirbayer, 1997; Turow, 1997).
Examining the relations of dependence between platforms and cultural
producers, Chapter 2 demonstrates that platformization proceeds
through business model alignment, as cultural producers and other
complementors develop economic strategies geared toward platform
markets. In turn, Chapter 3 discusses how cultural producers integrate
their own infrastructures with oft-invisible platform infrastructures.
We call this process infrastructural integration. Chapter 4, subsequently,
focuses on regulatory standardization as platforms minutely govern
how complementors interact with end-users and other sides in the
platform market. Hence, we can observe how platformization involves a
centralization of economic, infrastructural, and political power.
Analyzing these institutional modes of platformization, these chapters
demonstrate that this process involves a multiplicity of institutional
relations. Platform companies operate their own internal markets, but
they are also always in competition with other platform companies, as
well as telecommunication companies, consumer electronics
manufacturers, and legacy media companies. These internal and
external market relations are closely connected: external market
competition has prompted platform companies to increase the scope of
their operations by entering or even creating new markets. And, vice
versa, the rapid ascent of internal platform markets has spurred the
movement of platform companies into dominant positions in a growing
number of markets, triggering persistent concerns over market
concentration (Moore & Tambini, 2018).

As the chapters in the irst half of the book will demonstrate, a similar
entanglement of institutional relations and centralization of control can
be observed in terms of infrastructures and governance. As with any
other business, platform companies rely on public infrastructures,
especially internet connectivity (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015; Winseck,
2017). At the same time, they invest heavily in their own
infrastructures, for instance (cloud) computing and web servers, and
digital distribution outlets such as app stores. Hence, public and
platform infrastructures cannot be seen as separated. Yet, the
“infrastructuralization of platforms” means that private companies
compete with, and partly replace, public infrastructures, potentially
controlling key nodes of the web and app ecosystems (Plantin et al.,
2018). Finally, national and supranational regulatory frameworks set
the legal boundaries of what can be exchanged on platforms and by
whom. How platform companies interpret those frameworks is a
matter of key concern among scholars, pundits, politicians, and
policymakers. As platforms are becoming increasingly central to
cultural exchange, governance by platforms increasingly shapes the
governance of online spaces more generally (Gillespie, 2018; Gorwa,
2019a; van Dijck et al. 2018).
What adds complexity to the study of these institutional relations is
their inherent dynamism. Changes in the composition and activity of
complementor populations, for instance, prompt platforms to
constantly adapt the organization of their internal markets,
infrastructures, and governance strategies (Rietveld et al., 2020). As a
result of this adjustment process, which we will refer to as platform
evolution, cultural producers have to continuously adjust as well (see,
for instance, Arriagada & Ibá ñ ez, 2020). This constant negotiation was
clearly demonstrated in the Adpocalypse; the threat of advertisers
leaving the platform prompted YouTube to change its Partner Program.
Creators, then, had to scramble either to adjust their content, seek out
other platforms, ind effective ways to challenge abrupt changes in
YouTube’s monetization program, or simply accept the new guidelines.
Thus, the ever-evolving playing ield controlled by platform companies
unceasingly produces new opportunities for cultural producers, but
also generates sudden shifts and potential losses.

The second half of the book examines platformization as shifting
cultural practices, which are deeply enmeshed with the institutional
changes discussed in the book’s irst half. We analyze how speci ic
labor, creative, and democratic practices develop in the interaction
between platforms and cultural producers. Here, power is understood
as productive, circulating in the relations among platforms, cultural
producers, and a wide variety of other complementors (Foucault, 2012;
Rose, 1999). We observe how power produces particular types of
responsibility, forms of inequality, regimes of visibility, and modes of
meaning-making. In other words, the chapters in the second half of the
book explore the normative dimensions of platform-dependent cultural
production.
Similar to the institutional dimensions of platformization, considering
platform practices requires us to analyze how these practices are
simultaneously shaped by the interactions between platforms and
cultural producers, as well as by the broader sociocultural contexts in
which cultural production is situated. We should be careful not to fall
into the trap of platform determinism or platform essentialism,
disregarding the larger economic, cultural, political, and historical
relations in which cultural industries and platforms are embedded. The
challenge before us, then, is to understand how platformization takes
shape within and through particular contexts.
Taking up this challenge, Chapter 5 on labor takes as a starting point
the changing culture and political economies of cultural work. Over the
past decades, various modes of cultural production, like other forms of
work, have been transformed through the individualization of
responsibility and risk, the rise of the “gig” or “sharing” economy, and
pervasive discourses of entrepreneurship (Chan, 2019; Gandini, 2016;
Gray & Suri, 2019). These transformations are rooted in the
liberalization of markets and the fraying of welfare states in large parts
of the world, thereby greatly enhancing the economic insecurity of
cultural labor. Such labor, to be sure, was never secure in the irst place
(Blair, 2001; Gill, 2011; McRobbie, 2016). That said, we will argue that
platformization entails a further intensi ication of these broader trends,
generating new sets of tensions. While these tensions can be observed
in cultural work more generally, they take on a speci ic character on

platforms. The chapter explores in detail the balance between (1)
visibility and invisibility, (2) collective and individual responsibility, (3)
job security and precarity, and (4) equality and inequality. Drawing on
media industries studies and sociological accounts of creative labor, we
discuss how these tensions play out in the lived experiences of
platform-based cultural work.
Chapter 6 on creativity discusses the new cultural and commercial
forms and formats that can be observed in platform-based cultural
production. We examine how the autonomy of cultural producers
comes under further pressure, as the boundary between creativity and
(self-)promotion becomes fundamentally blurred. Similar to the
previous chapters, the challenge is to understand how these emerging
platform practices and norms are connected with broader historical
trends. Research on the cultural industries shows that cultural
production has, over the past decades, been characterized by
continuous creative upheaval and has become increasingly tied to
capitalist logics of marketing and monetization. To gain insight into the
speci ic trajectories of creative platform practices, we explore the
tensions observed along the axes of (1) mass versus niche audiences, (2)
quali ication versus quanti ication, (3) editorial versus advertising, and
(4) authenticity versus self-promotion. Analyzing these tensions, the
chapter shows the role that platformization plays in both enabling and
constraining creative expression.
Chapter 7 examines how platformization involves particular democratic
practices and tensions. We analyze the frictions between the
sociocultural and economic realities of platform-dependent cultural
production and the democratic ideals historically associated with the
cultural industries. The chapter speci ically focuses on (1) equality of
access, (2) diversity, (3) protection from harm, and (4) truthfulness.
While platforms have been associated with a democratization of
cultural production, we argue that wider societal inequalities and
problems are often reproduced in platform-dependent cultural
production. We thus examine how – despite the relative openness of
platform markets and infrastructures – cultural producers lacking
substantial resources and organizational support continue to face
barriers that preclude them from fully contributing to public and civic

life. What is more, the ability of cultural workers to participate in
platform-based cultural production remains unequally divided in terms
of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. While lack of diversity is a
well-worn threat to democracy, we also note how the lack of platform
governance often enables hate, harassment, and inaccurate information
to run rampant in digital public spheres. Taken together, as has become
painfully clear over the past years, and particularly in the context of the
global pandemic, the increasingly central role of platforms in cultural
production presents a major democratic challenge.

Notes
1. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-
uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/.
2. We are not the irst to use the notion of platformization. Helmond
conceptualized platformization as “the extension of social media
platforms into the rest of the web and their drive to make external
web data ‘platform ready’” (2015: 1). In this book, our
understanding is both broader and more speci ic. It is broader
because we make an argument that platformization is not only a
techno-economic phenomenon. It is narrower because we
speci ically focus on the cultural industries. For a more extensive
discussion of the concept of platformization, see Poell et al. (2019).
3. For the sake of readability and simplicity, throughout this book we
use business studies, critical political economy, and software studies
as a shorthand for broader bodies of work. Whereas critical political
economy of communications has a long history (Winseck & Jin,
2011), software studies includes an amalgam of the – arguably
emerging – ields of software and critical code studies (e.g., Bucher,
2018; Helmond, 2015; Mackenzie, 2006), app studies (e.g., Gerlitz et
al., 2019; Morris & Murray, 2018), platforms studies (e.g., Montfort &
Bogost, 2009), and what Robert Gorwa (2019a) has dubbed “critical
platforms studies” (e.g., van Dijck et al., 2018). Business studies
encompasses an even wider group of subdisciplines, which includes
orthodox economics, strategic management and entrepreneurship,
engineering design, and information systems research.
4. We purposely are not including research on platform companies such
as Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb, as these are, as of yet, not of economic or
technological relevance to cultural production. We do recognize that
many of the dynamics we discuss are particular to a broader shift
described as “platform capitalism,” which marks the disruption of
existing markets by introducing new regimes of power (Srnicek,
2017).

5. To be precise, Facebook has started to license intellectual property in
order to compete in the markets for live streaming (e.g., sports), and
scripted television and ilm distribution.

PART I
Institutional Changes

2
Markets

Introduction
When, in 2007, a group of tech entrepreneurs developed a plan to
launch their game studio Zynga (named after the pet bulldog of one of
the co-founders), they opted for a then-novel – and undoubtedly risky –
approach to game distribution and marketing. Rather than publishing
on an existing gaming platform, such as Steam or the Nintendo Wii,
they opted for Facebook. It was a bold move at the time: the social
network’s userbase was still relatively small, and most end-users
accessed the platform via desktops, rather than through mobile devices.
But the founders seemed to sense the platform’s vast potential. More
importantly, and crucial for Zynga’s success, Facebook had just
launched the Facebook Development Platform, which provided outside
companies with “deep integration” to “build a business around your
Facebook application” (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). In practice, this
meant that external developers, such as Zynga, could access part of
Facebook’s data infrastructure to build “social applications,” which
were then accessible within the boundaries of the Facebook.com
domain. One of those social applications was Texas Hold’em Poker. As
one of the very irst games to be played on Facebook, Zynga’s poker
game marked the beginning of a new game format: the social game
(Kerr, 2017).
By building its business around Facebook, Zynga was able to capitalize
on the platform’s rapid growth, while exploiting the social relations
among its users and, more pointedly, its ability to collect user data
(Bodle, 2011). Here, it seems important to note that Facebook’s
expansion followed an exponential growth curve – from 1 million end-
users (2004), to 10 million (2006), to 100 million (2008), to more than
2 billion (2017). Two years after the initial success of its poker game,
Zynga launched FarmVille – a farming-simulation game that at its peak
counted more than 80 million monthly players. What made FarmVille
such a blockbuster hit can be largely ascribed to the game’s
accessibility: its rules are relatively straightforward, and playing it
involves little skill other than logging in from time to time to attend
one’s virtual farm. Heeding Facebook’s call, Zynga did indeed deeply

integrate the game with the platform’s data infrastructure and social
affordances. FarmVille players were not only continuously prompted to
play alongside their Facebook friends, but they also could advance in
the game much faster by recruiting new friends. Together with constant
noti ications about a player’s in-game progress, these requests to join
the game were publicly shared on their News Feeds. Though the
consistent stream of game updates annoyed Facebook users en masse,
such communication served as a powerful publicity mechanism that
assuredly enticed new players to join. And, crucially, Zynga didn’t
contribute a single cent to this marketing blitz.
By integrating its technology and aligning its business model with
Facebook, Zynga helped popularize the “freemium” business model for
social games. Rather than opting for a premium revenue model –
charging players a one-time access fee – the game developer generated
revenue through a mix of advertising and optional in-game payments or
“microtransactions” (Nieborg, 2015). As FarmVille was a freemium
game, players could spend real money to buy exclusive virtual items to
decorate their farms. Piggybacking on Facebook’s massive data-
gathering efforts, Zynga started to conduct a large-scale data-mining
operation of its own – not only to optimize gameplay but also to igure
out which players were willing to pay (Arsenault, 2017; Willson &
Leaver, 2015).1 Zynga’s “intensely formalized” approach to game design
– a commercially oriented and hyper-rationalized mode of data-driven
game production (Keogh, 2019) – coupled with aggressive spamming
tactics through Facebook’s News Feed, did not make Zynga popular
among industry insiders (Victor, 2020). But Zynga executives seemed
not to care. After all, only four years after the company was founded,
Zynga secured a coveted spot on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
While the motivation to tap into Facebook’s userbase and its rich pool
of user data makes Zynga’s position clear, the boon to Facebook is
perhaps less obvious. What, then, was in this business partnership for
Facebook? One answer is simply capital. At a crucial time in Facebook’s
quest for market dominance, Zynga supplied hard cash.2 Equally
important, Zynga’s games generated traf ic to Facebook and increased
the time that users spent on the site. To make sure their crops did not
wither, FarmVille players were constantly nudged to come to the

platform at regular intervals (Burroughs, 2014). Initially, Zynga’s
aggressiveness was the perfect match for an equally megalomaniacal
Facebook.
Zynga’s rise and fall

As we will see, this is not where Zynga’s story ends. For platform
operators like Facebook, to grow their platform they need to forge and
sustain relationships with both end-users and external developers, or
“complementors.” This process of constant change and adaptation is
referred to as “platform evolution” (Helmond et al., 2019; Tiwana,
2014). As Zynga became increasingly popular, Facebook users grew less
and less tolerant of the annoying FarmVille noti ications. To appease
them, in 2010 the social network started to limit Zynga’s ability to post
content on the News Feed. And in 2012, Facebook de-friended the game
developer by severing its “special relationship”; suddenly – to extend
the platform’s relationship metaphor – Zynga’s status was
“complicated.” The game studio’s stock peaked brie ly in 2012 and
subsequently declined. It took until the summer of 2020 to get back to
its debut share price of US$10.
At some point, every game studio – big and small, old and new –
confronts a strategic dilemma similar to that faced by Zynga: whether
to latch onto an existing game platform or join a new one.3 As noted in
Chapter 1, games are prototypical platform-dependent media: game
publishers must choose one or more platforms on which to publish
their games. Just as Facebook was going through a phase of rapid
growth, the platform opened itself up to cultural producers, providing
an ideal opportunity for a start-up like Zynga to break with numerous
genre and business model conventions. While providing colorful and
accessible gameplay to tens of millions, the company helped to conceal
its business logic, namely a highly orchestrated system of “data
collection, aggregation, analytics, and monetisation of player activity”
(Willson & Leaver, 2015: 155). Indeed, because Facebook granted Zynga
access to its Social Graph – its vast trove of user data – the game studio
was among the irst to adopt such an intensely formalized, data-driven
approach to game design.

For news organizations, meanwhile, the decision to “join” a platform
such as Facebook has been more fraught (van Dijck et al., 2018; Nielsen
& Ganter, 2018). That is, given Facebook’s global reach, news
organizations likely feel compelled to distribute and monetize content
through the platform. Yet, joining Facebook makes them instantly
dependent on the platform’s moderation practices, curating algorithms,
and revenue-sharing schemes. As Facebook and other platforms
frequently change these features in response to shifts in user
engagement, advertiser interests, or societal concerns, it is risky for
news organizations to bet their business on platforms (Myllylahti,
2018), let alone on one platform in particular. For this reason, in May
2016 many newspapers expressed frustration when Facebook
launched its Instant Articles feature. To keep users immersed in the
platform, this new “product” hosted newspaper articles on Facebook’s
servers and displayed them in users’ News Feeds. Facebook’s pitch to
news organizations was unequivocal: they would receive a share of the
revenue generated from ads that appeared alongside the content. In
exchange, news providers had to relinquish control as Instant Articles
granted Facebook jurisdiction over advertising rates, content visibility,
and access to end-user data. In this sense, Facebook’s new product
threatened to replace the distribution and monetization framework of
news organizations, while thwarting the latter’s attempts to recruit
new subscribers. When, after years of experiments, it became clear that
this new revenue stream turned out to be rather meager, news
organizations quickly lost interest or withdrew altogether (Rashidian et
al., 2019).
Similar to news organizations, creators in the social media industries –
think of in luencers, streamers, and casters – rely on various business
models to earn income (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017; Postigo, 2016).
When it comes to reaching an audience, creators are typically
dependent on one speci ic platform – especially when they irst launch
their channels or accounts. But from a business perspective, they
participate in a range of income-generating strategies, including
sponsorships and donations (Hou, 2019; Johnson & Woodcock, 2019).
As they are not necessarily bound by the legacy of business models
past, nor by the corporate complexities of multibillion-dollar media
conglomerates, creators seem to enjoy a relatively high degree of

institutional lexibility (i.e., the ability to work with or for other
companies). We use the caveat “relatively” here because, in practice,
only those creators who amass a sizeable following will be able to go
off-platform when seeking out alternative sources of income. In Chapter
5, we discuss these and other forms of precarity by canvassing the way
in which platform-based labor practices take shape.
For creators, the economic calculus to “get on board” with one platform
or another is heavily dependent on a platform’s history, the size and
composition of its userbase, and the production practices they afford
(Gawer, 2020). For example, those who are inclined to stream their
game sessions live tend to lock to Twitch, which was acquired by
Amazon in 2014 (Taylor, 2018). The streaming platform’s users, its
interface, and its myriad of monetization options – ranging from
donations to subscriptions – are a good it to stream live gameplay
(Johnson & Woodcock, 2019; Partin, 2020). Similarly, as their moniker
suggests, YouTubers have integrated themselves deeply in Google’s
streaming ecosystem (Burgess & Green, 2018). In a business sense, this
limits the agency of this speci ic group of entrepreneurs, as the video
platform has a decidedly formalized (i.e., centralized, uniform) business
model that incentivizes a rationalized mode of production (Bishop,
2020). That is to say, although the creative practices of YouTubers may
be informal and diverse, their business practices are anything but. As we
have seen in Chapter 1, individual creators have little say over
YouTube’s business model, including advertising rates and pay-outs
(Burgess & Green, 2018; Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Tomasena, 2019).
As the example of social media creators makes clear, platform markets
vary widely, and relationships between platforms and complementors
can change on a whim. The next section, then, examines platformization
from a perspective that furnishes both a historical and a comparative
context. We explore how platform companies compete in capitalist
markets and how this competition, in turn, affects the ways in which
they operate their own internal markets. The later sections of this
chapter re lect on the challenges faced by cultural producers as they
navigate the economic asymmetries, opportunities, and uneven power
structures that are hallmarks of platform markets. To that end, we

discuss a number of key economic concepts: network effects, pricing,
and platform evolution.

Old and New Regimes of Economic Power
Untangling the rise of platforms from the recon igured economies of
cultural production requires a historically informed, macroeconomic
approach. We take such a comparative approach because of the
institutional entanglement and dependencies of companies active in
different industry sectors. Most relevant to cultural production is
competition between legacy media corporations and platform
companies, which directly impacts the way in which the latter operate
their internal markets. Competition among any of these businesses
concerns vying not only for market share or customers, but also for the
quest for “talent” (i.e., high-skilled workers) and access to inance
capital. Broadening the institutional scope, the ascendance of both
platform companies and the transformation of the cultural industries
should be considered alongside “neighboring” industries: consumer
electronics and telecommunications (Hesmondhalgh, 2019, 2020; see
also Winseck, 2011).
To illustrate the latter point, consider the transformation of the music
industry. For much of the twentieth century, the consumption of music
was tied to technological innovations in consumer electronics – from
radio, to vinyl records, to audio cassettes, to CDs (Hesmondhalgh &
Meier, 2018). Consumer electronics behemoths, such as Sony and
Philips, together with record labels that were often subsidiaries of
these larger conglomerates, pushed these new technologies in earnest –
often through concerted efforts to render their precursors obsolete.
More recently, telecom companies and streaming platforms, such as
Spotify and Apple Music, have taken a more central role in the
distribution and monetization of music (Morris, 2020; Prey, 2020). The
impact of streaming platforms on the political economy of the music
industry, however, should not be overestimated; legacy actors and
industry practices have not altogether disappeared, and in fact they
continue to exert in luence on systems of revenue, labor, and,
ultimately, power (Hesmondhalgh, 2020).
Thus, a comparative institutional perspective is warranted because the
cultural producers that decide to partner with platforms are typically

active across the wider media economy and in various platform
markets. It is precisely because cultural producers are not inherently
dependent on platform companies for every aspect of cultural creation,
distribution, marketing, or monetization that analyses of
platformization should account for inter-industry relationships as well.
Cultural producers may decide not to join a platform; they may “multi-
home” (i.e., join several different platforms to reduce platform
dependency); and/or they may seek out partnerships or arrangements
with legacy (media) companies. At times, this bifurcation leads to a
clash of different economic and regulatory paradigms; cultural
producers who draw on a history of legacy business models and legal
protections, for instance, may ind themselves at odds with platform
companies more than willing to “disrupt” entrenched institutions and
longstanding economic routines. As we will see throughout this book,
these institutional culture clashes can be a source of boundless
creativity and technological innovation, but also of ierce competition,
stark economic asymmetries, and of strong socioeconomic and
political-cultural tensions.
All of this is to say that the transformation of the cultural industries has
been markedly uneven. And, accordingly, one of the recurring
arguments in this book is that continuities and changes in the cultural
industries differ – at times, quite profoundly – across regions and
industry segments (Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Havens & Lotz, 2017; Miè ge,
2011; Winseck, 2011). As well as each country being in a different state
of economic development, changes in cultural production have shown
stark regional variations in terms of “traditions, technological
developments, regulations and industrial structure” (Bustamante,
2004: 805). How, then, do we make sense of these variations in
institutional dependencies – be they historical, between companies
(i.e., inter-industry relationships), or within markets (i.e., intra-industry
relationships)? Drawing from (media) economics, critical political
economy, and media industry studies, we argue that the consumer
electronics industries, the telecommunications industries, platform
companies, and legacy media companies are subject to and drivers of
concentration and digitalization. Being attentive to these two processes
allow us to draw out important political economic continuities by

acknowledging that both processes easily predate the platform
economy.
Concentration versus digitalization

On the surface, at least, platform Goliaths such as Google, Facebook,
Tencent, Amazon, and ByteDance seem omnipotent, and their ever-
increasing market capitalizations now total into the trillions. But
despite platform companies’ ever-rising share prices and soaring
pro its, we should be careful not to overdetermine the impact of their
inancial prowess, nor should we consider the economic and inancial
position of platforms as either entrenched or unassailable. For instance,
in most domestic markets, the revenue of telecom, internet, and media
conglomerates is much higher than the revenue of, for instance, either
Google or Facebook (Winseck, 2020).
Whether or not they choose to align their business models with
platforms, at some point cultural producers are likely to be faced with
globally operating conglomerates. And when that moment comes, they
will notice how each of these industry sectors – telecom, consumer
electronics, and media – is dominated by a handful of irms. For
decades, critical political economists and media economists have
attempted to measure the scope and impact of corporate concentration
on cultural production (Bagdikian, 1983; Birkinbine et al., 2017; Noam,
2009). With these histories of capital accumulation in mind, such
concentration is perhaps not surprising. After all, the economic
principles that have propelled such instances of monetary accrual have
not changed fundamentally.
Because of digitalization and globalization, transnationally operating
conglomerates bene it from economies of scale – that is, the ef iciencies
derived from an increase in output. Likewise, by leveraging economies
of scope – the ef iciencies derived from product variety – corporate
giants can capitalize on their access to inance capital by acquiring
competitors or promising new start-ups. Indeed, the cultural industries
have seen a rapid uptick in mergers and acquisitions – a fact that owes
much to antitrust regulators stepping aside and trade agreements
opening up domestic markets to foreign entrants. Together, these
broader economic principles also help explain the current impact

ascribed to platform companies. As we show in the next section,
platform companies take economies of scope and scale to an
unprecedented level. We should note that the inancial prowess of
platforms does have a historical precedent (Srnicek, 2017). Monopoly
power or oligopoly competition – highly concentrated markets
dominated by one or few irms – have existed since the dawn of the
industrial age.
Next to corporate clustering, cultural producers are faced with
socioeconomic drivers of concentration that are more speci ic to the
cultural industries. One such driver concerns attention. Who among the
millions of cultural producers are the “winners” and who are the
“losers” of the rapidly evolving media economy? We can be brief about
the winners: a lucky few. A very small percentage of cultural products
tends to generate the vast majority of revenue and pro it. The
consumption of games, music, and movies has always been
blockbuster-driven; hits are as much a sociocultural phenomenon as an
economic one (Elberse, 2013). Not for nothing are the cultural
industries described as a “risky business,” in which nobody can predict
long-term trends and tastes (Hesmondhalgh, 2019: 32). The need to
withstand losses, or vice versa, to secure access to inance capital to
fund big-budget blockbusters, therefore, plays straight into the
strengths of transnational media conglomerates (Fitzgerald, 2012;
Mirrlees, 2013). At the same time, the value of existing brands, stars,
franchises, and fan favorites puts small and medium-sized enterprises
and new entrants in a disadvantaged position.
To be fair, so-called “winner-take-all” dynamics and the unequal
distribution of resources underlies many – if not all – major industry
sectors and societies (Frank & Cook, 1995). We point to these
continuities here because two mitigating factors have been widely
considered as antidotes to corporate concentration and a blockbuster-
driven culture: digitalization and internet connectivity – both of which
have been framed as instances of democratization. The accessibility to
digital information and tools, legal scholar Yochai Benkler argued in the
mid-aughts, has lifted “the central material constraints” associated with
“industrial” (i.e., capital-intensive and proprietary) modes of
production and distribution of culture, thereby increasing “individual

autonomy” (2006: 133). Around the same time that Benkler published
his in luential monograph, a broad collective of media scholars,
consultants, and pundits pointed to the blurring of boundaries between
production and consumption, and the purported rise of “co-creation”
and increase in “mass creativity.”4 In hindsight, such enthusiasm was
understandable – if not myopic.
The cultural and economic power that record labels and news
organizations accrued and held for decades was suddenly challenged
by individuals who had the ability to easily distribute MP3 iles or set
up a blog to become citizen journalists. Then again, while such
instances of “non-market” production had the potential to radically
transform the information economy, and, in so doing, initiate a
“substantial redistribution of power and money” (Benkler, 2006: 23),
such a future has yet to be realized. As political economist Enrique
Bustamante had already predicted: “digital change does not engender a
revolution, an abrupt rupture with past history, because the new
technologies cannot erase the core nature of the media within modern
capitalist society” (2004: 805). While, in the abstract, the costs to create
and distribute digital information have fallen drastically, this has not
eradicated existing inequalities, such as access to capital, education,
and access to internet connectivity (Hargittai & Walejko, 2008; Mansell,
2017). Nor has increased access to the means of production put a dent
in the balance sheets of telecoms, consumer electronics, or media
conglomerates (Winseck, 2017, 2020).
Indeed, despite all the cheering optimism surrounding “user-generated
content,” the basic economics of information production and
distribution did not change for legacy organizations, as producing a
high-quality “ irst copy” of a game or song is still costly. Over recent
decades, the blockbuster-driven parts of the game industry, for
instance, have seen their production budgets increase, rather than
decrease (van Dreunen, 2020; Whitson, 2019). Legal frameworks,
particularly intellectual property regimes, erected to create arti icial
scarcity and to protect those signi icant investments, have not seen a
drastic overhaul either (Cohen, 2019).
That being said, what did change is that digitalization and internet
connectivity have made the “boundaries of the irm” – to use a turn of

phrase popular among business scholars – more porous. Instead of
engaging in costly legal battles, structurally acquiring suppliers, or
merging with competitors, businesses in a wide variety of sectors
decided to provide consumers, suppliers, and competitors with
“toolkits for innovation” (von Hippel, 2005). This concept, popularized
in the early 2000s by MIT business scholars, is a prescient description
of how, a decade later, platform companies provided consumers and
third-party companies with the means of cultural creation, distribution,
marketing, and monetization. In the next two chapters we discuss how
platforms have used these toolkits both to vastly expand their
infrastructural boundaries and as a means to govern cultural
producers. But irst, we examine the main tenets of platform
economics.

Platform Economics
Platformization simultaneously entails a continuation of and a break
with long-established economic models and strategies. On the one
hand, platform companies such as Google and Tencent behave as
globally operating tech conglomerates that aim to leverage economies
of scope and scale, attract and retain high-quality personnel, and create
“sticky” products and services, as well as valuable brands (Barwise &
Watkins, 2018). On the other hand, platform companies operate unique
business models and have devised novel business strategies (Evans &
Schmalensee, 2016; Parker et al., 2016). By doing so, platforms have
ushered in a fundamental reorganization of institutional relationships
and a subsequent shift in power, which has been theorized along
different disciplinary lines.
From the early 2000s onwards, a broad range of scholars situated
across the ields of economics, strategic management, marketing, and
information systems research contributed to a transactional
perspective on platform competition (for comprehensive reviews of
this literature see, for example, de Reuver et al., 2018; McIntyre &
Srinivasan, 2017; Rietveld & Schilling, 2020). The fact that this broad
collective of business scholars is predominantly concerned with
platform competition is indicative of their market-oriented politics; this
is an epistemology that tends to gloss over power relationships, what
kinds of cultural goods are produced, and under what conditions
(Mansell & Steinmueller, 2020). To be clear, we are less interested in the
ef iciency of markets and consumer welfare, and much more concerned
with the unequal distribution of economic and infrastructural power,
and how platformization impacts democratic norms and values (van
Dijck et al., 2018; van Dijck et al., 2019).
Taking these disparate, yet overlapping views into consideration, in the
context of this chapter we understand platforms as multisided markets,
which we de ine as aggregators of institutional connections, including
economic transactions, that mediate between end-users and content and
service providers. Let us unpack this de inition by pointing to how

platforms give way to, control, and structure markets, and how they
generate revenue.
First, platform companies engender so-called “multisided markets”
because they make and operate marketplaces that mediate between
two or more user groups (Gawer & Cusumano, 2002; Rochet & Tirole,
2003). A platform’s role is to be a “matchmaker” that connects
consumers or “end-users,” businesses, governments, nonpro its, and
other groups, each representing a separate side in a platform market
(Evans & Schmalensee, 2016). A popular case study among economists
is the game industry, particularly the dedicated game console:
companies such as Nintendo and Sega operate prototypical two-sided
markets as they mediate between players and game publishers
(Shankar & Bayus, 2003). In this instance, players (i.e., end-users)
populate the demand-side, whereas the supply-side is occupied by
game publishers. We will refer to those groups not consisting of end-
users as institutional actors, which we understand as companies or
individual entrepreneurs. Thus, we distinguish between end-users and
the producers of cultural content, the latter of whom, as noted in
Chapter 1, we consider to be part of a broader group of institutional
actors we refer to as complementors.
Second, the platform companies we examine in this book are not mere
matchmakers; they also strategically open the boundaries of their irms
to stimulate external innovations by complementors (Baldwin &
Woodard, 2009; Gawer, 2020). In this respect, platform companies such
as Google, Apple, and Facebook differ from “transaction” platforms at
the heart of the gig-economy, which Nick Srnicek describes as “lean
platforms” (2017: 73). An example of the latter are transportation
platforms such as DiDi, Lyft, and Uber, which aggregate drivers and
passengers, but they do not allow those drivers to develop and
distribute complementary innovations (e.g., apps that provide
additional services). A platform such as Facebook, by contrast, does
allow complementors to develop external innovations. The “social
games” developed by Zynga, the game developer we discussed in the
Introduction, are examples of such innovations. Not only did Facebook
“match” Zynga with players, but the platform also opened the
boundaries of its platform to build games that integrate with

Facebook’s data infrastructure and technology (Nieborg & Helmond,
2019).
To be sure, the institutional relationships between platforms and
complementors are not of primary concern to all platform scholars;
there is, however, widespread consensus that a fundamental tension
arises when platforms open their boundaries in the way that Facebook
has. When doing so, platforms have the potential to be a democratizing
force – providing market access and economic opportunity – while
simultaneously staying fully in control (Constantinides et al., 2018).
That is, platforms selectively open their boundaries to complementors,
but do so under the economic and infrastructural conditions of their
choosing, which will be discussed more extensively in the following
chapters (de Reuver et al., 2018; Tilson et al., 2010).
Because those platform companies active in the cultural industries tend
to do both – serve as matchmakers and allow for external innovations –
they are considered “hybrids” that “combine transaction and innovation
functions” (Gawer, 2020). Integrating these two characteristics brings
us to a third aspect speci ic to how platforms active in the cultural
industries operate as companies: their business models.5 Most legacy
media conglomerates, such as Disney, follow an intellectual property
(IP) ownership model, “which is designed to create scarcity through
copyright” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 101). In other words, Disney
tasks its subsidiaries – e.g., Walt Disney Pictures, Marvel, Lucas ilm, and
Pixar – to create original cultural content, often at tremendous cost,
which is then licensed or used to promote branded products, encourage
the sale of tickets to parks and musicals, or simply create additional
content based on its original IP (Wasko, 2020).
Conversely, platform companies are notoriously averse to being
considered media companies (Napoli & Caplan, 2017), a narrative
which we challenge in subsequent chapters. Instead of creating or
commissioning cultural content to be sold to consumers, their main
sources of revenue include advertising (Google, Baidu, Facebook),
selling hardware at a premium (Apple, Samsung), or e-commerce and
cloud hosting (Amazon, Alibaba). This is not to say that these
companies never create or commission media content.6 Since the mid-
2010s, Apple, Amazon, and other platform businesses have invested

billions of dollars in IP-based cultural commodities, such as movies and
TV-shows.7 Yet, looking at their balance sheets, the revenue derived
from these operations is secondary to their primary business model,
which relies on the aggregation of institutional connections and data,
and/or facilitating transactions. In sum, a platform’s main source of
revenue matters deeply because it determines the complementors to
which a platform may grant more or less favorable conditions.
Network effects and pricing

To better understand the political economy of multisided markets, it is
necessary to identify the core economic principles constituting these
markets and the subsequent strategic decisions faced by platform
companies. These principles and decisions, together, shape the
economic horizon of cultural producers. Two are particularly relevant:
network effects and pricing.
Like all digital and physical networks, platforms leverage economies of
scale because they bene it from internet connectivity, which, in turn,
allows for network effects. So-called direct network effects dictate that
the more users who join a network, the more valuable that network
becomes (Katz & Shapiro, 1985). These effects, or what economists call
“network externalities,” are especially pronounced in digital markets,
where marginal costs – the costs of adding additional units or users –
are low. Network effects help explain the potential for rapid growth: if
platform markets expand, which is never assured, its growth can be
sudden and swift. Apps such as Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, WeChat,
and WhatsApp are all prime examples of rapid diffusion when direct
network effects are positive.
We should emphasize that direct network effects are not unique to
platforms and apps: any company active in digital markets may bene it
from adding additional users. What sets multisided (i.e., platform)
markets apart from traditional market structures – both physical and
digital – is that they also engender “indirect” or “crossside” network
effects (Evans & Schmalensee, 2016; Rochet & Tirole, 2003). This
means that, when positive, the more users joining a platform market on
one side, the more valuable the platform becomes for users on the
other side. To return to the two-sided market example of game

consoles: the more players who have a PlayStation, the more valuable
the game console becomes for game publishers. And vice versa, a
broader catalogue of games (i.e., more complementors) offers a better
value proposition to players who consider buying a new game platform.
This example goes to show that network effects signi icantly impact
complementors: since they are part of the same market (or network) as
a platform company, they can bene it from a platform’s growing pool of
end-users. In our opening example, game developer Zynga harnessed
Facebook’s then-swift popularity to great effect.
The design of a platform’s business model shapes the economic
environment in which platform-dependent cultural producers operate.
When creating a platform market, platform operators are faced with a
series of fundamental strategic challenges, such as: which side to
attract irst? Complementors or end-users? Supply or demand? That is,
operators must address a “chicken-and-egg problem” and be careful to
“get both sides on board” (Rochet & Tirole, 2003: 990). Likewise, there
is the challenge of pricing. A key decision is whether, when, and how
much to either charge or subsidize which side: end-users, cultural
producers, or other types of complementors. Two-sided markets can
use the income they generate from one side to provide free access to
the other side. For example, in the case of Facebook – as with most
social networks – access to the platform is free for end-users, their
access is subsidized by advertisers. In Google’s and Apple’s app stores,
end-users can download a variety of apps for free, but developers are
charged a 30 percent fee over any monetary transaction.
A platform company’s options in designing a business model are
dependent on a number of economic variables that differ from platform
to platform and from market to market. These variables can include a
company’s primary sources of revenue and pro it and/or industry
norms.
We already brie ly touched upon the irst variable, a platform’s primary
business model. How a platform generates revenue determines its
strategic orientation and its ability – or inability – to grow. As we have
seen, the constant maneuvering on the part of the platform directly
impacts complementors. For instance, it matters greatly which side –
end-users or complementors – a platform favors at which time.

Consider Google: in both its YouTube and Search businesses, it has
shown a consistent inclination to appease advertisers over end-users or
content creators (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; Rieder & Sire, 2014).
A second variable impacting a platform’s pricing decisions are the
actions of competitors and industry norms. Given how the digital media
economy has evolved with its provisions of the proverbial “free lunch,”
a platform has to have a compelling reason to charge end-users for
access. In 2008, when Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors,
premium priced games were the norm; more than a decade later, the
great majority of game apps adopted the freemium business model. At
times, it is surprising how quickly new business models are adopted.
The 30 percent fee structure Google and Apple charge app developers
for in-app transactions has been in place since 2010; only recently has
this pricing standard started to shift.8 These examples, though, are
speci ic to Google and Apple. In China, for example, there is a much
greater variety of app store operators, hardware manufacturers, and
business models (Zhao, 2019).
While we have discussed network effects and pricing discretely, we did
so for analytical purposes. In reality, they are interrelated, giving way to
a dizzying number of economic issues and questions faced by all actors
in platform ecosystems. Managing end-users and complementors is an
inherently dynamic process (Gawer, 2014; Rietveld & Schilling, 2020).
In turn, this balancing act on the part of platforms – between getting
users on board and improving pricing structures – introduces
uncertainty and risk for cultural producers. Next, we discuss these
uncertainties and risks through the lens of platform evolution. This
allows us to provide a more nuanced perspective on the highly
contingent relationship between platforms and complementors – which
is subject not only to strategizing and economic decision-making, but
also to complex temporal shifts.

Platform Evolution and Ecosystems
Network effects and business model design – that is, pricing – each play
a role in the complexity and volatility of platform markets. More
pointedly, they contribute to the “unprecedented speed,” or velocity if
you will, with which platform markets evolve and platform businesses
expand (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 37; see also Arriagada & Ibá ñ ez,
2020). Recall the soaring growth of Facebook discussed in the chapter
opening. In 2020, it made US$18.48 billion in pro its – substantially
more than Disney’s US$11 billion earnings that same year. What is
more, The Walt Disney Company’s global empire was built over a span
of nearly a century; Facebook’s ascent, meanwhile, took place over a
decade. Network effects, both direct and indirect, heavily contributed to
Facebook’s growth, as did the platform’s ability to “lock in” end-users
and complementors through a variety of economic and technological
means.
The dynamic process of optimizing business models and a platform’s
efforts to getting users on board can be understood as platform
evolution – an idea that captures the fact that a platform company’s
institutional relationships are contingent and subject to continuous
change. Business scholars distinguish between different phases of
platform evolution and a platform’s placement along a “lifecycle.” In the
“launch phase,” business scholar Annabelle Gawer (2020) explains,
“platforms prioritize growth through network effects.” In this stage,
platforms can decide to provide complementors with a range of perks
and incentives, ranging from free access to advanced tools, special
accreditations (e.g., badges or certi ications), to increased visibility on
the platform (Helmond et al., 2019). After reaching a tipping point,
platforms enter the “maturity” phase, during which time they become
more selective with whom they partner. As such, a platform’s lifecycle
impacts platform-dependent cultural production. For instance, recent
research suggests that, in the aggregate, individual cultural producers
tend to become less economically signi icant later in a platform’s
lifecycle (Rietveld et al., 2020).

For complementors, such evolution is made all the more dif icult to
navigate because of the unpredictable behavior of end-users at various
stages of the lifecycle. As a platform evolves, there is an increase in end-
user heterogeneity. End-users who join during a platform’s launch
phase are labeled early adopters; they tend to invest more time and
money in exploring new technology (Rietveld & Eggers, 2018; see also
Rogers, 2003). This temporal dynamic, in turn, leads complementors to
face a strategic decision about when to join a platform – or when to
leave. While joining early is considered risky, joining later in a
platform’s lifecycle means that competition among complementors will
increase. What is more, complementors will encounter late adopters,
end-users who tend to be more risk averse and less committed
(Rietveld & Eggers, 2018). Then again, in the mature phase, the overall
pool of consumers can be exponentially bigger.
When a platform leaves the launch phase, it can alter its pricing
strategy, but also opt to add more sides to its business. That is exactly
what Facebook did in 2007. Initially, the social network functioned as a
two-sided market, mediating between end-users (i.e., students) and
advertisers. The launch of the Facebook Development Platform turned
the network into a multisided platform after it invited content creators,
such as Zynga, to create complementary innovations (Nieborg &
Helmond, 2019).
One important “side,” or user group, that is integrated with platform
companies when they mature includes various intermediaries that
range from talent agencies to digital advertising companies. For
example, if creators want to scale up or professionalize their
operations, they can team up with what used to be called “multichannel
networks”: companies that combine the role of agent, publisher, and
marketing agency (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Lobato, 2016). Likewise,
game and news companies active on Facebook depend heavily on “data
intermediaries” (e.g., data analytics companies, mobile marketing
agencies, etc.), which are “an assemblage of human actors, code,
software and algorithms that are active in shaping the circulation and
integration of new forms of data” (Beer, 2018: 476). Complementors
may opt to use Facebook’s built-in data tools, but, to make the
company’s expansive Social Graph legible and to extend the platform’s

capabilities, data intermediaries provide a wide range of
complementary innovations not offered by Facebook (Helmond et al.,
2019). It is important to note that many of the newly emergent
platform intermediaries – from multichannel networks to dataanalytics
companies – have been acquired by either legacy media conglomerates,
such as Disney, or platform companies. These examples show that
legacy actors in the cultural industries are far from obsolete. Rather,
they tend to reposition themselves to provide services to platform-
dependent cultural producers, often by integrating with platform
infrastructures.
To maintain growth by attracting new users to all sides, major platform
companies have morphed into parent or holding organizations that
operate different platform subsidiaries. For example, YouTube is a
subsidiary of Google, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Incorporated.
Google also operates other platform subsidiaries, such as Google Search
and the Google Play Store. While Google is colloquially referred to as a
platform, its ever-expanding collection of platform subsidiaries all
operate different business models. YouTube’s advertising-driven
business model is not the same as the main revenue source of its app
store, Google Play, which derives revenue from a mix of advertising and
transaction fees. Similarly, Facebook’s apps, particularly those they
acquired (Instagram and WhatsApp), can be seen as subsidiaries, since
each functions as a multisided market in its own right. One way to make
analytical sense of how platform companies are structured is thus to
see them as platform ecosystems (van Dijck et al., 2018). Returning to
the role of platform evolution, these instances of market integration are
relevant to complementors because the growth of each subsidiary
solidi ies a platform company’s control over its wider ecosystem.
The winner takes all?

As millions of cultural producers from across industries and regions
lock to platforms, questions emerge about the political economic
implications of this in lux. How do the economic characteristics and
institutional relationships speci ic to platform markets – network
effects, pricing, platform evolution, and ecosystems – impact the ability
of cultural producers to create, distribute, market, and monetize

content? Do platforms challenge or exacerbate existing economic
inequalities already present in the cultural industries? To start with this
last question, we are inclined to offer a less optimistic perspective. In
platform economies, the distributions of value and resources are highly
uneven. Network effects alone generate “a cycle whereby more users
beget more users, which leads to platforms having a natural tendency
towards monopolization” (Srnicek, 2017: 45). In the case of platform
competition, if a winner emerges, it tends to become dominant
(Barwise & Watkins, 2018).
Consider our retelling of Zynga’s corporate history, which points to the
familiar political economic dynamic of the accumulation of economic
power on the part of a single entity – in this case, Facebook. The launch
of any new platform represents a crucial moment for cultural
producers. After all, it is during this pivotal juncture that platform
operators may offer complementors incentives to get on board, similar
to Facebook offering Zynga special access to its end-users and their
data. At the same time, with each additional end-user that joins
Facebook, the platform becomes more powerful: “Due to network
effects and economies of scale and scope, platforms can achieve a level
of user participation that consolidates their position in the market,
further increasing their capacities for data ication” (Mansell &
Steinmueller, 2020: 39). We have seen what this meant for Zynga. After
reaching a tipping point in revenue and end-users, Facebook decided
that it was no longer dependent on individual complementors
developing social games.
Thus, the early promise that platformization breaks the cycle of
corporate concentration needs to be questioned from an economic
perspective. Business scholars have recognized this trend and
designated platform markets as “winner-take-all” (Constantinides et al.,
2018; Schilling, 2002). Because platforms are aggregators of
transactions and connections, there is a limit to how many platform
companies can be economically viable at any one time. This can be
partially explained because end-users and complementors face costs if
they want to be active on different platforms. Another reason that
advances concentration is the data-driven nature of platform
companies such as Facebook and Google. They invest heavily in data

storage, analytics, and machine learning, which gives them an almost
insurmountable lead compared to platforms that seek to displace them
(Mansell & Steinmueller, 2020). The historical data alone gathered by
legacy platforms is hard to acquire, let alone replicate.
These observations have enormous political economic consequences
and have resulted in antitrust inquiries across the globe. Considering
platform-dependent cultural production, winner-take-all effects also
apply to complementors. That is, direct network effects and economics
of scale are leveraged by both platform companies and complementors.
Recall the logic of positive network effects in cultural markets: the more
end-users there are listening to a song, watching a stream, or using an
app, the more valuable these cultural commodities become to others.
These effects are one of the root causes of market concentration.
Consider the controversial social media creator PewDiePie. Over the
years, the popular YouTuber has been quite savvy in leveraging the
platform’s community features that allow end-users to rate, share, and
comment on his clips. Throughout 2019, in his race toward attracting
100 million subscribers to his channel, he urged his fans to encourage
others to subscribe as well. PewDiePie may not be the best or funniest
YouTuber out there, but this is of little relevance once network effects
kick in. Serving as an example of the “popularity principle” (van Dijck,
2013: 13), by leading in the charts, he will be recommended more, end-
users will talk more about him, and so on and so forth. This example
demonstrates how complementors are poised to take advantage of a
platform’s winner-take-all dynamics. While understandable, they are,
after all, pro it-driven industry actors; their growth crowds out
alternatives in such a saturated marketplace for attention.
Although relatively open boundaries make platforms economically
accessible, such accessibility does not necessarily entail a
democratization of the cultural industries. To the contrary, platform-
dependent cultural production is riddled with economic inequalities
and asymmetries. This is con irmed by inancial analyses of the music
industry (Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018; Ordanini & Nunes, 2016), the app
ecosystem (Bresnahan et al., 2014; Nieborg, Young, Joseph, 2020), and
the impact of recommender systems on sales diversity (Fleder &
Hosanagar, 2009) – all of which suggest a strong bias toward popularity.

Recent research on the distribution of attention on YouTube paints a
similar picture. In terms of “channels, uploads and views,” there is a
sharp contrast among YouTube’s 18 different prede ined categories,
with a vast majority of viewers locking to a very small percentage of
channels in each category (Bä rtl, 2018; see also Rieder et al., 2020).
Because the supply of content on platforms such as YouTube is virtually
limitless, it is easy to overlook the highly concentrated nature of
demand. Similarly, while individually we may consume a broader and
more diverse set of offerings, in the aggregate, diversity decreases as
we collectively lock to fewer – yet bigger – stars, hits, and bestsellers.
As such, the political economy of multisided markets appears to
inherently frustrate economic sustainability and cultural diversity. The
distribution of transactions in platform markets is highly skewed as a
very small percentage of complementors is responsible for capturing
the majority of downloads, views, likes, revenue, and, ultimately, pro it.
Moreover, even though platforms have the ability to increase cultural
diversity by steering attention to underrepresented voices, they often
chose not to do so in favor of a more select group of hits (Rietveld et al.,
2020). We will return to these issues in Chapters 4 and 5.
How, then, does all this impact cultural producers? How do producers
strategically navigate platform markets? Somewhat surprisingly, the
economic circumstances of individual complementors and speci ic
industry segments remain underexplored territory for mainstream
economists and media scholars. So, let us shift focus and turn to the
question of why complementors are drawn to platforms in the irst
place.

Becoming a Complementor
Despite the complexity of the platform economy, millions of cultural
producers decide to get on board, thereby making themselves platform-
dependent. Economic asymmetries represent both a deterrent and a
potential economic opportunity. What sets the platform markets in the
cultural sector apart from the “lean” or “transaction” platforms in the
physical realm – such as transportation or housing platforms – is the
virtually uncapped revenue potential of the former. As noted in Chapter
1, information goods in their digital form are nonrival, meaning that
one person consuming them does not prevent others from doing the
same. Add to that the low marginal costs for digital distribution, which
are close to zero in digital markets. Once a cultural producer has a
digital copy of an app, revenue is only limited by demand. Compare this
to an Uber driver, whose revenue potential is limited by hours worked.
The cultural industries’ star system is another driver of unequal
distribution of revenue: “The winner-take-all effect is especially strong
in entertainment markets because performances of the most sought-
after creative talent can be reproduced at low additional costs”
(Elberse, 2013: 90). While tens of millions of end-users lock to TikTok
star Charli D’Amelio or Douyin star Chen He, an Uber driver may very
well have a ive-star rating, but this will not translate into millions in
potential earnings.
The revenue potential of platform markets has only increased with
their continued global diffusion. Historically, producers of physical
cultural goods confronted obstacles when trying to enter foreign
markets; the costs for small entrepreneurs and new entrants were
especially signi icant. Without a doubt, platforms have increased
market access and thus the scale of economic opportunity. At the same
time, platforms have lowered costs for a great many forms of cultural
creation and distribution.
The costs of cultural creation – shooting a video, recording a song, or
taking a high-quality photo – have fallen drastically (Benkler, 2006;
Shirky, 2008). Meanwhile, in the realm of news production, the tools

required to engage in journalistic work, “such as access to press
releases, newswire services and archives, interviews with experts, and
other research tools,” which are “now widely available to anyone with
Internet access,” allow freelance journalists to work outside the
traditional bounds of journalistic institutions (Cohen, 2016: 85).
Platform operators, for their part, have allowed for either seamless
integration with existing (digital) tools and software formats, made
platform-dependent production software available for a nominal fee, or
integrated production tools straight into the platform itself. The latter
category – the vertical integration of toolsets – constitute the beating
heart of newly emerging platform practices. They allow users to forgo
extensive training or acquire additional software.
Next to lowering creation costs, platforms have put downward pressure
on distribution costs as well. Platforms such as Spotify and Twitch have
no distribution fees for for-pro it developers. Developers of social
games, such as Zynga, do not have to compensate Facebook to host
content on their servers. Creators in the social media industries have
never received a hosting bill either. It may sound somewhat obvious,
but this marks a major departure from just a decade ago. In legacy
markets, such as music and journalism, the costs for physical
distribution were – and still can be – staggering. These costs not only
include exhibition (i.e., transportation of newspapers, books, and discs),
but also the costs of coordinating distribution, which brings us to
another important reason why joining a platform can be so tempting
for complementors.
Digital platforms have drastically reduced economic friction by cutting
down on transaction costs – that is, the costs incurred in doing business
(Gawer, 2020; Parker et al., 2016). For end-users, engaging in economic
transactions is relatively seamless. For complementors, getting paid by
platform companies can be dif icult, but, in the aggregate, transaction
costs are lower compared to physical markets. In theory, at least, the
rules on payments are uniform and clear. For example, Apple’s
payments to app developers “are made no later than thirty (30) days
following the end of each monthly period.”9 This may sound like a
trivial detail, but as any entrepreneur can attest, getting paid on time
and not having to retain lawyers to chase after delinquent corporate

partners saves a lot of time, money, and angst. In practice, meanwhile,
complementors have accused platform companies of uneven systems of
payment and, worse, surreptitious practices that unfairly punish
creators (Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021).
In addition to allowing cultural producers to save on creation,
distribution, and transaction costs, platform companies provide them
with access to a bigger and more heterogenous groups of end-users.
Facebook, for instance, is available in more than 100 languages. Apple,
WeChat, Alibaba, and Line cater to large regional and national
audiences (Jia & Winseck, 2018; Mohan & Punathambekar, 2019;
Steinberg, 2019). For producers vying to attract regionally diverse
audiences, such reach has had profound effects. While the headquarters
of the most powerful platform companies are located in just a few
countries (i.e., the US, China, and Japan), complementors are much
more geographically dispersed. YouTube’s content, for instance, is
“largely born global”; as a result, content creators on these platforms
are said to be “more racially plural, multicultural, and gender diverse by
far than mainstream screen media” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 49,
11). A similar increase in geographical diversity can be seen in the
book, music, and game industries. Cultural or language-based af inities
play an important role here. In India, for example, creators who speak
Bengali and Marathi – two of the 121+ languages spoken in India – use
streaming platforms to their advantage by creating “demand for
regional content from the local and global Indian diaspora” (Mehta,
2020: 117).
Business model alignment

For cultural producers, the trade-off for economic opportunity is often
conformity. To enter into a platform market and engage in economic
transactions, complementors have to align their business models and
work with the economic framework set out by platform operators. Even
though such frameworks can be changed at whim, a platform’s business
model is a highly formalized arrangement of economic technologies
and standards meant to engender trust among complementors. This
ensures that markets are transparent and economic friction is reduced.
Pricing standards are just one example of how platforms formalize

transactions. For example, app developers selling paid apps via Apple’s
app store cannot engage in dynamic pricing because they are not
allowed to pick any random price tag they want, nor can they set
different prices for individual users. Instead, they have to pick from
price points pre-set by Apple.
While advertising is one of the most visible monetization options
driving platform markets, there is a plethora of other revenue streams,
such as subscriptions, microtransactions, and donations. The Apple app
store, for instance, lists ive business models to choose from: paid (a set,
up-front payment), free (i.e., advertising), freemium (optional in-app
purchases), subscription (recurring revenues), and paymium (a mix of
the paid and freemium model).10 Then there are platforms that do not
provide complementors with direct means of monetizing their content
(Stoldt et al., 2019). Social networks such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and
Twitter welcome complementors to establish a presence on their
platform, but provide no direct sources of revenue. The unspoken
agreement between these platforms and its users – both end-users and
complementors – is that these platform subsidiaries serve as a way to
garner visibility and steer attention their way. Instagram in luencers
are able to generate considerable income by posting sponsored content
paid for by brands, but Facebook itself does not pay directly for posts.
For this reason, Facebook has become a major headache for traditional
institutions, especially news organizations (Myllylahti, 2018).
Collectively, these examples reveal that, while platform business models
are marked by a high degree of formalization, complementors are not
fully platform-dependent when it comes to generating revenue.
Musicians, for instance, retain the ability to secure income outside the
boundaries of a platform, such as through selling merchandise or live
performances (Hesmondhalgh & Meier, 2018). For complementors,
inding the “right” balance between platform-dependent and platform-
independent forms of income can be a complicated, continuous
exercise. For instance, Spotify not only streams music, it also helps
users purchase concert tickets – thus granting the company in initely
more control of previously platform-independent transactions.
Similarly, Twitch has added a number of monetization functionalities,

some of which integrate the streaming platform more deeply into one
of the many business units of its parent company Amazon.
In the end, what makes digital markets more ef icient than physical
ones is a platform’s ability to extract, store, and analyze information
about its end-users and any of the transactions it facilitates. Nick
Srnicek goes as far to say that “twenty- irst century advanced
capitalism” is “centered upon extracting and using a particular kind of
raw material: data” (2017: 39). Platforms can provide complementors
with detailed market and customer insights, often in real time. To be
sure, the systematized gathering of user or market data is not without
historical precedent, as media companies have long sought to gather
actionable information (Ang, 1996; Napoli, 2011; Turow, 2011). What is
different are the scale and the velocity of these efforts.
The data ication of digital markets has a number of implications,
discussed in this chapter, chief among which is the lowering of costs.
Another side-effect of data ication is that platform markets can be
made more transparent compared to nondigital markets – at least to
those who are granted access to valuable platform data. For example,
data intermediaries can provide information on which app is ranked
number one in an app store, creators can see how many people are
watching and donating, and journalists can test different headlines to
see which one attracts more readers (Beer, 2018; Petre, 2018).
Similarly, because data is at the very heart of the digital advertising
ecosystem, platform companies remain at the forefront of tracking,
analyzing, and modeling end-user behavior (Couldry & Mejı́as, 2019;
Turow, 2011). Game developers, movie studios, and newspaper
companies use digital platforms to advertise their games, hype their
movies, and sell subscriptions, respectively. The functionality provided
by advertising technology is incredibly sophisticated and seemingly
endless because of Google’s and Facebook’s relentless investments in
data tracking and user targeting technology (Crain, 2019).
Then again, as with so many transformations ushered in by
digitalization and data ication, digital advertising is a double-edged
sword for complementors. On the one hand, it allows cultural
producers to ind, track, and target new pockets of end-users that can
be sliced and diced into highly granular subgroups. Compared to, let’s

say, putting an advertisement in a local newspaper, the ease with which
small and medium-sized enterprises (which many cultural producers
are) can use Facebook’s and Google’s advertising tools is remarkable.
Using Facebook’s targeting tools, it is relatively simple and affordable
for a game developer to set up a small advertising campaign to, for
example, target a small group of players to see if they like a new game.
Using Facebook’s advertising analytics tools, that same game developer
can then see the exact demographics of those who have downloaded
the game along with features of those who keep playing it; such data
can, in turn, be used to launch even better targeted digital advertising
campaigns.
On the other hand, using platforms for “user-acquisition” campaigns as
described above only makes complementors all the more platform-
dependent. In certain cultural industry segments, such as the game app
economy, growing an audience organically – without paying money –
can be too uncertain, too slow, or simply impossible for new market
entrants. As a result, publishers are forced to invest heavily in digital
advertising campaigns if they want to reach audiences and get noticed
among the never-ending glut of digital content. Facebook’s and Google’s
data are richer and their targeting capabilities better than many of their
competitors, granting this duopoly signi icant in luence over the digital
advertising ecosystem. Therefore, they can set measurement standards
and rates, and enforce idiosyncratic regulations with virtual impunity.

Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated how platforms are becoming central
markets in key segments of the cultural industries, as an increasing
number of cultural producers create, distribute, market, and monetize
content and services through these “matchmakers.” This affects, in turn,
how cultural producers operate as economic actors. Aligning their
business models with those of platforms, they become subject to the
economic dynamics of platform markets. For one, in platform-
dependent modes of cultural production, “winner-take-all” dynamics,
which have long characterized the cultural industries, are further
intensi ied. Like other digital markets, platforms allow for direct
network effects; the more users who join the platform, the more
valuable it becomes. Yet, unlike other markets, platforms are also
characterized by indirect network effects. That is, when more end-users
join a platform, it becomes more valuable for complementors, and vice
versa. When positive, these network effects not only enable platforms
to rapidly become dominant markets, they also lead to greater
disparities between cultural producers. While some creators, game
publishers, and news organizations become hyper-visible, others
remain largely invisible.
Second, cultural producers as complementors are subject to the
volatility of platforms markets. In their efforts to entice end-users and
complementors to join while staving off competition from legacy media
companies, telecoms, and other platforms, platform companies are
constantly evolving, changing pricing models, and adjusting access to
their market. While all markets are inherently dynamic, platform
markets are particularly capricious. When a platform has just launched,
it tends to be highly accommodating to cultural producers, as it tries to
grow its complementor population. When it reaches a “mature” stage,
however, it can alter pricing models and platform regulations on its
own terms, which instantly impacts tens of thousands of content
producers. In the second half of this book, we will come back to this
issue of volatility by pointing toward the precarity of platform labor
and the contingent nature of platform creativity.

For now, let us return to the central argument of the book concerning
the reorganization of power relations in the cultural sector. In economic
terms, we can observe that platformization involves a simultaneous
decentralization and centralization of economic power. Especially early
on in a platform’s development, this process opens up new economic
opportunities for cultural producers to ind audiences and generate
revenue. These opportunities are open not just to large media
companies, but also to individual cultural producers. As such,
platformization furnishes the potential for individual producers to be
economically emancipated from legacy media companies. At the same
time, when network effects materialize, platformization leads to
extraordinary concentration of economic power held by a handful of
platform corporations. In combination with the constant evolution of
platform markets, this concentration of power is particularly
problematic for cultural producers, as it exacerbates the uneven
distribution of resources and other forms of economic inequality.

Notes
1. It was through a social game that Cambridge Analytica, the company
at the heart of the 2016 US elections scandal, was able to harvest so
much user data. In the early 2010s, Facebook put very few
restrictions on “social application” developers to collect user data
(Bogost, 2018).
2. For every dollar in revenue Zynga generated in optional purchases,
the company had to transfer 30% to Facebook, which amounted to
“12% of Facebook total pro its in 2011” (Willson & Leaver, 2015:
150). In the years after, this speci ic source of revenue – payment
fees – would dwindle relative to advertising revenue, which became
Facebook’s main revenue driver.
3. In the context of this book and this chapter we are always talking
about digital games rather than physical games, such as card or
board games.
4. See van Dijck & Nieborg (2009) or the work of Nicholas John (2016)
for critical reviews of such discursive interventions.
5. A business model is “the set of activities a irm undertakes to create
and capture value, including identifying products or services,
revenue sources, customer base, and details of inancing” (Rietveld
& Schilling, 2020: 28).
6. Google subsidiary YouTube, the Japanese video-sharing service
Niconico, and Tencent, to an extent, are all examples of platform
companies that mix media company behavior – e.g., via investment
in original IP – and aggregate massive numbers of institutional
connections with complementors (Cunningham & Craig, 2019;
Steinberg, 2019).
7. When platform companies do invest billions in original content, for
example in the case of Apple (Apple TV+) and Amazon (Amazon
Video), it is to compete directly with other video-on-demand portals

and to make other, more pro itable parts of their business more
attractive to end-users.
8. In late 2020, Apple launched its App Store Small Business Program,
which lowered its transaction fee to 15% for those app developers
earning less than $1 million in annual sales.
9.
https://itunespartner.apple.com/en/books/faq/Payments%20and
%20Financial%20Report Getting%20 Paid. Add to this: “To receive
payment, you must have provided all required banking and tax
information and documentation, as well as meet the minimum
payment threshold.”
10. See: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/business-models/.

3
Infrastructure

Introduction
While hundreds of newspaper companies have shuttered over the last
decade, the Guardian – the celebrated British daily founded in 1821 –
has been on a distinctively upward trajectory. Its global reach at the end
of 2020 was 35.6 million monthly users, including both print and online
readers.1 The company’s labor recruitment was also quite favorable – at
least until the COVID-19 pandemic forced the publisher to cut 180 staff
positions. Prior to that, the Guardian’s “Work for Us” page advertised
dozens of open positions, with job titles divided into such well-
established categories as Editorial, Commercial, and Business
Operations.2 An entirely new job category appeared, too, namely
“Digital Development,” which listed vacancies that would be it a game
studio as much as a news organization: Engineering Manager, Software
Developer, and Data Scientist, among others. Like any news
organization with ambitions set well beyond its national borders, the
Guardian sought specialists who could effectively help them execute a
two-prong publishing strategy: irst, drawing readers to its digital
outlets (i.e., its website and apps) and keeping them there with so-
called “sticky content”; second, deploying a platform-native strategy by
hosting and monetizing content on external platforms and apps,
ranging from Facebook to Snapchat to Amazon’s Echo devices.
Inevitably, the platformization of news presents newspaper publishers
with formidable challenges as well as strategic mechanisms for
responding to such challenges (Burgess & Hurcombe, 2019; Nielsen &
Ganter, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018). Enacting such responses raises
various questions. For example, during which stage of news creation,
distribution, marketing, and monetization do you partner with
platforms? Do you try to pull your audience toward your own digital
domains, or do you push content out to where audiences are? In the
case of the Guardian, the answer was “both.” Indeed, in a section of the
website designed to lure advertisers, the Guardian boasted: “Our
coronavirus video explainer is the third most popular video on the
Guardian News YouTube channel.”3

Crucially, these examples foreground the directly visible aspects of
platform-dependent newspapers: attracting audiences and monetizing
them. Yet newspaper companies face another set of strategic decisions
that are wholly invisible to outsiders, namely whether or not to swap
out legacy publishing infrastructures for platform-dependent
equivalents, a process we refer to in this chapter as infrastructural
integration. In the context of this book, platform infrastructures refer to
platform databases and networks, as well as the gateways, interfaces,
tools, and associated documentation to access these systems. Taken
together, platform infrastructures provide cultural producers with the
economic and material affordances to create, distribute, market, and/or
monetize cultural content.
To understand why decisions about infrastructural integration are so
daunting for news companies like the Guardian, it is necessary to
recognize that for much of the twentieth century, newspaper publishers
retained control of their own distribution operations. Not every
newspaper was fully autonomous, of course, but major newspaper
publishers owned their own paper mills, oversaw their printing
presses, and commandeered leets of delivery trucks (Stamm, 2018). In
other words, they owned and operated the physical publishing
infrastructure dedicated to printing and delivering daily newspapers.
Beginning in the aughts, however, as audiences started to lock to
digital outlets for their news, physical distribution became not quite
redundant, but much less of a necessity. Gradually, newspapers had to
consider how, when, and where their content was to be distributed
alongside digitally wrought transformations in production and
distribution (Nielsen, 2019). Moreover, to remain competitive, news
content has to be available 24/7, engagement needs to be constantly
monitored, and the reading experience must be optimized for clicks,
retention, and, ultimately, monetization (Christin, 2020; Petre, 2018).
The Guardian seemed able to take these new infrastructural demands
in its stride. As former director of architecture Graham Tackley
explained, the website and all its associated software were initially
hosted in-house.4 In 2012, this strategy changed when the publisher
started to move two essential parts of its digital operations – content
hosting and data analytics – into “the cloud.” Tackley’s platform of

choice was Amazon Web Services (AWS) – an on-demand cloud
platform used for remote computing, storage, analytics, and other
services. While the Guardian’s decision to outsource a vital part of its
publishing operations may seem like a relinquishment of control, the
move enabled Tackley’s team members to operate a digital publishing
infrastructure at scale and for much lower costs. For news publishers,
the expenses related to owning and operating servers that host
gigabytes of data, handle terabytes of traf ic, and run sophisticated data
analytics software can be staggering. Moreover, such services must be
fast, secure, reliable, and able to easily traverse regional boundaries.
AWS therefore responded to the Guardian’s critical infrastructural
needs. The newspaper is by no means unique in this regard; news
organizations around the world (e.g., News Corp, Globe and Mail,
Sanoma, and Hindu Group) have pursued similar tactics by outsourcing
key parts of their publishing operations to “Infrastructure as a Service”
companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft (Arsenault, 2017).
By doing so, news organizations have become infrastructurally
platform-dependent.
Such dependence is both contingent and relational; Amazon cannot, for
instance, directly interfere with the Guardian’s editorial policies.
Similar to an internet service provider’s relationship with the owner of
a website, AWS does not directly control the content hosted on its
servers.5 So, if AWS does not directly interfere with the process of
cultural production, why do we need to critically engage with the issue
of platform infrastructures? In this chapter, we show how
infrastructural integration is a central institutional dimension of
platform-dependent cultural production. Despite its invisibility, we
contend that infrastructures are located at the very intersection of
platform markets, discussed in the previous chapter, and platform
governance, the subject of the next chapter. Thus, in the context of
platform-dependent cultural production, systems, networks, and tools
translate into hardware, software, and associated protocols and
practices that allow for connections to be established, transactions to
take place, and regulations to come into effect. For the Guardian, this
means integration with AWS’s software, hardware, databases, and tools.
It is at this material level – formalized by AWS’s design and
architectural standards – that platforms shape cultural production.

Infrastructural integration
For some cultural producers – such as members of the Guardian’s
executive team – infrastructural issues are an ongoing consideration.
For others – TikTok creators, for instance – platform infrastructures are
rarely a top priority. Then again, platform infrastructure impacts
production practices of both in profound ways. Considering that the
location of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is in China, both
pundits and policymakers have been wary about the app’s widespread
popularity among teens (Jia & Nieborg, 2021). Such wariness is rooted
in wider concerns about national security and sovereignty, and the
2020 ban of the platform in India – one of TikTok’s larger markets –
only ampli ied such angst. ByteDance tried to downplay these fears by
arguing that TikTok’s data was hosted in the US and Singapore “to
establish a irewall between the Chinese state and users outside China”
(Tolentino, 2019). Such an “infrastructural perspective” – an interest in
the material structure of how apps and platforms operate in the
background (Parks, 2015: 363) – has a different sense of urgency than
in discussions surrounding Silicon Valley-born platforms. US and Indian
policymakers, in particular, investigated TikTok with remarkable speed,
if not outright hostility.
While the geopolitics of global media infrastructures directly impact
how content gets circulated, these kinds of conversations may sound
irrelevant to independent cultural producers (Chen et al., 2021; Kaye et
al., 2021). In the case of TikTok, it is easy for creators to take
infrastructure for granted: Uploading is seamless, and interruptions or
outages are rare. What is more, if there are public conversations about
potential publishing bottlenecks, they revolve around platform
governance, discussed in the next chapter. More broadly, users only
tend to notice the material structures that make platforms tick when
such services break down (Star, 1999). Accessibility is something of a
given for TikTok creators, too, who are awarded free access to the
platform’s development and monetization tools through so-called
software development kits (SDKs). By tapping on the plus sign located
in the app’s home screen, a creator can upload an existing clip or shoot
a new one. While users can upload existing material (e.g., photos,
videos, music), TikTok clearly nudges its users toward its native

creation and distribution infrastructure. Then, to attract viewers, they
can select from a range of built-in editing features that include ilters,
stickers, and short music clips.
For game developers, meanwhile, platform-native tools are nothing
new (Foxman, 2019; Nicoll & Keogh, 2019). Instead, producers in the
game industry have long understood that software suites, programming
languages, and distribution frameworks have been set – or at least
stringently controlled – by platform operators (Montfort & Bogost,
2009). For example, to develop a PlayStation game, a studio requires
Sony’s approval to acquire and use expensive, dedicated development
kits – or, in industry speak, “devkits” (Kerr, 2017). The same logic
structures game platforms by Nintendo and Microsoft. Although game
developers can use third-party tools or so-called “game engines” to
create virtual environments, software distribution requires of icially
sanctioned machines to compile and test their software. That is to say,
game developers have traditionally followed platform-native
production strategies, which long elevated the role of game hardware
manufacturers to decide which games are made, where, by whom, and
for whom (Johns, 2006).
The emergence of app stores has led to a further integration of the
creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization of games with
platform infrastructures (Gerlitz, Helmond, Nieborg, et al., 2019; Zhao,
2019). Mobile games are primarily accessible via the app stores
operated by Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon, as well as more
regionally focused app stores operated by Tencent, Line, and Huawei
(Steinberg, 2019). When game developers want to promote their
newest app – an advertising practice called “user acquisition” – they
target players via advertisements that appear in other apps. Such
placement ensures that data is routed through the advertising tools and
targeting technologies of Google and Facebook, as well as through
thousands of their data partners (Nieborg, 2017). Payment
infrastructures are, similarly, fully integrated into mobile devices. Thus,
whereas certain aspects of game app production can be conducted
independently of platforms, the entire distribution–marketing–
monetization cycle of a game app takes places within the boundaries of
mobile platform ecosystems.

The impact of this high level of infrastructural integration on the game
app economy has been substantial. For this reason, app stores provide
insight into a crucial tension at the heart of institutional platform-
dependence, namely that of access and opportunity versus asymmetry
and precarity. To the former point, app stores are much more accessible
distribution outlets than either game consoles or retail stores. An
important upshot of this level of accessibility is a marked increase in
the number of game apps available to users. But while a larger market
has the potential to broaden economic opportunities, the reality is that
app stores have recast the game app economy as a winner-takes-all
economy par excellence (Bresnahan et al., 2014; Nieborg, Young,
Joseph, 2020; Rietveld et al., 2020). Regardless of which metric one
utilizes to assess a game app’s performance – downloads, revenue, or
average monthly users, among others – the numbers will be extremely
skewed toward a handful of winners. As such, we may conclude that
app stores do little to alleviate the precarious nature of game labor.
Taken together, the opening examples that draw on the Guardian,
TikTok, and game apps demonstrate that platform infrastructures
should be a signi icant area of concern to cultural industries
researchers. What makes this concern all the more pressing is that
platform companies’ scale, ambition, and networked structures have
further blurred the distinctions between infrastructures and platforms
(Constantinides et al., 2018). In their intervention in the ield of
platform studies, Jean-Christophe Plantin and colleagues aptly note:
“Digital technologies have made possible a ‘platformization’ of
infrastructure and an ‘infrastructuralization’ of platforms” (2018: 295).
A key argument that runs through the irst half of this book is that a
platform’s economic operations – the conditions under which it
aggregates connections and transactions – are deeply enmeshed with
both its infrastructural operations and its governance framework. In
the words of internet studies scholars Anne Helmond and Fernando van
der Vlist, complementors are both distributed “across the multiple
sides of platforms (multi-sidedness)” as well as “across the different
architectural levels of platforms (multi-layeredness)” (2019: 10). To
further explore the institutional dimension of platformization, this
chapter pays special attention to what infrastructural integration looks

like in the phases of cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization. To lay the groundwork for understanding this
integration, we begin by surveying the distinctive properties of those
infrastructures – both old and new – that are relevant to cultural
production. Our focus here is twofold. First, we consider the relational
nature of infrastructure – that is, its integration or nestedness in other
networks or systems. Such a relational focus allows us to offer greater
precision in our analysis of institutional relationships while identifying
differences among public, private, legacy, and platform infrastructures.
Second, given our overarching interest in manifestations of
infrastructural power, we interrogate issues of infrastructural
accessibility and control. The latter issues prompt a conversation about
openness, ownership, and the notion of “generativity” – a term that has
gained great traction among legal and business scholars.

Platforms and Infrastructuralization
To fully examine the infrastructural dimensions of platformization, it is
irst necessary to understand the wider infrastructural context within
which platforms are embedded. The relationships of platform
companies to neighboring organizations – including those in the
cultural, consumer electronics, and the telecommunications industries
– can be characterized not only by competition and cooperation, but
also by progressive infrastructural integration and interoperability.
These concepts point to a level of formalization and standardization
that allows systems, services, and databases “to ‘talk’ to one another
and share data across domains and platforms” (Bechmann, 2013: 75).
For instance, when launching the iPhone, not only did Apple set up an
exclusive agreement with US telecommunications service provider
AT&T, but the company also made sure its device was compatible with
the GSM radio telecommunications standard used by AT&T.
To make sense of such institutional relationships across industry
formations and within platform ecosystems, infrastructure should be
understood above all as a “relational concept” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996).
This idea highlights infrastructure’s embeddedness inside “other
structures, social arrangements, and technologies” (Star, 1999: 381).
These structures and technologies include both physical, material
dimensions and intangible, immaterial ones. The former usually
includes hardware, or networks of infrastructural objects distributed
far and wide; an example would be the computer servers located in the
data warehouses owned and operated by Amazon. The latter points to
the role of software, which includes not only the software that runs on
computers, but also the social practices, arrangements, and codi ied
instructions, such as standards and protocols. In the case of AWS, this
immaterial dimension includes terms of service and professional
documentation instructing engineers working for the Guardian about
how to deploy AWS servers. In sum, hardware and software are two
sides of the same coin; one does not function without the other.
The embeddedness of infrastructures also reveals how they are deeply
implicated in power relationships (Parks & Starosielski, 2015: 11). This

relational understanding corresponds with our own stance that power
structures and relations emerge out of the dependency between
platform companies, cultural producers, and end-users. It is precisely
such dependency that makes infrastructure more visible. Consider
infrastructures for public services, such as utilities (e.g., drinking water
and electricity). A litmus test would be to see what happens when they
do not work; infrastructural breakdowns or even slight disruptions
bring infrastructural integration into sharp relief – for instance, when
the power goes out, or water pumps fail. We can translate the notion of
embeddedness into platform ecosystems, too. In recent years, AWS has
been plagued by a number of outages; as a result, thousands of
newspapers, podcast hosting companies, and game apps have abruptly
become inaccessible. Because platform companies like Amazon have
established such a critical position in the internet economy, some
scholars have argued that they should be subject to stricter antitrust
regulation or regulated as utilities (Hindman, 2018; Khan, 2018).6
Doing so would allow governments to enact regulatory frameworks
similar to those in telecommunications, such as common carrier rules
that ensure network neutrality – nondiscrimination in routing digital
data – or provisions that guarantee network access (Noam, 2001).
The issue of embeddedness also leads us to considerations of
ownership. The fact that the companies at the heart of platform-
dependent cultural production are for-pro it corporations is signi icant
because of the fundamental differences that exist regarding the
openness, ownership, and market-orientation of commercial platforms,
compared to public or semi-public infrastructures, such as those owned
by states, (local) governments, or the digital commons (e.g., open-
source software). For decades, cultural producers have been nested
within these private as well as public infrastructures. Yet, the more
integrated cultural producers become with company-owned and
operated platform infrastructures, the more this balance tilts toward
company-owned networks and systems.
The internet is a prime example of a public network (of networks) that
is ubiquitous, interoperable, decentralized, and notoriously generative
– meaning that its hardware and software are open to virtually anyone
who wants to build products or services on top of it (Jamieson, 2020).

“Generativity” has been theorized as “a system’s capacity to produce
unanticipated change through un iltered contributions from broad and
varied audiences” (Zittrain, 2008: 19). It is precisely because of the
internet’s open standards that both marketbased or “industrial” and
nonmarket or “commons-based peer production” are enabled (Benkler,
2006). The latter set of practices signals a shift away from the use and
production of proprietary (i.e., copyrighted, patented, and
trademarked) resources in favor of openly shared, nonproprietary
content. Platforms themselves can also be commons-based in terms of
ownership: think of Wikipedia, but also of content management
systems such as Moodle or WordPress. Arguably, nonproprietary
platform infrastructures are more likely to make nonmarket, commons-
based forms of cultural production possible. That said, as argued by
Matthew Hindman: “Again and again, real-world peer production of
content has been unable to compete with traditional corporate models”
(2018: 170).
Recognizing the existence of nonmarket alternatives does not mean
that platform subsidiaries such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are
not generative. The key point here is that corporate ownership allows
for the centralization of control over access to a platform market, to
platform data, and to platform tools, interfaces, and developer
documentation. Thus, infrastructural integration hands over control of
key facets of cultural production to platform companies. To relate this
back to the de inition of generativity, one way in which platform
companies operationalize control is by iltering contributions. While
social media platforms are part of the open internet, as well as being
built and integrated with commons-based tools and systems, they
“promise to rise above it, by offering a better experience of all this
information and sociality: curated, organized, archived, and moderated”
(Gillespie, 2018: 13). These instances of content moderation are
instantly visible to end-users. In this chapter, however, we are
interested in how iltering impacts the contributions of cultural
producers, which are shaped by the less visible standards, networks,
systems, and tools owned and operated by platform companies.
After two decades of critical internet scholarship, what is becoming
increasingly clear is the profound political economic stakes of the

platformization of digital infrastructures. Undeniably, the growth of
platform companies crowds out open (source) or public alternatives
(DeNardis, 2012; van Dijck et al., 2018). That said, we are not
suggesting that, currently, platform companies are infrastructurally
dominant.
First, as political economist Dwayne Winseck (2017) points out, we
have to measure the rise of platform companies alongside other
institutional actors that shape and structure the material side of
internet connectivity. For example, Facebook, Google, and Amazon have
invested heavily in internet access, by taking ownership stakes in optic
cables and building data centers around the world. But the investments
and ownership stakes of incumbent bandwidth wholesalers and
telecom operators, such as Vodafone, Telefó nica, and China Mobile, are
just as – if not more – signi icant.
Second, public and private infrastructure building plays out quite
differently across regions. For instance, to ensure internet sovereignty,
Russia and China have appointed or elevated domestic platform
companies, such as Yandex and Baidu, respectively (Budnitsky & Jia,
2018; Leong, 2018). The Chinese state, for its part, has allowed
platform behemoths Alibaba and Tencent to achieve unprecedented
scale in “their infrastructural ambitions as long as they are aligned with
economic development and security interests” (Plantin & de Seta, 2019:
259). Because Chinese and Russian platform infrastructures are much
more intertwined with existing state-controlled regulatory frameworks
and state-owned infrastructures (payment, health, security, etc.), these
platforms are not only more seamlessly integrated into everyday life,
but – as we will see in this and the following chapter – they also allow
the state to exert a greater degree of control over cultural production.

Platforms as Components-based Data
Infrastructures
As we argue throughout this chapter, what complicates investigations
into infrastructures is their invisibility; physical systems and digital
networks are always only partly visible (Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Star
& Ruhleder, 1996). This is by no means a problem unique to the twenty-
irst century; if we wanted to examine electricity, we could start by
surveying electrical outlets and power lines; however, most of the grid –
the vital hardware and software needed to power our homes and
of ices – is hidden from view. The notion of partial visibility raises an
important methodological challenge in studies of infrastructure: where
to start an analysis and what to focus on? That is, what are the
“infrastructural objects” – think of mail sorters, power poles, and
satellite dishes (Parks, 2015) – that render infrastructures more
legible?
For cultural producers, the speci ic infrastructural conditions under
which cultural commodities are created are highly in luential for their
creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization. This does not mean
that cultural producers need to be constantly attuned to the
con igurations of servers in the data warehouses of Amazon,
ByteDance, or Facebook. What it does mean is that they must consider
access to a subset of infrastructural objects known as gateways – the
devices, interfaces, and apparatuses typically invisible to end-users –
that allow third parties to integrate themselves with a network or
system (Plantin et al., 2018). In platform ecosystems, such gateways are
data interfaces (APIs), tools (SDKs), and their associated
documentation. How open or closed, and how omnipresent these
gateways are is a political issue that leads to a series of compelling
questions. Who owns them? Who sets their standards? Where are they
located? And particularly important for our inquiry: how to access
them.
To understand infrastructural objects and gateways, we survey recent
work in information systems research and platform studies. With the

rise of the platform economy, both research traditions have taken a so-
called “infrastructural turn” (Constantinides et al., 2018; Plantin &
Punathambekar, 2019). These research traditions acknowledge that
platforms are not merely websites or apps; rather, they are components-
based data infrastructures, which, put together, comprise platform
ecosystems. The next section will discuss the main characteristics of
these ecosystems and how they shape platform-dependent forms of
Platform instances and ecosystems

Taking a relational perspective allows us to break down platform
infrastructures into their constitutive parts and explore how, in turn,
these parts structure the relationship between platforms and cultural
producers. Our starting point in this exercise is a concept introduced in
the previous chapter: platform ecosystems. To recap, when discussing
platform markets, we argued that platform companies – such as Google
– own and operate several platform subsidiaries. Each of these
subsidiaries contributes to the overall revenue of their parent company
(e.g., Google LLC) and, in the case of multidivisional companies, a
holding company (e.g., Alphabet Inc.). Each subsidiary, further, operates
a distinct multisided market (e.g., Google Search or YouTube) by
aggregating different groups of end-users and complementors.
To distinguish between an economic and an infrastructural perspective
on platform ecosystems, it is necessary to recognize that each platform
subsidiary is also a distinctive sociotechnical system or platform
instance (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). Consider Facebook, which is
colloquially referred to as a social network site, and which, in a
remarkably short time span, transitioned toward becoming a mobile-
irst company (Goggin, 2014). For end-users, and thus for cultural
producers, Facebook’s apps have become more and more relevant,
perhaps more so than its website. Furthermore, each of Facebook’s
popular apps – WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger – has a distinctive
architecture and serves as a stand-alone derivative that provides “a
distinct ‘view’ of the platform as a whole,” with each instance offering
“different functionalities tailored to distinct user groups” (Nieborg &
Helmond, 2019: 199). Thus, from an infrastructural point of view,

Facebook should be considered a platform ecosystem comprising
several platform instances. These instances are part of a broader data
infrastructure – both in a material sense (i.e., Facebook servers hosting
app data are housed in the same data warehouses) and in a
computational sense (i.e., advertisers can go into the “Ads manager”
tool and, with a simple click, have the same ad appear in different
Facebook apps).
For scholars, the institutional position and distinctiveness of platform
instances are important for several reasons. First, their relationality
forces us to be more precise about the exact level of analysis when
considering the infrastructural integration of cultural producers and
other complementors. In the vast majority of cases, cultural producers
integrate not so much with a platform, but with a platform instance. For
instance, while a cultural producer may do business with Google LLC,
they are only granted access to those APIs and SDKs that are part of an
individual platform instance – such as YouTube, Google Search, or
Google’s Play Store. Indeed, each of these instances requires distinctive
tools, involves different levels of integration, and gives way to speci ic
regulatory frameworks.
Second, institutional politics can differ signi icantly among platform
instances, even if they are part of the same parent company. The
embeddedness of platform instances in other platform ecosystems and
broader media and communication infrastructures adds another layer
of complexity to infrastructural integration (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020;
Flensburg & Lai, 2020). As an app, Facebook Messenger can be
considered both a platform instance and a complementor in Google’s
and Apple’s app stores. For cultural producers that distribute and
monetize content through Messenger, this layering of infrastructures
means they must be carefully attuned to the governance frameworks of
both the app instance and the app stores operated by Apple, Google,
and Tencent, among others.
Lastly, there is substantive variation among platform instances based
upon their evolutionary phase (Rietveld & Eggers, 2018; Rietveld &
Schilling, 2020). As we discussed in the previous chapter, some
platforms or apps may be relatively “mature,” while others are still in
their infancy, or “launch” phase (Gawer, 2020). To conduct business on

a platform – be it creating or monetizing cultural content – cultural
producers require access to a platform’s infrastructure; moreover,
depending on the stage of a platform’s evolution, such infrastructures
are considered more (or less) accessible, comprehensible, and
functional.
The evolution of the Facebook Messenger app provides a compelling
example of how the business model of a platform instance develops in
tandem with its infrastructure – as well as how this process of co-
evolution had signi icant economic rami ications for speci ic groups of
cultural producers. Facebook introduced Messenger in 2008 as a simple
chat functionality available on its website. By late 2011, the company
developed the “chat product” into a full- ledged platform instance by
releasing it as a stand-alone app for mobile phones. Neither of these
milestones, however, meant that external developers could integrate
their product or service with the app. This began to change in 2016, as
Facebook started to devote signi icant resources into building a
business around Messenger. For example, the “Instant Games” product
was introduced, which allowed third-party game developers to make
their products accessible within the app. At this point in its lifecycle,
Messenger seemed to provide an attractive opportunity for game
developers. Among these developers was the game studio we discussed
at length in the previous chapter: Zynga. Yet Messenger kept evolving,
as platforms do. To streamline the app’s interface, Facebook decided in
2019 to remove the Instant Games functionality from Messenger.
Together with other game developers, Zynga was instantly booted from
the app.
Programmability and datafication

As research from platform studies makes clear, platform instances are,
by de inition, programmable (Bodle, 2011; Helmond, 2015; McKelvey,
2011). Digital infrastructures are not only designed to be extended by
others, they “are distinct from other types of infrastructures because of
their ability to collect, store, and make digital data available across a
number of systems and devices” (Constantinides et al., 2018: 382). In
other words, to streamline the integration between a platform and its
complementors, data needs to low continuously and effectively. To

make a platform instance accessible, platform companies provide
complementors with access to platform data via standardized access
points or APIs. As mandatory gateways, APIs permit interaction among
components “to form a seamlessly interactive network” (Plantin et al.,
2018: 303). In practice, this means that developers can set up
programmatic (i.e., automated) HTTPrequests or calls, “via a technique
of retrieving data on a server in the background, without disrupting the
display and function of a web page” (Bodle, 2011: 322). For example, in
its social games played on the Facebook website, game developer Zynga
would use Facebook’s Social Graph API to display player information
hosted by Facebook. For end-users, these data lows are invisible, as
APIs provide a seamless user experience.
As Anne Helmond (2015) has argued, the moment a website provides
an API, it becomes “programmable” and hence a platform in a
computational sense. She describes platformization as a historical shift
where social network sites turn into platforms, thereby becoming the
“dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web”
(2015: 1). Importantly, “programmability is what enables a platform to
be extended and embedded into other domains” (Helmond & van der
Vlist, 2019: 17). That is to say, both APIs and SDKs allow platforms to
extend beyond the borders of their own data infrastructures (Blanke &
Pybus, 2020; Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013). For example, Facebook and
Google offer login functionalities that provide user authentication
services – used by many game app developers – or Facebook’s “Social
Plugins,” such as the “Comments Plugin,” “Page Plugin,” or “Share
Button,” which typically appear as share or comment buttons on news
sites and apps. Facebook freely provides cultural producers with these
functionalities because they serve as a means to “decentralize the
production of data” by complementors and to “recentralize the
collection of that data” by platforms (Helmond, 2015). In other words,
these kinds of integrations provide platforms with a crucial means to
control who gets access to which data, and under what conditions. In
their research on the mobile app ecosystem, Tobias Blanke and Jennifer
Pybus illustrate how pervasive infrastructural integration has become:

Even as we log out of the ecosystems of Google and Facebook, we
are still permanently connected to them, as the services they
provide via their SDKs reach far into the mobile ecosystem. From
the perspective of technical integration, platformization is the
permanent process of de- and recomposing SDK services. (2020:
11)
By de-composition, they are referring to the integration of platform
SDKs into apps developed by complementors, which then allow for
decentralized data production in the same way as the aforementioned
platform plugins and login services do.
To invite integration and ensure accessibility, a platform’s data
infrastructure requires certain levels of stability, architectural
standardization, and technical interoperability. For platform companies
vying to scale up fast(er), open standards promise to attract the widest
variety of cultural producers, and to have clear rules that will decrease
transaction costs. Cultural producers, for their part, must be equipped
with the skills and literacies to navigate the infrastructures of the major
platforms; they should know, for instance, how to integrate SDKs, how
to access APIs, how data is structured, how much can be retrieved, and
how often. As such, it is necessary for platforms to set clear formats and
standards.7
In practice, however, data infrastructures are far from stable, and any
opening of platform boundaries is partial, at best. For platform
companies, APIs have become a crucial avenue for platforms to control
access, but also to enforce – in the words of Anja Bechmann (2013: 75)
– “intraoperability” as opposed to “interoperability.” Whereas public
infrastructure is characterized by the latter (Plantin et al., 2018: 299),
commercial platform APIs enforce asymmetrical infrastructural
relationships between complementors and platform companies. These
relationships are uneven because cultural producers have few options
other than to agree with the economic and infrastructural standards,
and the governance frameworks set by platform companies. What is
more, the standards vary widely precisely because platform companies
operate a number of platform instances, each of which offers a variety
of APIs and SDKs that provide only partial access to prede ined sections
of a platform’s data infrastructure. Confounding these asymmetries

further still, SDK con igurations, API structures, and associated
governance frameworks are constantly changing. For example,
Facebook’s API structure is frequently restructured and renamed, and
APIs are deprecated on a whim (Helmond et al., 2019). Thus, while
platform data and programmability enable cultural producers to
provide new content and services, they cannot automatically count on
these resources. From an infrastructural perspective, this makes
platform-dependent cultural production innately volatile.
Boundary resources
Next to gathering data on end-users by facilitating transactions and
decentralizing data production, the platform companies discussed in
this book also provide cultural producers with important “innovation
functions” (Gawer, 2020). As business scholar Michael Jacobides and his
colleagues explain of such functions, “technological modularity allows
interdependent components of a system to be produced by different
producers, with limited coordination required” (2018: 2260). There are
countless examples from the domain of cultural production. Neither
TikTok nor Instagram produces their own content, nor do Apple or
Google pay app developers to build speci ic apps. Rather, these
companies facilitate “product-agnostic” innovations; they can be games,
transportation apps, or banking apps (Constantinides et al., 2018).8
Seen in this light, the platform-dependent production of
“complementary innovations” is not a top-down, pre-planned affair, but
a loosely coordinated effort by a theoretically unlimited number of
complementors (Constantinides et al., 2018). A case in point would,
again, be the many millions of different TikTok or YouTube clips
uploaded to ByteDance’s and YouTube’s servers – none of which is
directly commissioned by platform companies.
Here, it bears repeating that loose coordination does not necessarily
imply a loss of control. To access a platform, complementors need
access to resources that not only include APIs and SDKs but also
regulatory frameworks (e.g., terms of service, manuals, training videos,
support networks, etc.) and support documentation to comprehend
these resources (Gerlitz, Helmond, Nieborg, et al., 2019). Such boundary
resources can be understood as a platform’s infrastructural gateways

and associated informational resources that enable and control the
computational and institutional interactions with complementors. They
are designed to support or “resource” complementors while
simultaneously “securing” or controlling them (Ghazawneh &
Henfridsson, 2013).
Apple’s iOS ecosystem testi ies to the breadth of boundary resources
available to complementors. To streamline app development, Apple
provides developers with Xcode.9 This Integrated Development
Environment (IDE) provides a full suite of tools (editors, compilers, and
other tools) that support multiple programming languages, chief among
which is Apple’s own Swift language (Stratton, 2020). The use of Xcode
for app creation is not mandatory but, rather, simpli ies app design and
is free of charge for Mac users. Xcode is integrated with Apple’s SDKs,
such as the iOS SDK, and has a visual graphical user interface (GUI) so
developers can preview how their code functions in real time. Lastly,
Xcode includes instructions and guides that illustrate Apple’s strategy
to resource developers and control them via guidelines, templates, and
code snippets. Particularly for smaller companies and burgeoning
cultural producers, boundary resources such as those provided by
Apple drastically lower the barrier to participate in content creation
and distribution.
At the same time, this example illustrates the didactic component of
boundary resources. In the same way that production tools, such as text
or graphic editors, require training and instructions, so too do APIs
require a certain level of “data infrastructure literacy” and therefore
come “with extensive developer documentation, detailing the query
formats and limits regarding which data can be accessed in what
quantities by whom, and at what cost” (Gray et al., 2018: 6).
Infrastructural integration with platforms on the part of cultural
producers is, therefore, inextricably bound with questions of labor.
Learning how to use (new) tools or keeping up with changing API
structures is a nontrivial task (Jamieson, 2020). A small change in any
of a platform’s boundary resources can have profound effects on the
ability to do one’s job. Much like the “algorithmic literacies” required of
platform entrepreneurs (Klawitter & Hargittai, 2018), cultural
producers must also develop infrastructural literacies. Moreover, the

level of uncertainty hitched to platform infrastructure ampli ies the
already precarious nature of platform-dependent labor – an issue we
explore in more depth in chapter 5.
As a result of complementors’ different technological, cultural, and
economic needs and incentives, platform companies alternate between
accommodating and resisting changes to boundary resources – a
recursive process theorized as “tuning” (Eaton et al., 2015). For
instance, since the irst version of Xcode was released in 2003,
subsequent versions have offered more capabilities and supported
more Apple devices. The tuning process not only involves platform
companies and complementors, but also end-users and a variety of
external stakeholders, such as governments. Together, the involvement
of so many social actors makes this process “simultaneously and
inseparably political and material” (Eaton et al., 2015: 236).
As we discuss in further detail below, boundary resources “offer
important entry points for understanding a platform’s technical
expansion” (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019: 203). Crucially, such an
understanding not only concerns API structures and SDK capabilities,
but also includes a wealth of developer documentation, community
guidelines, programming languages, and terms of service, all of which
contribute to the formalization of platform-dependent cultural
production (Helmond & van der Vlist, 2019). Collectively, these
resources delineate platform boundaries by codifying and
standardizing infrastructural access and integration. As such, they
provide platform companies with decisive mechanisms to govern
transactions and interactions.

Infrastructural Integration by
Complementors
The preceding examination of platforms’ operation and control of
infrastructures provides a useful backstory to assess how and when
cultural producers infrastructurally integrate themselves with
platforms. To further examine this issue, it is useful to distinguish
between three phases: (1) creation, (2) distribution, and (3) marketing
and monetization. In some sites of cultural production, such as social
media content creation, these three phases blend together. In other
instances, such as game development, they remain much more
distinctive. Untangling these phases thus serves an analytical purpose,
allowing us to show how different kinds of cultural producers develop
distinctive forms of dependency during different stages in the
production process.
Creation
The history of the game industry provides important insight into the
evolving nature of complementors’ use of boundary resources. In the
early 1980s, many gamemakers were not-for-pro it developers – that is,
amateurs who tinkered in their spare time. As an example of the
participants in Benkler’s (2006) “networked information economy,”
these bedroom coders wrote nonproprietary software on their home
computers and freely shared their creations with friends and other
hobbyists. In the mid-1980s, publishers such as Electronic Arts and
Activision started to sell game program “construction sets,” which
standardized and simpli ied programming tasks, thereby contributing
to the institutionalization of what rapidly became an industry
(Kirkpatrick, 2017). These construction kits not only simpli ied game
development, but also began “the process of bracketing those
endeavours, constraining them to operate within preconceived notions
of what the user should be permitted to do” (Kirkpatrick, 2017: 24).
Around the same time, the irst generation of dedicated game consoles
– the Atari VCS in 1977 and Nintendo’s NES in 1983 – launched, further
bracketing off game development. As bedrooms were swapped for

of ices, game consoles became inhospitable places for hobbyists,
thereby contributing to the ostensible industrialization of game
development and publishing (Montfort & Bogost, 2009).
Compared to the publishers of construction sets, Atari and Nintendo
had different economic incentives. The latter companies were among
the irst in the game industry to operate two-sided markets –
connecting publishers with players – and derive revenue from tacking
on a premium – or a tax of sorts – on every game sold on their
platforms. For game developers seeking to create saleable games, the
emergence of dedicated home consoles was both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, these consoles offered uniform hardware and access
to growing pools of players. On the other, Atari’s and Nintendo’s
construction sets were an obvious securing mechanism. After an initial
glut of mediocre titles in the early 1980s, Nintendo in particular
became very selective concerning to whom they would open up the
boundaries of their game machine. In fact, Nintendo became notorious
for using access to its own mandatory toolsets as one of the means to
quite aggressively exert quality control (Sheff, 1993). At this point, it
became clear that the era of “bedroom coding” had largely passed; it
wasn’t until the early 2010s that such hobbyist practices – now known
as indie developers or “everyday gamemakers” (Young, 2018) –
resurfaced alongside the advent of social and mobile game platforms.
Since the 1980s, the balance between resourcing and securing within
game development has tilted heavily toward platform owners. As we
noted earlier in this chapter, those aspiring to develop games for
Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft must irst acquire expensive, proprietary
devices directly from the aforementioned trio of hardware
manufacturers (Kerr, 2017). Note that these SDKs typically integrate
with other intricate, equally expensive development tools, such as
Autodesk’s 3ds Max modelling software and Maya’s animation software.
The result of this historical trajectory – where increasingly powerful
game hardware propels the industry forward – has been dramatic. As
such, we have argued elsewhere that blockbuster game production has
become one of the more capital-intensive instances of cultural
production (Nieborg, 2021). Games in the Grand Theft Auto, Destiny,

and Battle ield franchises cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, and
involve hundreds of developers devoting years to a single project.
The rise of mobile platforms (i.e., the combination of smartphones and
tablets with app stores) partially returned gamemaking to its hobbyist
roots and tipped the scales back to resourcing game developers,
thereby allowing for much less formalized – and less capital-intensive –
modes of production (Keogh, 2019). Indeed, the tools for mobile game
development are software-based and, accordingly, considered more
accessible and affordable. A crucial industry development in this
respect has been the proliferation of game engines, such as the Unity
software suite, which provide vital pieces of software and access to pre-
made material, such as animations, character skins, and audio samples
(Foxman, 2019; Nicoll & Keogh, 2019).
What we can take away from this example is that, while Unity indeed
lowered the barriers to game development, its software increased the
infrastructural integration with game platforms. Such integration was a
key catalyst for the popularity of Unity, which exported software in such
a way that it could be easily transferred to popular platforms –
dedicated consoles and mobile and social platforms alike. More broadly,
this example attests to the constant push-and-pull between the
openness afforded by accessible toolsets and the for-pro it imperatives
of billion-dollar tool developers like Unity, Microsoft, Adobe, and
Autodesk.
From an infrastructural perspective, music and book publishing have
followed historical paths quite different from that of game
development. While both forms of cultural production have seen the
introduction of a wide range of digital tools – from textual editors to
sound engineering suites – few of these tools are infrastructurally
integrated with speci ic distribution platforms. Writing a book or news
article is not inherently a platform-dependent production practice. A
Microsoft Word document, for example, does not need a proprietary
platform to be displayed or distributed and can be accessed by open-
source editing software, such as Apache OpenOf ice. The same goes for
music iles, which are – when formatted as MP3 iles – quite portable.
While the MP3 format is still proprietary, it is not tied to a particular
platform. As a result, both these modes of platform-independent

development are less formalized, require less capital, and, arguably,
allow for greater levels of creative autonomy.
In terms of infrastructural integration, social media entertainment,
available via apps such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, is different
still. For creators, the widespread accessibility of platform-native tools
signals a drastic decrease in production costs. Instagram,
Douyin/TikTok, and Snapchat afford end-users and complementors
high-end editing tools that are built into the app. While some creators,
such as fashion in luencers, may still prefer to shoot their photos using
professional cameras, many others have opted to stick with the built-in
capabilities of their apps and phones. Given how essential codes of
authenticity are within many social media genres – game-related
material, skits, and make-up videos – one could even argue that
creators are disincentivized to excessively polish their creations (Duffy
& Hund, 2019). Particularly in the case of relative newcomer TikTok,
speed and relatability trump careful scripting and slick editing (Galer,
2020).
Comparing social media entertainment to legacy industry segments
such as music, book, or newspaper publishing shows that platform-
dependency in the creation phase is rather luid. Some platforms
provide elaborate or built-in boundary resources speci ically aimed at
creation, while others do not. But when platforms do provide
development tools, they instantly formalize cultural production by
implementing infrastructural control (e.g., over API access) and
requiring business model alignment. Chapter 6 continues to discuss the
impact of infrastructural integration on creativity.
Distribution
Writing in the early, halcyon days of the public internet, Bill Gates
published an essay on the Microsoft website declaring: “Content is
king” (see Evans, 2017). If so, then, as Cunningham and Craig (2019:
48) and others have quipped, distribution must be King Kong. Indeed, it
is at the moment of distribution that platform power becomes explicit.
By opening their infrastructural boundaries, platforms have married
content aggregation with distribution.10 But precisely what happens

when complementors integrate their distribution infrastructure with
platforms differs across industry sectors and companies.
We can see the transformation of content distribution by examining the
infrastructural trajectory of podcasting toward platform-dependence.
Media scholar John Sullivan (2019) chronicles how, in the mid-2000s,
the storage of podcast content was decentralized, located either on
one’s personal server or on a third-party hosting service. Individual
podcasts were made accessible to users via platform-independent RSS
feeds. These standardized, computerreadable feeds allowed end-users
to “catch” or download podcasts to their devices. By today’s standards,
the different steps required to listen to a podcast were cumbersome.
In 2005, a new version of Apple’s iTunes media player made inding
and downloading podcasts much more seamless, and Apple’s popular
portable media player – the iPod – was a critical factor in the
widespread diffusion of podcast technology. Content storage, however,
was left to podcast producers, and a diverse cottage industry of podcast
hosting services sprung up. The new version of iTunes included
another consequential change: for Apple to include an RSS feed into
iTunes, it required podcasters to keep their RSS feeds openly accessible.
Apple was not willing to pay for access, nor did it want end-users to pay
– a move that essentially rendered premium business models
impossible (Sullivan, 2019). Therefore, for podcasters to monetize their
content, they had to rely exclusively on advertising-driven business
models.
Apple’s decision played to the interests of hobbyists, educators, and
legacy radio stations – the latter of which have decades of experience
with advertising-driven revenue streams. In the US, public broadcasting
entities such as National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS) are central sources of what is described as
“public podcasting,” an ecology marked by “fact-fueled, story-driven”
productions (Aufderheide et al., 2020: 1685). But Sullivan (2019)
cautions that the open, decentralized infrastructure of podcasting may
well come to an end soon because of the popularity and economic
viability of the format. Indeed, platform companies such as Google,
Spotify, Amazon, and Apple, each in their own way, are attempting to
regain and centralize control over podcast storage, discovery, and

monetization. Podcast production companies and hosts, meanwhile,
have opted to either launch their own dedicated apps or integrate their
podcast distribution with music platforms. This last strategy has been
aggressively pursued by Spotify, which used its deep inancial pockets
to expand its podcast offerings. For example, the platform reportedly
paid US$100 million in exchange for an exclusivity deal with
controversial US comedian Joe Rogan (Weiss, 2020).
A second example of infrastructural platform integration in the
distribution phase is newspaper journalism. In the chapter opening, we
discussed the Guardian’s decision to integrate its digital distribution
operations with AWS. Their economic motive was unequivocal: AWS
provides hosting and computational infrastructure at a scale and cost
that the Guardian itself cannot match. In theory, at least, this form of
content distribution does not directly encroach on the company’s
editorial autonomy. Amazon may tear up the Guardian’s contract, but it
cannot directly in luence the distribution of individual news items. This
is different from platform-native instances of news distribution. Since
the mid-2010s, news content hosted directly on Twitter, Snapchat, or
Facebook’s app and web instances has seen mixed results in terms of
revenue and editorial autonomy (Caplan & boyd, 2018; Myllylahti,
2018; Rashidian et al., 2019). For example, Facebook’s Instant Articles
product promised end-users fast and immersive reading experiences.
But by hosing news content, Facebook created economic dependencies,
which resulted in “infrastructural capture” – a situation in which news
organizations lost their editorial independence to the (platform)
companies they may want to cover (Nechushtai, 2018).
Similar to podcasting, the market for mobile game apps has bene ited
tremendously from the distribution infrastructure afforded by mobile
devices. As we argued earlier in this chapter, digital distribution has
been a double-edged sword for game developers. Compared with
physical distribution systems, the level of ef iciency in digital
distribution has allowed game publishers to wrest back control from
powerful retailers such as Walmart, Amazon.com, MediaMarkt, and
GameStop. Then again, the distribution of game apps is now largely
controlled by Apple and Google, and dozens of rival app store operators
in Japan, China, and Korea (Steinberg, 2019; Zhao, 2019). Collectively,

these examples reveal that platform-dependency comes at a price:
sometimes the price is literal (i.e., inancial pro its and losses), whereas
other times it is igurative (i.e., relinquishment of control).
Marketing and monetization

Finally, the impact of platform infrastructures on marketing and
monetization needs to be considered, which, arguably, further
centralizes and solidi ies the control of platform operators. Because of
how their business models are designed, platform companies are at the
forefront of the data ication of the cultural industries. As Jathan
Sadowski argues: “Just as we expect corporations to be pro it-driven,
we should now expect organizations to be data-driven” (2019: 1). As we
noted in Chapter 2, compared to physical markets, digital platform
markets are much more transparent, irst and foremost to platform
operators. Every inancial transaction can be tracked, stored, analyzed,
and circulated alongside the collection of end-user behavior and their
demographics (Arsenault, 2017). For cultural producers who want to
market their content through targeted advertising or monetize their
content or their customers’ attention, such granular insights can
provide an important competitive advantage.
Platforms, on the other hand, are notoriously reluctant to share end-
user data with cultural producers. And when cultural producers do gain
access to “big” or “raw” data, it is rarely instantly useful. Ultimately,
data needs to be parsed and made legible. As a result, there is a whole
cottage industry of “data intermediaries” ready to provide cultural
producers with data-driven business intelligence (Beer, 2018; Helmond
et al., 2019). When such services are not within reach, there are
thousands of “algorithmic experts” keen to unearth, reverse engineer,
and share how data-driven platform markets function (Bishop, 2020).
The granularity of platform data keeps increasing, and effectively
handling big datasets has become a key competency for cultural
producers to master. For instance, by relying on data provided by
Spotify, artists can see how long a song is listened to, which songs are
skipped, and which genres are popular and trending (Prey, 2020). They
can also integrate with Spotify’s API and get a sense of the anatomy of
individual songs and popular playlists (Prey, 2016). This information

allows musicians to engage in sophisticated optimization strategies to
increase engagement with their songs or to create new playlists, songs,
or genres based on past trends (Morris, 2020). As we discuss in Chapter
6, however, such metric impulses can brush up against internal markers
of creative success.
For other cultural producers, user retention or engagement are vital
benchmarks. A TikTok creator, for instance, may produce a viral clip
that garners 8 million views. While impressive, such leeting success is
rarely enough to build a sustainable business. Having users come back
to a pro ile, channel, or a creator’s “brand” is crucial for advertising-
driven business models. Therefore, TikTok creators are keen to know
what memes are trending, what kinds of videos are resonating with
end-users, and which songs are popular to create a clip around. Data-
driven insights become even more appealing when coupled with user
data. While it is useful to know which TikTok video is gaining likes or
how often it is being shared, it is even better to know who exactly is
watching. As a TikTok creator explained: “[B]ecause I know what my
target audience is, and what the demographic of the people who
currently follow me are, I play to that all the time” (Duffy, Pinch, et al.,
2021). Unlike physical markets, platforms allow an end-user’s
behavioral patterns to be tracked in intricate detail, allowing producers
to optimize their marketing and monetization strategies even further
(Crain, 2019; Morris et al., 2021; Turow, 2011).
The mobile game app industry segment has seen signi icant
transformations after infrastructurally integrating their marketing and
monetization capabilities with platforms (Nieborg, 2017; Whitson,
2019). The introduction of social games on Facebook, as well as mobile
game apps distributed via app stores, provided a slew of new business
models to game developers. The freemium business model has become
the de facto standard in the market for mobile games, dethroning
premium pricing or subscription-based models. Instead of paying up
front, end-users engage in optional microtransactions by buying virtual
coins, boosts, hats for their characters, or anything in between. Put
differently, the smallest viable monetizable unit has been reduced from
content modules (sequels, expansion packs, or downloadable content
packs) to individually priced in-game items or mechanics. The shift is

made possible because of a game developer’s ability to track every
single aspect of the marketing and monetization loop (Seufert, 2014).
Various interactions – from a player encountering an app-based
advertisement for a new game, to downloading an app, to playing, to
engaging in an in-game transaction – take place within Apple’s and
Google’s mobile platform ecosystems and are therefore traceable. Some
aspects of end-user behavior – for instance, information from credit
card purchases or a consumer’s postal code – may have been traceable
in the pre-digital era as well, but not with the same scope, immediacy,
and granularity.
Because of their deep integration into a platform’s data infrastructure,
free-to-play game developers can track, trace, and pro ile all players.
This allows them to create sophisticated audience pro iles, or what
Facebook calls “lookalike audiences” of “whales” (highpaying
customers) or “connectors” (players who have many whales as friends).
As such, for the freemium business model to be effective, it relies on a
highly sophisticated, complex, data-driven advertising ecosystem made
possible by the digital economy’s dominant platform companies.

Conclusion
To deepen our understanding of the institutional dimension of
platformization, this chapter identi ied how the reorganization of
market relations is intertwined with the rise of platform
infrastructures. Such infrastructures – be it outsourcing of a publishing
infrastructure in the case of the Guardian, the use of advertising
technology in freemium game apps, or the use of platform-native tools
for TikTokers – partly replace the legacy infrastructures of the cultural
industries and partly replace public or commons-based infrastructures.
In some instances, cultural producers will still be able to bene it from
the decentralized, open character of the internet when they seek to
distribute content. In other cases, they become increasingly dependent
on the proprietary, centralized systems, networks, and tools of platform
companies. The extent and evolution of such infrastructural
integrations on the part of individual cultural producers and
organizations is hard to gauge. We argue that a systematic analysis of
the emergence and evolution of boundary resources should be an
important item on the research agenda of critical media scholars.
For now, it’s important to understand that platform executives have
clear infrastructural ambitions that are inherently about power and
control, and which we consider to be contingent, relational, and
material. Then again, because these are ambitions, such control is far
from ubiquitous; digital distribution continues to rely on decadesold
networked infrastructures operated by the telecommunication
industries, which are subject to strict regulation and marked by open
standards and protocols (Zittrain, 2008). Platform companies have
essentially built a proprietary layer on top of the open internet that
allows them to set new standards and route traf ic and transactions via
their own data infrastructures (Jordan, 2020). Because the open
internet still provides an alternative, this means that there still are
ample opportunities to bypass or circumvent platform infrastructures
(Jamieson, 2020).
In sum, an infrastructural perspective on platform-dependent cultural
production requires us to be more attentive to the key tensions at the

heart of the platformization of infrastructure: openness versus
closedness, control versus autonomy, centralization versus
decentralization, visibility versus invisibility, and stability versus
lexibility. In many instances, it is no longer the state or nonpro its that
guarantee or regulate access to vital tools and services, but for-pro it
companies. To gain access to readers, listeners, players, and viewers,
cultural producers have to reckon with platforms’ immense power to
exert infrastructural in luence over all facets of the creation,
distribution, marketing, and monetization of cultural content and
services. As in so many cases, platform companies want the best of both
worlds: market dominance, but no responsibility; infrastructural
ubiquity, but no transparency. We will continue this discussion in the
next chapter, where we explore the governance of platform markets and
infrastructures.

Notes
1. https://advertising.theguardian.com/advertising/why-us.
2. https://workforus.theguardian.com/.
3. https://advertising.theguardian.com/advertising. Next to advertising
revenue, in the summer of 2020 the Guardian attracted more than
800,000 paying contributors. See:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/29/guardian-
reports-surge-in-readers-support-over-past-year.
4. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/guardian/.
5. To be sure, AWS does reserve the right to suspend accounts for those
clients who violate its terms of service (e.g., hosting illegal material).
6. An argument against considering platforms such as AWS to be a
utility would be that, unlike electricity or water, there are viable
competitors.
7. The setting of standards is also one of the clearest instances of why
infrastructures require a certain degree of formalization. Electricity
sockets, for example, have a uniform design, and so, to decrease
costs, should APIs. In turn, uniformity necessitates codi ication. A
lack of compatibility, or opaque rules and constantly shifting criteria
are the surest ways to disrupt the functioning of any system or
network. Those who travel across continents and forget their power
plug adapters can attest to this.
8. As with many of our examples, there tend to be exceptions. While
exact details are shrouded in secrecy, game developers who are
chosen to be part of Apple’s subscription-based game service Apple
Arcade get paid either up-front or after they become part of the
subscription service.
9. https://developer.apple.com/xcode/.

10. To be sure, content aggregation does not equal ownership. The
majority of intellectual property (IP) circulated via platforms is not
commissioned, acquired, or held by platform companies, but held by
end-users and complementors. Exceptions emerge when platform
services aim to compete directly against legacy publishers, such as
when YouTube or Facebook invest in licensing or commissioning IP
for their premium (i.e., subscription-based) services or to promote
new functionalities.

4
Governance

Introduction
In early 2019, tech news outlet TechCrunch reported that both
Facebook and Google were abusing Apple’s Developer Enterprise
Program (Constine, 2019). The program enables companies to
internally distribute apps to their employees without having to go
through Apple’s iOS app store. Unbeknownst to Apple, Facebook and
Google were exploiting this program, using the workaround to
distribute network traf ic sniffer apps not to their employees, but
directly to end-users. In so doing, Facebook and Google were able to
circumvent Apple’s stringent data collection and user privacy
guidelines. By “sideloading” apps – that is, bypassing the app store – the
companies garnered “unparalleled access to all of the data lowing out
of a device” (Whittaker, 2019). To entice end-users to install these apps,
Facebook was paying them US$20 per month, while Google lured them
with gift cards. After TechCrunch reported the story, Apple reacted
swiftly by revoking the Enterprise Certi icates of both companies, citing
violations of Apple’s developer guidelines. Apple’s revocation disabled
Facebook’s and Google’s suite of employee-only apps, disrupting both
internal communication and the development of their iOS apps. Only
after the two offenders had removed the violating apps, which they did
within a couple of hours, did Apple restore their company certi icates
(Whittaker, 2019).
As it turned out, Facebook and Google were far from the only
companies misusing Apple’s Enterprise Program. Further TechCrunch
investigations found that dozens of porn and gambling apps did so as
well by cleverly using the credentials of existing companies. In this case,
what prompted circumvention was the app store’s stated commitment
to the provision of “family-friendly” content and services (Constine,
2019). Investigations by various other media outlets eventually
unearthed “thousands of prohibited iOS apps, from gambling and porn
software to pirated games and ad-free versions of Spotify” (Statt, 2019).
As the tech news website The Verge maintained, “it now looks as if an
entire underground world of secretly sideloaded apps that violate
Apple’s terms are available direct to consumers – if you know where to

look” (Statt, 2019). Following these reports, Apple released a
threatening statement, warning: “Developers that abuse our enterprise
certi icates are in violation of the Apple Developer Enterprise Program
Agreement and will have their certi icates terminated” (Statt, 2019).
This episode was by no means unprecedented; rather, Apple has long
sought to govern how complementors develop, distribute, advertise,
and monetize their apps (Eaton et al., 2015; Gerlitz, Helmond, van der
Vlist, et al., 2019). At the same time, this incident represents one of
many instances in which cultural producers – and various other types
of app developers – strategically traverse Apple’s notoriously restrictive
governance framework (Bergvall-Kå reborn & Howcroft, 2013; Gillespie,
2017). This recursive process of governance and evasion has
characterized the relationship between the platform and its
complementors since the launch of the iPhone in 2007 (Goggin, 2009).
Governing through boundary resources

Initially, Apple only allowed third parties to offer iPhone applications
through its Safari mobile web browser, which already boasted a
signi icant developer community; Safari thus came to function as a
“boundary resource” (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013). As discussed
in the previous chapter, these resources are to be understood as the
platform’s infrastructural gateways and associated informational
resources that enable and control the computational and institutional
interactions with complementors. The decision to open the iPhone’s
platform boundaries enabled complementors to offer content and
services to end-users and to integrate their apps with the iOS
infrastructure. More generally, next to having an economic and
infrastructural function, boundary resources thus constituted key
governing instruments for platform companies. They allowed Apple to
control who was certi ied to develop what kind of content and services
for the iPhone. Crucially, providing of icially sanctioned resources made
it possible for Apple to prevent individual third-party applications to
run on the iPhone. At least, that was the idea.
During the irst months of the iPhone lifecycle, news companies and
social media platforms, such as the New York Times, YouTube, and
Facebook, indeed started to develop Safari-based iPhone apps in

earnest. At the same time, however, a crowd of hackers, students, and
businesses developed their own apps that were outside Apple’s
purview. One notorious effort of such “unsanctioned self-resourcing”
was to “jailbreak” the iPhone, which removed the restrictions against
installing native third-party applications (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson,
2013: 181). Within a few months, an extensive, underground iPhone
app ecosystem lourished. With more than 1.6 million jailbroken
devices, unof icial application installers and alternative app stores
quickly became popular (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013: 181).
Confronted with the failure of its Safari-based governing strategy, Apple
switched gears and provided developers with a new set of boundary
resources that enabled third-parties to develop and distribute native
apps (Eaton et al., 2015). Over the course of 2008, the company
released an of icially sanctioned software development kit (SDK) –
including a graphical user interface builder, an app analysis tool, and an
iPhone simulator tool – as well as a set of application programming
interfaces (APIs) for networking and ile access, among other
functionalities. Finally, in July 2008, it opened the virtual doors to its
app store as the only certi ied app distribution channel. This new set of
platform boundaries supported cultural producers and other
complementors as they integrated their apps with the iOS
infrastructure. And it allowed Apple to recentralize governance and
secure its platform boundaries.
Governing content
To control who could distribute which apps, Apple established a strict
certi ication and review process. Then, in an effort to steer end-users to
what it considered high-quality apps, the company began to
algorithmically curate how apps were visible in the app store by
introducing top lists and sections central to the cultural industries, such
as Games, Magazines & Newspapers, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Kids, and
Music. By opening its platform to outsiders and combining a variety of
governing strategies, Apple became one of the central gatekeepers in
the cultural industries, boasting in mid-2020 that: “Apple’s App Store
ecosystem facilitated over half a trillion dollars in commerce in 2019”
(Apple, 2020).

As the afore-mentioned appeal to “family-friendly content” attests,
Apple’s mechanisms of governance have a profound impact on the
content that circulates in the platform ecosystem. In 2010, thenCEO
Steve Jobs famously declared: “We do believe we have a moral
responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can
buy [an] Android phone” (see Siegler, 2010). In accordance with this
policy, Apple rejected the irst version of “Newspapers” – an app that
provided access to content from more than ifty newspapers around the
world – because of content deemed “obscene.” The concern in this case
was the English tabloid The Sun, which featured scantily clad women in
its infamous “Page 3” feature. The Newspapers app was only approved
after The Sun had been removed. Cultural producers, for their part, have
long found Apple’s guidelines to be infuriatingly inconsistent (Hestres,
2013; Mosemghvdlishvili & Jansz, 2013). Whereas an e-book app was
rejected because it provided access to the Kama Sutra, other adult-
themed apps – including Playboy and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit
Issue – have been allowed to remain in the app store. Indicative of
Apple’s inconsistency – or perhaps hypocrisy – is the fact that the e-
book app in question was subsequently approved without explanation.
Apple’s management of politically contentious content is similarly shot
through with contradiction. A notorious early example is Apple’s
rejection of the cartoon app NewsToons by Mark Fiore, which was
banned because the satire “ridicules public igures,” such as Barack
Obama, and references controversial political issues, including the use
of torture by the US government (McGann, 2010). In 2010, after Fiore
was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, the platform
company reversed course and approved the app. Over time, Apple has
revisited some of its content policy restrictions, such as the rule that
forbade the satirizing of public igures. Yet, it continues to censor
cultural content in highly uneven – hence controversial – ways.
While Apple’s app store may be notorious for its heavy-handed
policing, it is important to acknowledge that all platforms employ a
variety of governing strategies. From the perspective of platform
companies, maintaining an “optimal” balance between openness and
control is among the key managerial challenges involved in governing
complementors and end-users. While “optimal” is a relative term, we

use it to signal the speci ic strategic attempts on the part of for-pro it
platforms to create the ideal economic and infrastructural conditions
that ensure revenue growth. To sustain this balancing act, platform
companies have to adapt not only to the strategies of competitors – for
instance, media conglomerates and other platform companies – but
also to the constantly changing composition and activities of both
complementors and end-users. Moreover, they are expected to comply
with the legal frameworks of the geographic regions in which they
operate, as discussed in the next section. Consequently, platforms
determine which cultural producers can access the markets and
infrastructures they control.
This chapter will demonstrate that this not only entails blocking access
altogether – as frequently happens in the case of the app store – but
also efforts at ordering and categorizing content, as well as setting
standards, guidelines, and policies. In exploring these ever-evolving
governing strategies, we highlight the implications for both cultural
producers and the content that circulates in the digital realm.

Platform Governance
The development and operation of platform markets and
infrastructures, as discussed in the preceding two chapters, cannot be
understood apart from the systems of governance that shape their
operations and evolution. Indeed, platform governance plays a crucial
role in cultural production and other economic activities precisely
because platforms have become lucrative markets and ubiquitous
infrastructures on which the cultural industries have come to rely. We
thus conceptualize governance as the third institutional dimension of
platformization.
In general, governance can be de ined as “institutional steering” (Just &
Latzer, 2017). Platform governance, in turn, entails both institutional
steering by platforms and of platforms (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015;
Gillespie, 2018; Gorwa, 2019a). These two forms of governance are
deeply enmeshed. Governance of platforms refers to how public
institutions set the legal boundaries of what can be exchanged on
platforms. Governance by platforms, meanwhile, structures how
content can be created, distributed, marketed, and monetized online,
affecting the regulation of public space more generally.
Examining these intertwined modes of governance in various parts of
the world reveals the substantial variation in how national
governments approach platforms as legal entities. An important
distinction is whether or not platforms are held accountable for what is
exchanged by complementors and end-users. This distinction is based
on the host–editor dichotomy (Angelopoulos & Smet, 2016; Helberger et
al., 2018). If platforms are considered as hosts, its owners have limited
responsibility for the content that circulates. By contrast, if they are
categorized as editors, they bear a legal responsibility. Historically,
telecom companies, such as AT&T, Verizon, and NTT, have been
classi ied as hosts, whereas media companies, such as The Walt Disney
Company and the New York Times, have been considered editors. In the
case of platforms, which tend not to be as open as telecom services or
as controlled as media companies, it has been far from clear cut as to

how they should be classi ied (Helberger et al., 2018; Napoli & Caplan,
2017).
In the West, especially in the US, legislators have tended to consider
platforms as hosts rather than as editors. In 1996, the US Congress
created a so-called “safe harbor” – a legal provision that limits liability –
for “interactive computer services,” which at the time especially
referred to internet service providers (ISPs) and search engines.
Drafted as an amendment to a larger communication bill, Section 230 of
the US Communications Decency Act law held that, as long as
intermediaries restricted themselves to providing access to the internet
or to information published by third parties, they were not liable for the
content that was made available by anybody other than the
intermediary.1 Just like telephone companies and ISPs, platform
companies were not legally obliged to police content shared by cultural
producers or end-users. In addition, as Tarleton Gillespie (2018: 30)
points out, Section 230 also held that, if such intermediaries did
moderate content, they would not lose their safe harbor protection and
be reclassi ied as publishers. Because many of the US-based internet
companies were largely exonerated from any responsibility concerning
content, the “age of sharing” began in earnest (John, 2016).
As illustrated by our opening example of the iOS app store, platform
companies have used these favorable provisions to the fullest. In fact,
major platform companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook have
often been much stricter than is required by law. Managing the delicate
balance between openness and control, platform companies, as we
argue throughout this book, rarely have the interests of cultural
producers at the top of their priority list. Instead, they are primarily
focused on growing audiences and revenue, protecting their brands,
and avoiding risks, such as the potential liabilities of hosting
controversial content.
Copyright
An important exception to the immunity of internet intermediaries
concerns the exchange of copyrighted materials. From the earliest days
of the commercial internet, copyright holders – from Playboy to the
Church of Scientology – sued end-users for sharing copyrighted images,

music, and documents. Almost immediately, internet intermediaries
that facilitated the exchange of this content – from Usenet newsgroups
and peer-to-peer (p2p) ile-sharing software like Napster and
LimeWire – were taken to court by copyright holders. Thus, it was in
relation to copyright that internet intermediaries irst were confronted
with the legal responsibilities for the content exchanged by third
parties (Gillespie, 2018: 28; Rosenoer, 1997). These liabilities are,
however, “conditional”: intermediaries are not accountable as long as
they do not know that copyrighted content is shared through their
platform. Only when noti ied by copyright holders does the violating
content need to be removed.
Given the sheer volume of content on the internet, platforms have
developed automated systems to instantly remove copyright-infringing
content. The most famous example is YouTube’s Content ID system,
introduced in 2007, which compares videos uploaded to YouTube with
audio and video iles registered by content owners (Burgess & Green,
2018: 48). From the perspective of cultural producers, the upside of
these kinds of systems is that they can earn revenue for content shared
through platforms. Yet, the downside, as Jean Burgess and Johsua Green
(2018: 5) point out, is that these systems have had signi icant “chilling
effects on vernacular creativity and fan engagement.” In practice, these
systems tend to favor the protection of the intellectual property rights
of companies over those of individuals.
From an international perspective, the broad immunity that platforms
enjoy in the US is quite exceptional. As Gillespie (2018) makes clear,
platforms have been granted conditional liability in most European and
South American countries. Similar to US copyright rules, platforms are
not liable for what users share, “as long as they have no ‘actual
knowledge’ of and did not produce or initiate, the illegal or illicit
material” (2018: 33). However, like in the US, companies must promptly
remove illegal content when asked to do so by the state or courts. In
China and Middle Eastern countries, governments have imposed a form
of strict liability, which means that platforms have to proactively
remove content deemed “unlawful” (2018: 33; see also Hong & Jian,
2019). Under such legal regimes, platforms can be considered editors,

which, as noted earlier, directly impacts the kind of content that
cultural producers can distribute (Wang & Lobato, 2019).
Perhaps not surprisingly, such geographic variations in governance
create a complex situation for cultural producers and other
complementors. With few exceptions, major US-based platforms are
dominant throughout the world. And, as we argued elsewhere,
“transnational platform companies tend to set global, rather than local,
standards regarding content” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018: 4285).
Consequently, US platforms regularly refuse to ful ill take-down
requests from states with strict liability regimes. Accordingly, these
states, such as Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, have instead relied upon
local ISPs to block violating content. Given the dif iculty involved in
blocking particular expressions of content on very large and highly
dynamic social media and content-sharing platforms, situations abound
where entire platforms have been blocked. In fact, some states have
opted to block international platforms altogether. The best example of
this is China, which blocks virtually all international platforms,
including YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and, ironically, TikTok,
which is developed by the Chinese company ByteDance.2 In sum,
although platforms have enjoyed broad immunity from governing
bodies in the US, these same platforms, and the cultural producers that
share content through them, continue to confront much stricter
regimes elsewhere.
Three strategies of governance by platforms

While national laws and regulations determine the extent to which
platforms are required to govern, platforms themselves ultimately
decide how they govern. Responding to continuous changes in the
composition of complementor and end-user populations, platform
companies constantly adapt their governing strategies (Helmond et al.,
2019; Rietveld et al., 2020). Exploring these strategies of governance by
platforms, this chapter analytically divides them into three main
categories:
1. Regulation, the setting of standards, guidelines, and policies.

2. Curation, the categorization and ordering of content, and services.

3. Moderation, the enforcement of governance by platforms.
Regulation sets the formal, technical framework in which cultural

production takes shape, whereas curation and moderation structure
the availability and visibility of cultural content.
To return to our opening example, all three governance strategies can
be observed in the app store. Apple actively regulates the type of apps
that can distributed through the app store by offering an evolving set of
boundary resources, including SDKs, APIs, associated documentation
and instructions, and increasingly elaborate “App Store Review
Guidelines.” In turn, Apple engages in curation by giving individual apps
it deems compelling a “boost” – for instance, by featuring them in the
“Our Favorites” section. Finally, as an example of moderation, Apple’s
internal review teams assess each individual app submitted to the
store, ensuring an app’s technological compatibility, regulatory
compliance, and “appropriateness.”
As noted earlier, platform companies tend to deploy more robust
standards of governing cultural producers and end-users than is legally
required. This seems to contradict the spirit of openness that Silicon
Valley investors, journalists, and entrepreneurs champion (Marwick,
2013, 2017; van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009; Turner, 2010). Platforms are,
however, anything but neutral conduits; rather, they play a crucial role
in the differentiation, prioritization, and iltering of content (van Dijck,
2013). In this governing process, platforms simultaneously open up
new opportunities for cultural producers, while also minutely
controlling how these complementors can create, distribute, market,
and monetize content and services. Examining the three core governing
strategies, this chapter discusses to what extent platform boundaries
are opened up and how economic rules and infrastructural boundaries
are controlled. In so doing, we pay particular attention to the
distribution of power and resources within the cultural industries,
which, as we will see in the second half of the book, has major
implications for the allocation of wealth and visibility among cultural
producers. The inal section of this chapter explores how cultural
producers tactically navigate governance by platforms in their efforts to
attract end-users and generate revenue.

Regulation
Platform regulation concerns the standards, guidelines, and policies set
by platforms. These are both codi ied in writing and operationalized by
setting and upholding architectural criteria in what has been
conceptualized as a platform’s boundary resources (Eaton et al., 2015;
Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013). As discussed in the previous chapter,
such resources include a constantly evolving constellation of APIs,
SDKs, partner programs, badges, and certi ications, as well as various
kinds of documentation that guide and instruct complementors how to
build applications and provide services (Helmond et al., 2019). Taken
together, they enable cultural producers to integrate with platforms.
Yet, simultaneously, the standards, guidelines, and policies embedded
in these resources give platform corporations far-reaching control over
how processes of cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization are organized.
From the perspective of platform owners, regulation “relates to the
various formal and informal control mechanisms” that ensure that the
actions of complementors “are aligned with what is in the best interests
of the platform” (Constantinides et al., 2018: 384). The best interests of
complementors may, of course, very well differ. As will be argued in the
inal section of this chapter, cultural producers frequently ignore
platform rules and misinterpret guidelines, either intentionally or
inadvertently. Research on how platform governance impacts end-users
shows that regulations are portrayed as binary – allowed or not-
allowed – whereas, in practice, regulations are highly contingent
(Duguay et al., 2020; Suzor, 2018). While platform companies may
decide to be lenient toward unof icial and unauthorized boundary
resources (Gerlitz, Helmond, van der Vlist, et al., 2019), cutting off
access to of icial boundary resources is the stick that platforms can use
to beat complementors with.
Consider APIs, which provide cultural producers with access to
prede ined data collections or streams. These infrastructural gateways
function as control mechanisms, setting rules “to manage relations with
various stakeholders, developers, clients and data industries” (Gray et

al., 2018: 6). A platform’s decision to discontinue or “deprecate” an API
– which happens quite often – can have major rami ications for
complementors (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). For example, in October
2019 Facebook announced it would replace its “Basic Permission” API
for Instagram with the “Instagram Basic Display” API, which included
new regulations that altered how cultural producers interfaced with
the platform (Facebook for Developers, 2019). To access the new API,
Facebook required app developers to have a Facebook Developer
Account – a move that allows the company to access a developer’s
credentials and creations. Similar to Apple’s app review process,
Facebook’s guidelines for adjudicating external apps are quite
intricate.3 These guidelines supply Facebook with a broad set of tools to
steer cultural producers in any direction the company sees it. It can
cancel or freeze a Facebook Developer Account or shut off API access at
any moment, for any reason.
SDKs, meanwhile, allow cultural producers to build applications for a
platform; they also furnish platform operators with instruments to set
and enforce technical requirements and limit the type of content that
becomes available on a platform. At times, a platform’s design
requirements are quite mundane (e.g., the use of certain icons, fonts, or
colors in the case of an app). At other times, they are profound,
requiring third-party developers to devote time and energy to, for
example, learn new programming languages (Stratton, 2020). Similar to
changing an API, a tweak to an SDK can have signi icant consequences
for cultural producers.
To ensure that complementors are able to make sense of a platform’s
architecture, technological affordances, and associated regulations,
APIs and SDKs “are commonly packaged into ‘developer products’,
which foreground the use of speci ic data and functionality to
developers (e.g. Facebook ‘Pages API’ and ‘Live Video API’)” (Helmond
& van der Vlist, 2019: 16). Such products are complemented by softer,
more indirect enforcement mechanisms. Think of platforms doling out
badges and certi ications, or setting up partner programs to verify,
validate, or promote certain complementors over others (Helmond et
al., 2019). Prominent examples are the app store’s Developer

Enterprise Program and YouTube’s badges and elaborate partner and
veri ication program to differentiate between types of creators.
As Robyn Caplan (2020) points out, platforms use these instruments
“as a way to distinguish between sources, often framing these efforts
within concerns about safety or trustworthiness.” In practice, they
enhance the inequality between different types of cultural producers.
During the pandemic, following concerns over COVID-19
disinformation, YouTube, for example, prioritized “the monetization of
videos from news partners and from users who had self-certi ied
accurately” (Caplan, 2020). Likewise, Twitter used pro ile veri ication
as a way of highlighting authoritative sources during this time. In this
way, we can see that regulation and curation are closely entwined.
Taken together, platform companies regulate by developing and
constantly revising platform boundary resources, and setting
standards, guidelines, policies, and procedures by which
complementors have to abide. Regulatory standardization gives these
companies far-reaching control over how platform-dependent cultural
creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization take shape. In other
words, it transfers infrastructural power to platforms. For platform
companies, the main challenge in designing and enforcing regulations is
in striking an optimal balance between openness and control, keeping
complements on board, but also aligning their activities with the
objectives of the platform (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013: 176). The
degree of openness they furnish profoundly shapes the content and
format of cultural commodities. Let’s see how this works in different
segments of the cultural industries.
Regulating the cultural industries

How platform regulation touches virtually all aspects of cultural
production can be clearly observed in the digital game industry (Kerr,
2006, 2017). This is an industry segment that is highly formalized, with
platform owners ruling their boundary resources with an iron ist. In
the previous chapter, we pointed to the history of the game industry,
which provides illuminating examples of the rigorousness with which
those regulatory policies were enforced. Flash forward a couple of
decades and we see different, but still quite profound, instances

wherein platform regulation impacts developers. Apple, for example,
introduced a series of “structural governance changes” to the iOS app
store, which included not only novel ways to test unreleased apps, but
functionalities that allowed for in-app purchases and in-app advertising
(Rietveld et al., 2020). The latter change spurred the adoption of the
freemium business model which fundamentally altered the economics
of app-based game distribution and monetization (Nieborg, 2015; Paul,
C. A., 2020; Whitson, 2019). Certainly, microtransactions and
advertising-supported games existed long before the regulatory
changes in the app store. The structural implementation, formalization,
and codi ication of in-app transactions on the iOS platform, however,
ensured its widespread adoption among game developers.
The regulation of social media content creation, meanwhile, is
super icially more open and less strict; content can potentially be
created on, and distributed outside, platform infrastructures. In
practice, however, creators share with game developers a strong
reliance on platforms. To reach substantial audiences, creators have to
align their business models with creator-centric platforms, such as
Instagram, YouTube, Youku, Momo, Twitch, TikTok/Douyin, and
WeChat. The economic and infrastructural standards set by these
platforms, therefore, shape this industrial formation.
Looking in more detail at these standards, we can see how the
particular technical affordances of platforms shape how cultural
content is formatted and produced. For example, the maximum length
of a TikTok video, which grew from a mere six seconds to ifteen
seconds to sixty seconds, has set creative parameters for an entire
segment of the creator community. Similarly, the vertical orientation of
Snap Originals – Snapchat’s series of short, professionally produced
videos – challenges traditional conventions of ilm production. Rather
than lipping a phone sideways, as is common when watching a
YouTube clip, Snapchat clips are square, which forces its creators to
“completely reconsider the directing and editing process”
(VanArendonk, 2020). One can consider a wide range of platform
affordances – from live-streaming and commenting to image format,
video length, and available ilters – as both enabling and limiting
speci ic forms of cultural production and distribution. In the second

half of the book, we will re lect on how constantly changing platform
affordances enhance the precarity of platform-dependent cultural
production.
Beyond business models and technical affordances, particularly vital for
creators are the terms and conditions de ined by social media
platforms. As Gillespie argues, social media platforms’ agreements tend
to prohibit images of violence, graphic content, and obscenity –
subjective as these categories may be (2018: 54; see also Roberts,
2019). Platforms seem to focus their regulatory efforts on the latter,
although their patterns of regulating “obscene” material are
inconsistent if not downright hypocritical (Tiidenberg & van der Nagel,
2020). An especially well-known example is what Time magazine
somewhat cheekily dubbed Facebook’s “War on Nipples” (Calhoun,
2008). Drawing attention to the public backlash against Facebook’s
staggeringly uneven regulation of the female body, journalist Ada
Calhoun offered:
Facebook has drawn a line in the sand by removing any photos it
deems obscene, including those containing a fully exposed breast,
which the site de ines as “showing the nipple or areola.” In other
words, plunging necklines or string bikinis are ine – just no nips.
The purging of bareboob pics began last summer and has swept
up, alongside any girls gone wild, a growing number of proud –
and very ticked-off – breast feeders.
More recently, scholars and members of the creator community have
drawn attention to Twitch’s problematic de inition of “sexual content.”
Assessing the platform’s community guidelines, terms of service, and
other policy documents, Bonnie Ruberg (2020) contends that not only
are these messages “vague, subjective, and contradictory,” they also
enable discrimination and bias against women and other marginalized
communities (see also, Zolides, 2020).
Compared to the game industry and social media entertainment, the
impact of platform regulation on the news industry is less discernable.
In contrast to games, news can be produced without platform boundary
resources. As Efrat Nechushtai (2018: 1051) points out, “news
organizations still rely mostly on traditional tools, such as tips,

interviews, press releases, inancial reports, documents, and academic
studies.” And unlike social media entertainment, news audiences are
not fully tied to particular platforms. At the same time, it is also clear
that news organizations have, since the early 2000s, steadily lost
readers, viewers, and advertising and subscription revenue. While
some of these downtrends precede the rise of platform companies
(Winseck, 2020), this decline occurred against the background of an
increase of news consumption through platforms (Gramlich, 2019;
Newman, 2020). Accordingly, news organizations have looked toward
platforms to regain audiences and revenue, with varying degrees of
success (Myllylahti, 2018). It is in these instances, when news
organizations and individual journalists come to rely on platform
boundary resources, that platform regulation has the most impact and
affects the creation and distribution of content. Of particular interest to
the news industry are: (1) data tools and APIs, (2) native content
hosting programs, such as Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s
Accelerated Mobile Pages, and (3) platforms’ terms and conditions.
Here, we focus on the irst type.
The APIs of large social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook,
have allowed news organizations to identify real-time trends around
speci ic news topics, as well as to develop insights into user
engagement (Poell & van Dijck, 2014). Furthermore, platforms have
developed data analysis tools that provide journalists with granular
insights into audiences and their interactions. To accommodate
journalists, Facebook developed Signal, “a free discovery and curation
tool for journalists who want to source, gather, and embed newsworthy
content from Facebook and Instagram” (Welch, 2015). The tension
between such data ication practices and the creative autonomy of
cultural producers will be more extensively discussed in Chapter 6.
Building on institutional theory, Robyn Caplan and danah boyd (2018:
7) argue that, in combination, these data resources trigger a process of
“mimesis” in which the “dominant organization’s incentives or goals
become embedded across an industry through the borrowing of
practices that lead to success over the network.” That is to say,
platform-dependent instances of news production are not only more

data-driven, they become subject to the values embedded in platform
data (Poell & van Dijck, 2014). As we have observed elsewhere:
[Many news organizations] have invested in supplying platform
users with a steady stream of infotainment and breaking news in
the form of videos, slideshows, (live) blogs, listicles, quizzes, as
well as constant Twitter and Facebook updates. They have also
speci ically focused on creating more video content for their
lifestyle, technology, and sports sections because such content is
seen to boost social media traf ic and is a crucial source of native
advertising revenue. (van Dijck et al., 2018: 67)
Thus, while there is substantial variation across industry segments in
how much control platforms exercise, we can simultaneously observe a
more general trend toward alignment with platform standards.

Curation
The second key mode of platform governance concerns curation, which
refers to the categorization and ordering of content and services on
platforms. Against the backdrop of what Taina Bucher (2012) describes
as “regimes of visibility” that structure the platform environment, much
has been written on the importance of the ranking, ordering, and
“discoverability” of cultural content (Davis, 2017; McKelvey & Hunt,
2019; Morris & Powers, 2015). While Google Search is a paradigmatic
example of curation, others in the cultural industries include Spotify
playlists, Net lix’s recommendation system, and the seemingly
“inscrutable” algorithmic systems that shape the visibility of TikTok
creators, Instagram in luencers, and the like.
Examining the signi icance of ordering practices for visibility, we can
make a general distinction between editorial and algorithmic curation
(Bonini & Gandini, 2019). Editorial curation is done by humans who,
based on cultural norms and professional procedures, make judgment
calls in their selection of (cultural) content (Roberts, 2019; see also
Scolere & Humphreys, 2016). Historically, editorializing has been the
domain of professional experts employed by or af iliated with cultural
institutions: journalists deciding what news stories to publish or
broadcast, museum curators choosing what artworks to exhibit, DJs
picking what records to play, and so on. Most platforms, especially
those central to cultural production, use editors to highlight particular
content, but they increasingly also rely on algorithms, “coded
instructions that a computer needs to follow to perform a given task”
(Bucher, 2018: 2). Algorithmic curation deploys automated systems to
rank content and complementors. Typically, content or complementors
with the highest ranking appear on top of a user’s feed, a homepage, or
start screen (Bucher, 2012).
As stressed by critical media scholars, both editorial and algorithmic
curation are rooted in particular norms and values, and both involve
human decision-making and choices. Yet, both have also been
legitimated through promises of objectivity and neutrality. This
generates frictions that can clearly be observed in the news industry.

Historically, news production has been informed by the ideal of
journalistic objectivity: the commitment by journalists to set aside
personal beliefs and biases (Schudson & Anderson, 2008). However,
like any type of knowledge production, news reporting is inevitably
guided by particular values and interests.
A similar tension can be observed in platform-based algorithmic
curation. As Gillespie (2014: 192) points out, platforms appeal to an
ideal of objectivity, which depends on the notion of “mechanical
neutrality.” Algorithmic curation is presented and may subsequently be
perceived as far removed from human intervention. In practice,
however, algorithms are “designed by human operators to automate
some proxy of human judgment” (2014: 192). Research in critical
software studies illustrates how automated decision-making frequently
produces results that can be quali ied as biased, discriminatory, and
thus deeply problematic (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; Sandvig et al.,
2014). Moreover, platform companies develop their editorial and
algorithmic sorting practices in correspondence with their capitalist
business logics (Couldry & Mejı́as, 2019; van Dijck et al., 2018). While
economic interests do not necessarily have to lead to algorithmic bias
and discrimination, they tend to be at odds with values and norms
related to transparency, accountability, equity, and social and cultural
diversity.
The more cultural producers distribute and monetize content through
platforms, the more platform curation steers what content and which
complementors become visible. On platforms and apps with in inite
shelf space, such as YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, and WeChat, an
average end-user only gets to see a tiny fraction of the boundless supply
of cultural content available. As platform operators design and control
the algorithmic and editorial selection processes through which
content is organized, platformization brings about a centralization of
“curatorial power” (Prey, 2020; see also Bonini & Gandini, 2019;
Bucher, 2018). While this has been widely recognized, less attention
has been devoted to the variation between platforms in how they
curate. To understand how platformization reorganizes regimes of
visibility in the cultural sphere, it is important to gain a more
systematic insight in these variations.

From editorial to algorithmic curation
Exploring the curatorial practices of platforms vital to the cultural
industries, there is a continuum that ranges from platforms that
predominantly engage in editorial selection to those that primarily rely
on algorithmic curation. On the editorial side of the equation, we can
ind the iOS app store. Although the store’s search function relies on
algorithmic sorting, the many editorially curated sections have become
its most prominent feature. Over the years, the app store has veered
toward an editorial curation strategy, largely eliminating
algorithmically populated “top” lists (Perez, 2017). This approach
corresponds with Apple’s tight regulatory stance toward the app store,
which, as this chapter’s introduction showed, is envisioned as a family-
friendly space (Hestres, 2013). Through editorial curation, Apple
closely controls what apps become prominently visible. For instance,
considering the different app store content categories, Apple’s
disposition toward gaming becomes immediately clear. It is hard not to
see an economic motive behind this decision; games generate the
majority of app-related revenue. Left out of the app store is what Apple
considers obscene or politically contentious, which does not
correspond with its family-friendly brand.
Moving along the continuum, Spotify, the leading music streaming
service, constitutes an interesting combination of editorial and
algorithmic curation strategies. The creation of playlists, one of the key
ways through which users access music, draws upon both strategies to
curate songs and podcasts (Eriksson, 2020). Although most playlists
are curated through algorithms – e.g. “Today’s Top Hits” or “Your Top
Songs 2020” – the most popular ones are crafted by human editors
(Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018: 5). For that reason, as Tiziano Bonini and
Alessandro Gandini (2019: 4) found, the major music streaming
platforms collectively employ hundreds of editors, many of whom
previously worked in the music industry as musicians, DJs, journalists,
or executives. The main takeaway of Bonini and Gandini’s work is that
editorial and algorithmic curation should not be understood in
opposition; rather, they complement each other, driven as they both are
by “an array of data and analytics previously unknown to traditional
gatekeepers” (2019: 8). It is safe to say that the playlist as a mix of

editorial and algorithmic curation has deeply impacted the political
economy of the music industry. Music is now fully unbundled, leaving
the traditional album format behind and transferring “curatorial
power” away from artists and record labels, to platforms (Prey, 2020).
In the case of Spotify, curation has a very direct economic impact: on
average, being listed in “Today’s Top Hits” provides musicians with an
additional 20 million streams and “between $116,397 and $162,956 in
payments from Spotify alone” (Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018: 14). These
effects are even more pronounced the higher a song is on that same list.
Ironically, while music streaming initially marked a break with radio’s
liveness and full editorial control by DJs, the playlist has recentralized
curatorial power in the hands of the big players of the music industry.
This, in turn, favors the major record labels over independents, as the
former have longer and better relationships with platforms, more
bargaining power, and much deeper pockets (Eriksson, 2020).
Social media content creation, by contrast, is largely structured by
algorithmically curated platforms, or, rather, platforms that have
become progressively algorithmically curated over time. A prominent
example is YouTube, which started, as Jean Burgess and Joshua Green
describe, by organizing the uploaded videos though “native
categorization and tagging systems”; these systems “enabled uploaders
to freely describe and sort their videos by content, theme, and style”
(2018: 16). Over the past decade, the platform has increasingly
deemphasized categories as an ordering logic. Instead, it has pushed
“search and personalized recommendations,” as well as
“companycurated channels” (2018: 16). This shift allows for real-time
algorithmic responses to ever-evolving and diverging user interests,
which, in turn, are geared toward increasing user engagement and,
ultimately, advertising revenue. Similar algorithmic con igurations can
be observed on other social media platforms. The individually
customized nature of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm (i.e., “For
You”), for example, quickly elevated it to the ranks of “the world’s
strongest video competitors” (Galer, 2020).
Considering how these different modes of platform curation reshape
regimes of visibility, it has been observed that the algorithmic turn
makes the ordering of cultural content particularly dif icult to decipher.

This was also the conclusion of software studies researchers Bernhard
Rieder, Ariadna Matamoros-Ferná ndez, and Oscar Coromina (2018:
63), who surveyed the mechanics of YouTube’s ranking algorithms.
They found “few direct links between basic variables such as view, like
or comment counts and search results.” For creators, this creates a
situation of structural uncertainty, especially as algorithmic
recommendation systems are incessantly evolving (Arriagada & Ibá ñ ez,
2020; Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021). While we explore in Chapter 5 the
implications of what we have elsewhere described as “algorithmic
precarity,” it is important to acknowledge creators’ concerted responses
to such structural insecurity. Indeed, as we discuss in the inal part of
this chapter, they engage in collective knowledge building and
“strategic management of algorithmic visibility” (Bishop, 2019: 2589).
The precarity of efforts to achieve algorithmic visibility is particularly
palpable in the news industry (Meese & Hurcombe, 2020). A striking
example is the response of the news industry to Facebook’s push
toward having more video on its platform (Rein & Venturini, 2018). In
June 2014, the platform company incentivized news organizations to
create more original video content by increasing the visibility of this
format in Facebook users’ News Feeds. A study of US-based news
organizations active on Facebook found that most of them did
substantially increase their investments in video production (Tandoc &
Maitra, 2018). Focusing on video also meant, however, iring journalists
and hiring video producers (Madrigal & Meyer, 2018). Initially this
appeared to be a savvy move, as indicated by the data furnished by
Facebook. However, in the following years, it turned out that Facebook
had wildly in lated its numbers (e.g., views and engagement with video
content). In turn, this led some news organizations to pivot back to
traditional reporting while dismissing the video producers they had
hired a few years before (Madrigal & Meyer, 2018).
To summarize, platform curation shapes how cultural content is
developed, circulated, categorized, and ordered. We have emphasized
that such ordering practices don’t indicate a fundamental break with
past curatorial practices. Contemporary accounts of platform curation
tend to focus on algorithmic systems; while we agree that such
attention is warranted, we must not overlook the continued importance

of editorial selection. In terms of governance, curatorial practices –
from sophisticated recommendation software to the editorial selections
by human actors at newspapers and radio stations – have a similar
goal: to increase audience reach, revenue, and visibility. If there is a
break with the past, it would be that curatorial power is increasingly
held by a few platform companies, which, with little transparency or
demonstrable editorial expertise, tend to shirk their editorial
responsibilities. As has become clear over the past several years, such
circumvention has led to a range of democratic issues, including those
that exacerbate social inequalities.

Moderation
The third governance strategy is moderation, which, building on the
work of Caplan and Gillespie (2020), we de ine as the pre-screening,
rejecting, removing, sequestering, banning, downgrading, or
demonetizing of content and accounts by platforms. Platforms can
engage in content moderation ex ante (i.e., before content has been
published, for example through pre-screening and certi ication) or post
hoc (i.e., removing, suppressing, or demonetizing content after
publication) (Boudreau & Hagiu, 2009). In recent years, the topic of
content moderation has drawn a lurry of media attention against the
backdrop of a series of scandals about the insidious conditions facing
human moderators, platforms’ failure to regulate “fake news,” and the
lopsided nature of moderation, with mechanisms of surveillance and
censorship that disproportionally target marginalized communities
(Newton, 2020a; York & McSherry, 2019).
Given the sheer scale of content shared across sprawling platform
ecosystems, content moderation is profoundly complex and labor-
intensive (Gillespie, 2018; Gorwa et al., 2020). To offset the high costs of
outsourcing moderation to workers (Roberts, 2019), platform
companies have sought to automate moderation. This shift has become
especially urgent given the increased popularity of live streaming via
services such as Facebook Live, YouTube Live, TikTok, and Twitch (Rein
& Venturini, 2018; Taylor, 2018). While live streaming generates new
content genres and creative practices, the combination of its scale and
its immediacy present platform operators with a whole new set of
challenges.
To prohibit violent content, hate speech, and disinformation from
circulating widely, speed is of the essence. This has prompted platform
companies to increasingly rely on “algorithmic moderation”: “systems
that classify user-generated content based on either matching or
prediction, leading to a decision and governance outcome (e.g.,
removal, geoblocking, account takedown)” (Gorwa et al., 2020: 3). One
of the challenges that cultural producers are faced with is that
platforms do not necessarily care who creates particular content: end-

users or cultural producers. While there is undoubtedly a clear need to
deploy automated forms of moderation, an overreliance on these
systems can exacerbate the very problems that plague platform
moderation more generally: opacity, fairness, and equity, and the
obfuscation of the politics of speech (Gorwa et al., 2020).
As with platform regulation and curation, moderation increases a
platform’s grasp on cultural production. This in luence is all the more
pervasive, as cultural producers and other complementors adapt their
production and distribution strategies to how platforms moderate.
Let’s now explore the impact on and challenges of platform moderation
in the cultural industries in more detail. How do they affect particular
industry segments?
Moderating the cultural industries

In the game industry, the iOS app store in particular has drawn
scholarly attention because of its combination of both strict and
inconsistent moderation practices (Bergvall-Kå reborn & Howcroft,
2013; Morris & Morris, 2019). As we have seen in the introduction of
this chapter, Apple sets moral boundaries by rejecting apps that
distribute what they consider “obscene.” While such controversial
decisions generate waves of public attention, we should at the same
time acknowledge the need for moderation. There is a clear need to
reject apps that are malicious, do not work, cause harm, or break the
law. Some of these cases are not immediately evident. For instance, one
problem that plagues the app gaming industry is copycats (Katzenbach
et al., 2016). A famous example is Flappy Bird, a game played with a
simple tap on the screen, which triggered a large number of replicas.
Cloning is problematic as it enhances the precarity of small game
developers, who are already struggling to survive in highly competitive
platform markets. Arbitrating this form of copying is, however, much
more dif icult than, say, moderating text. In the case of Flappy Bird, app
stores rejected games with “ lappy” in their title, but this left hundreds
of apps with similar gameplay untouched. This example shows that
platform moderation involves complex balancing acts between too
much and too little intervention.

Such a balancing act can also be observed in the news domain. Given
that this topic has already received a lot of scholarly attention over the
past years in the wake of the widespread proliferation of
disinformation, we will only point at the central tensions here (Benkler
et al., 2018; Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Marwick & Lewis, 2017).
Platforms have, on the one hand, been taken to task for not adequately
responding to the disinformation crisis (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). On the
other hand, platforms have been criticized for intervening too much in
the free low of news and information. Facebook’s continual removal of
the iconic “The Terror of War” photograph, depicting children running
from a napalm attack during the Vietnam war, has come to symbolize
this tension (Gillespie, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018). From the
perspective of the news industry, this type of platform moderation is
especially controversial given journalism’s long professional tradition
of self-governance based on institutionally anchored professional
standards.
Finally, we turn to social media content. Given its vast, sprawling
nature, this type of content is notoriously dif icult to moderate. To see
how context matters here, consider China-based platforms, which are
classi ied as media companies in China’s legal system (Jia & Nieborg,
2021). As Wilfred Wang and Ramon Lobato emphasize, Chinese
platform moderation should not be seen “as being outside the state’s
political domain”; instead, “state and market are different facets of a
common entity” (2019: 360, 362; italics in the original). Consequently,
the global adoption of Chinese platforms such as WeChat triggers
intriguing questions concerning moderation within different political
and cultural contexts (Chen et al., 2018).
As Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet (2019: 4) point out, domestically,
Chinese platforms are “not immune to censorship or the state’s demand
for a compliant culture,” while internationally they present themselves
in terms of values on a par with their competitors. Douyin and TikTok,
two apps that conquered the social media universe over the course of
2019 and 2020, present fascinating cases in this regard (Chen et al.,
2020). ByteDance’s international instance, TikTok, is promoted as a
fun-loving liberal platform, described in the New York Times as “a
refreshing outlier in the social media universe” (Roose, 2018). Yet,

when looking at how ByteDance moderates TikTok’s domestic
equivalent, Douyin, a very different image emerges. Employing more
than 10,000 moderators, the company closely monitors all content to
ensure that it complies with strict Chinese censorship regulations
(Chen et al., 2020). Just like any other digital platform, Douyin is
expected to ban “any words, images, lags, or other content that express
support for the independence of contested territories like Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Tibet or Xinjiang” (Davis, 2019). The platform is also barred from
carrying content that pokes fun at the national anthem, the Communist
Party, major policies, or national laws (Davis, 2019).
The tension between this regulatory regime and ByteDance’s efforts to
promote TikTok internationally as a liberal platform become
immediately evident when we consider that TikTok is blocked in
mainland China. Internationally, however, ByteDance’s moderation of
TikTok clips is by no means unproblematic either. For example, in June
2020, in the midst of the global Black Lives Matter protests, the
platform was accused of algorithmically suppressing Black creators
(Kelly, 2020). Black Lives Matter content was reportedly taken down,
muted, or hidden from viewers (McCluskey, 2020). Trying to limit the
damage to the TikTok brand, ByteDance immediately set up a “creator
diversity council,” reassessed its moderation practices, built a “user-
friendly appeals process,” and said that it would “stand in solidarity
with the Black community” (Kelly, 2020). Nevertheless, even after these
measures, Time reported that various Black creators “either
experienced noticeable declines in viewership and engagement on their
videos after posting content in support of the Black Lives Matter
movement or noticed recent instances where they felt that TikTok’s
community guidelines weren’t being fairly applied to Black creators”
(McCluskey, 2020).
While these complaints were lobbed at TikTok, it appears that there is a
larger problem with how race is accounted for on social media
platforms more generally. Various studies show that Black people have
a higher chance of having their content lagged and moderated than
their White counterparts on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter
(Angwin & Grassegger, 2017; Lee, 2020; Sap et al., 2019). These studies
strongly suggest that the natural language processing AI that underpins

the algorithmic curation and moderation systems of these platforms
can amplify the same biases that human beings have. Further research
is urgently needed to understand how such biases can be addressed.
In sum, exploring the collective impact and challenges of platform
moderation across industry segments and geographic regions shows
the fraught nature of platforms’ liminal placement between creators
and the cultural sphere. Positioned somewhere on the spectrum
between host and editor, platforms are bound to moderate either too
much or not enough. In any case, political controversy is guaranteed.
This is not to say that platform companies should be exempt from
critique. Platforms often claim to moderate to protect their
“community.” Yet, in practice they tend to focus on appeasing
advertisers, above all else. Therefore, it is essential that all societal
stakeholders are given a voice in how platforms moderate (Helberger et
al., 2018). The economic, cultural, and political consequences for
cultural producers and citizens are too large to let platform moderation
be guided by the economic interests of a few tech companies. The
informal initiatives that have emerged in recent years indicate more
collaborative responsibility in platform moderation, especially in
efforts to combat disinformation and violent extremism (Gorwa,
2019b). Ideally, such initiatives will be further formalized and
broadened in the years to come.

Navigating Platform Governance
While the preceding sections examined three distinct forms of
governance by platforms, reality is more complex given that these
modes – regulation, curation, moderation – often overlap and intersect.
Moreover, platform companies rarely exert unilateral governance;
instead, these decisions are shaped through interactions with cultural
producers, advertisers, and other complementors, as well as with end-
users (Jacobides et al., 2018). In other words, governance is not so
much imposed as it is negotiated. Cultural producers, for their part,
strategically navigate platform governance, mostly adapting their
production process, but occasionally also negotiating with platforms
about how governance should take shape. There is a crucial difference
between these two approaches. When cultural producers adapt to
platform regulation, curation, and moderation, they make platforms
more central to the organization of cultural production. When
complementors negotiate with platforms, they effectively struggle over
how governance should take shape while exerting their own mechanics
of agency. The inal part of this chapter discusses how cultural
producers strategically position themselves in relation to platforms,
and how this, in turn, affects the governance process.
Adaptation
In the context of platform-dependent cultural production, adaptation
involves the organization of creation, distribution, marketing, and/or
monetization practices in accordance with a platform’s governance
frameworks. This strategy takes various forms across the cultural
industries; its variability is in part an upshot of cultural producers’
relative degree of platform-dependence – or independence.
Given the history of the game industry described earlier, it is not
surprising that there are numerous levels on which game studios adapt
to platforms. Earlier in this chapter, we discussed how app developers
optimize their player acquisition (i.e., marketing) strategies in the hope
of securing a higher spot in one of the app stores’ top lists. Armed with
third-party data and advertising intermediaries, game studios have the

ability to calculate the exact price it takes to reach a top spot and if, in
turn, that position is worth the investment (Nieborg, 2017). While
these and other tactics can be seen as sophisticated data-driven
business practices on the part of these studios, they can also be
understood as the penetration of platform governance in the game
industry. By organizing their operations around platform data, game
studios effectively integrate their distribution and monetization
infrastructures with those of platforms. Data-driven advertising
campaigns lay bare a considerable challenge faced by every cultural
producer amid a hyper-saturated marketplace for attention:
algorithmic visibility.
Visibility is especially challenging in social media content creation.
Unlike well-funded game studios that have thousands – if not millions –
of dollars at their disposal to acquire business intelligence and
sophisticated advertising technology, individual creators typically lack
access to these resources (Duffy, 2017; Litt & Hargittai, 2016).
Platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram provide data for
individual pro iles, such as the number of likes and comments, but they
typically do not divulge market-level data. Thus, creators ind
themselves in a situation of structural uncertainty. Faced with such data
de icits both creators and end-users construct mental models of how
algorithms work. These models serve as an “algorithmic imaginary,” or
“ways of thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be and
how they function” (Bucher, 2017: 30).
Following this line of thought, Sophie Bishop (2018, 2019, 2020) has
conducted extensive research on the type of algorithmic knowledge
developed by YouTubers. Examining beauty vloggers, she shows the
importance of “algorithmic gossip,” “communally and socially informed
theories and strategies pertaining to recommender algorithms” (2019:
2589). The term “gossip” captures the fact that these theories and
strategies tend to circulate through messaging apps and closed
Facebook groups (2019: 2595). The question then becomes whether
these bottom-up forms of knowledge production and sharing challenge
or reinforce platform governance. Bishop suggests the former. She
maintains that algorithmic gossip should be understood as a
“subversive” response to highly unequal power relations. We agree, but

also observe that this gossip simultaneously facilitates adaptation. It
prompts creators to optimize their creation and distribution strategies
in relation to algorithmic curation, reinforcing the logic of this mode of
platform governance (Morris, 2020).
Such modes of optimization and adaptation can also be observed in the
news industry. We should stress that the use of audience data is by no
means a new phenomenon. Over the course of the twentieth century,
the news industry, like other segments of the cultural industries, has
become more data-driven, opening up cultural production to
continuous optimization and cost–bene it calculation (Napoli, 2011).
The jury is still out on how exactly platform regulation and curation
affect the news industry in practice. It is clear that platform audience
analytics are widely adopted in contemporary newsrooms around the
globe: from the US (Petre, 2018) and France (Christin, 2020) to
Zimbabwe, Kenya, and South Africa (Moyo et al., 2019). Staff at
newsrooms across Europe and North America “want analytics, as an
earlier period of skepticism seems to have given way to interest in how
data and metrics can help newsrooms reach their target audiences and
do better journalism” (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016: 5; italics in original).
However, this is not to say that journalism is fully platform-dependent
or that editorial decision-making is fully driven by platform data.
Metrics are used to optimize distribution rather than production – for
instance, to determine where to place a story on the homepage or to
A/B test headlines and visuals (Tandoc, 2014; van Dijck et al., 2018).
What these examples from the game industry, social media, and the
news industry illustrate is that governance by platforms is largely
shaped by the practices, norms, and values of cultural producers.
Grassroot perceptions of algorithmic imaginaries incentivize creators
to optimize their operations. We feel safe in concluding that governance
by platforms shapes cultural production because cultural producers
willfully and knowingly adapt to platform governance. Next, we discuss
how some cultural producers negotiate platform governance.
Negotiations
Although most cultural producers feel compelled to adapt to platform
governance, there are noteworthy examples of their attempts to

negotiate with platforms. The latter strategy refers to efforts to affect
how platforms regulate, curate, and moderate cultural production. This
can take the form of actual talks between cultural producers and
platforms, such as the negotiations between major record labels and
Spotify over the terms under which their music is distributed and
monetized on the platform (Eriksson et al., 2019). Yet, negotiations also
take shape in attempts to game the algorithmic systems of platforms.
This section discusses notions of gaming, as these are a productive
space in which to explore how negotiations between cultural producers
and platforms play out across industry segments.
First, it is important to observe that algorithmic gaming emerges as a
response to platform moderation; this form of optimization only
becomes “gaming” because it is considered illegitimate by platforms.
Hence, algorithmic gaming can be de ined as third-party algorithmic
optimization tactics labeled as illegitimate by platforms. Since the
boundary between what is considered by platforms to be either
legitimate or illegitimate constantly shifts, what is initially understood
as adaptation can quickly transform into gaming, and vice versa (Petre
et al., 2019).
During the 1990s, these dynamics were already observed in relation to
search engine optimization (SEO) practices (Ziewitz, 2019). Cultural
producers and a wide variety of other complementors at the time began
to develop covert SEO tactics, which critics described as “spamdexing”
and “link slutting” (Halavais, 2017). As these tactics proliferated, the
search engine industry labeled them “black hat” SEO, distinct from
legitimate “white hat” SEO (Malaga, 2010). Third parties found
engaging in these black hat tactics were subsequently punished,
downgraded, or made invisible by the search engine. While these SEO
struggles continue to the present, they have, as new platforms emerge,
been complemented by a wide variety of other algorithmic
optimization tactics. Each platform gives way to different optimization
practices among its complementors, as well as evolving normative
frameworks to evaluate them (Morris et al., 2021).
In the news industry, optimization at the edge of what is deemed
permissible revolves around “clickbait.” This form of optimization has
been described by Facebook as the posting of “a link with a headline

that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much
information about what they will see” (O’Donovan, 2014). Typically, the
clickbait text or thumbnail is sensationalist or misleading, creating a
“curiosity gap” by giving enough information to trigger user interest,
but not enough to satisfy it (Potthast et al., 2016). These practices,
obviously, stand in the historical tradition of sensationalist newspaper
headlines, which have always played a major role in the curiosity game.
Initially, Facebook appeared to accommodate such strategies. In fact, in
2013 the platform announced that it would algorithmically prioritize
content that received many likes and comments. This prompted digital
outlets such as BuzzFeed, HuffPost, and Upworthy to generate “click-
worthy” content. After an initial spike in traf ic, Facebook, as we have
seen throughout this book, reversed its decision. When it became clear
that “click-worthy” did not equal “optimal levels of user engagement,”
the platform operator declared that it would focus on promoting
“quality” news content instead. Many digital news organizations
experienced an immediate, dramatic drop in traf ic thereafter (Caplan
& boyd, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018).
Similar dynamics can be observed in social media content creation.
Instagram in luencers’ efforts to challenge the 2016 shift to algorithmic
curation provides an apt example of creators’ optimization tactic
(O’Meara, 2019; Petre et al., 2019). Playing what Kelley Cotter (2019:
906) calls the “visibility game,” Instagram creators responded to the
replacement of chronological ordering by forming “reciprocal
engagement groups” known colloquially as “pods.” Pod members like
and comment on each other’s posts regardless of the content. The
objective is to trick Instagram’s algorithms by mimicking unprompted
end-user engagement. Victoria O’Meara (2019: 1) argues that such
tactics can be interpreted as an “emergent form of resistance that
responds to the recon igured working conditions of platformized
cultural production.” Yet, engagement pods also make explicit the
tension between what Instagram considers manipulation and
legitimate engagement. Pods have replaced the use of bots –
automation software to perform repetitive tasks – that are explicitly
forbidden on this platform instance. In the hope of preventing their
comments from being lagged as bot activity, pod members follow a
number of rules regarding the length of comments (e.g., at least four

words), as well as concerning their orientation, which needs to be
tailored to a speci ic Instagram post (O’Meara 2019: 6). According to
creator testimonies, failing to follow such rules may result in being
lagged or even banned from the platform (Cotter, 2019: 907).
Taken together, optimization strategies – routinely condemned as
manipulation, clickbait, and algorithmic gaming – are deeply
ambiguous. Some cultural producers cast these as necessary tactics to
build a sustainable business, whereas others consider them
manipulation. While platform companies tend to adopt a paternalistic
language in moderating these tactics, in correspondence with their own
market optimization strategies, they constantly shift the boundaries
between illicit and legitimate activities (Petre et al., 2019). Ultimately,
this is an uphill battle, at best. As the above examples illustrate,
platforms companies almost always prevail. Simply adjusting their
governance frameworks, platforms can instantly and profoundly
change the playing ield for cultural producers.

Conclusion
Examining how platform governance affects the cultural industries, this
chapter has built on a variety of research traditions, most prominently
software and platform studies, business and information system
studies, and cultural and media industries studies. Research in these
traditions demonstrates that platforms steer cultural producers
through a complex maze of standards, guidelines, policies, and editorial
and algorithmic categorization practices – each of which can lead to
rejections, shadow bans, or the demonetization of content. Together,
these insights constitute a powerful refutation of the claim that
platforms are merely neutral conduits; rather, they make clear that
platforms intervene in media economies, cultures, and politics in
staggering ways. In addition, going beyond current research, this
chapter provides a comprehensive perspective to understand how such
interventions take place, proposing that platform governance takes
shape through three core strategies: regulation, curation, and
moderation. These strategies, for their part, are afforded, constrained,
shaped, and driven by corporate considerations and materialized
through infrastructural integration.
While all cultural industry segments are affected by the three
governance strategies, we have shown that there is substantial
variation in how they are perceived, adopted, or negotiated. These
differences should be understood in the light of the particular relations
of dependence between industry segments and platforms. The game
industry and social media, as platform-native industries, are most
directly and thoroughly affected by shifts in governance by platforms.
In these segments, major changes in platform regulation, curation, and
moderation can make or break cultural producers. In industry
segments that have historically been platform-independent, such as the
news and music industries, the impact is more diffuse. In these
segments, platform governance is largely considered to be an external
intervention that poses a threat to producers’ institutional, creative,
and cultural autonomy.

As platform governance frameworks evolve, platform-dependent
cultural producers across all industries have to either adapt or resist.
Platform regulation, curation, and moderation shape the horizon of
economic opportunity for these producers. Crucially, this is a horizon
that continues to shift and that is largely controlled by a handful of
transnational companies. Going forward, the challenge for researchers
is to gain more precise insights in how particular modes of platform
governance exactly afford speci ic forms of cultural production, while
stymying others.

Notes
1. Section 230 states: “No provider or user of an interactive computer
service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any
information provided by another information content provider.” See:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230.
2. An important exception is the iOS app store, which has been allowed
to operate in China by complying with strict Chinese regulatory
frameworks (Peters, 2020).
3. See: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/review#app-
review.

PART II
Shifting Cultural Practices

5
Labor

Introduction
In 2019, amid the continued swell of media attention to in luencers and
internet celebrities, a cross-national survey made headlines with
indings that social media creator ranks among young people’s top
career aspirations (Stillman, 2019). Roughly 30 percent of 8–12-year-
old participants from the UK and the US identi ied YouTuber/Vlogger as
their dream vocation. The percentage of astronaut hopefuls, by
contrast, was a mere 11 percent (Stillman, 2019). Though critics tend to
attribute indings such as these to social media’s provisions for glib
narcissism within a new “celebrity-industrial complex” (Orth, 2004),
we contend that a more useful framework is one that foregrounds the
role of platforms in new con igurations of work and labor.
Take the career of Emma Chamberlain – the American internet
phenomenon who, in 2019, was dubbed by The Atlantic as “the most
important YouTuber today” (Lorenz, 2019a). While Chamberlain’s
comedic – sometimes brash – portrayals of young adulthood have
garnered her an astounding 10 million channel subscribers, her success
is widely attributed to an eschewal of patterned tropes of
attentionseeking. And, for Chamberlain at least, “the business of being
relatable” (Jennings, 2020) has paid off: her estimated annual earnings
are more than US$1.7 million – a igure that includes corporate
“partnerships” with a roster of commercial brands, including Audible
(audio books), Curology (beauty products), Hollister (clothing), and, of
course, her own buzzy product lines, Chamberlain Coffee and Low Key
by Emma C.1 In an interview with W Magazine, Chamberlain
acknowledged the substantial effort required to project and maintain
such a “relatable” self-brand. After noting that she single-handedly
devotes “20 to 30 hours [to] editing each video,” she confessed, “I’ve
cried multiple times after posting a video. So much work goes into each
video that I don’t know how I’m still alive” (McCarthy, 2019).
Chamberlain’s admission of the grueling nature of YouTube production
lays bare the amount of labor involved in a social media career. Beyond
the work of content creation – say, ilming a video, crafting a post, or
staging a photoshoot – independent cultural producers also invest

considerable energy promoting their content across the dynamic cross-
platform ecology (Abidin, 2016; Baym, 2018; Duffy, 2017). Social media
creators often expend additional energy dealing with platform
intermediaries – from lawyers and analytics irms to talent agencies
promising to “broker deals” with brand sponsors (Cowles, 2019; Stoldt
et al., 2019).
Chamberlain is not the only star-creator to acknowledge the less
auspicious elements of social media visibility – much of which remains,
paradoxically, concealed behind-the-screen. As Danish e-sports star
Lucas Tao Kilmer Larsen divulged to a reporter, his dream career has
steadily evolved into “more and more of a job”; the League of Legends
player added that, with fourteen-hour workdays and few opportunities
to socialize with friends, “It isn’t as fun anymore” (Smith, 2018).
Creators in China vying to earn income on one of the country’s highly
competitive live-streaming platforms, such as Huya and DouYu, have
voiced similar sentiments about the infringement on their personal
lives. In their research on DouYu, as Xiaoxing Zhang, Yu Xiang, and Lei
Hao observed, streamers “push themselves to the limit, streaming
seven days a week and more than eight hours a day” (2019: 348).
Streamers also worry about taking time off – even brie ly – given the
ickle nature of online audiences. One popular Chinese streamer found
that when she took a short break after nearly three years of incessant
work, her fanbase had already started to dwindle away (Zhang et al.,
2019).
To be sure, the tales of Chamberlain, Larsen, and other successful
internet personalities represent the exception, rather than the rule. Only
a small minority of social media creators earn a living wage from their
activities; fewer still rise to the upper echelons of commercial success.
Among the important – yet largely unresolved – questions for scholars,
policymakers, activists, and creators themselves are thus: what is the
likelihood of success for aspiring creators? What features do they share
in terms of social identity and other markers of privilege? And how
does the distribution of income and status in platform-dependent
cultural production compare to other segments of the cultural
industries? In Chapter 2, we discussed these broader political-
economic issues in the context of asymmetrical platform markets. The

unevenness we identi ied helps explain why newcomers to YouTube
have a low probability of success and, relatedly, why a small sliver of
channels receive the vast majority of views and thus revenue (Bä rtl,
2018; Rieder et al., 2020). In this chapter, we probe these questions and
issues in the context of labor.
Putting labor at the forefront of platformization allows us to assess, for
instance, how the experiences of YouTube’s cadre of top-tier creators
differ markedly from the wider population of social media creators –
those who comprise a sprawling class of what we have elsewhere called
“aspirational laborers” (Duffy, 2017). These individuals devote time,
energy, and talent to activities that promise, but – for the majority, at
least – fail to deliver substantial material rewards (see also Duguay,
2019; Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013). Not only is the allocation of rewards in
the social media in luence/entertainment categories highly lopsided,
but – crucially – it tends to be represented by existing markers of
privilege and power. The uneven distribution of material rewards in
social media content creation attests, in part, to the profoundly
precarious nature of platform-labor markets.2

Platform Precarity
Much like Helen Blair’s (2001) turn-of-this-century account of work in
the ilm industry, today’s cultural laborers are cautioned (and
presumably roused) by the well-worn idiom, “You’re only as good as
your last job.” That is to say, the precarity that platform-dependent
creative laborers experience is by no means unprecedented; rather,
intermittent, piecemeal “gigs,” long hours for low pay, and a lack of
bene its are longstanding features of employment in the cultural
industries (McRobbie, 2016; Neff et al., 2005). The cultural industries,
moreover, have progressively supplanted on-the-job training with a go-
at-it-alone, or “DIY” style of training and upkeep (Gill, 2011). Perhaps
not surprisingly, such implicit job requirements tend to pose high
barriers to entry for career aspirants who lack suf icient reserves of
cultural and/or economic capital (Friedman et al., 2017; O’Brien et al.,
2016).
Platforms, by contrast, are deceivingly accessible. As will be more
extensively discussed in Chapter 7, where we re lect on platformization
from a democratic perspective, open platform infrastructures seem to
substantially reduce the thresholds to participate in various forms of
cultural production – from engaging in journalism on Facebook or
Twitter, to developing a game app, to becoming a creator or live-
streamer. But while platforms may indeed be more accessible to
newcomers, an upshot of such openness is a staggering increase in the
talent pool. Platform policies do little to challenge this skewed
provision of attention and other resources. As we argued in the
previous chapter, the organization of frontpages, app stores, playlists,
and newsfeeds – be they editorially or algorithmically curated – only
reinforces the unevenness of the so-called attention economy. By
conferring or removing markers of “visibility” and hence status,
platform companies play up the divisions within and between various
creator communities.
Those employed by legacy cultural industries – newspaper editors,
magazine staffers, and radio personalities, among others – are by no
means impervious to the forces of platform-wrought precarity. News

workers, for instance, have faced a maelstrom of professional
challenges in recent decades. While classi ied ad websites, search
engines, and social media platforms have collectively threatened the
advertising revenue of news organizations, workers face ever-
increasing competition from blogs, Twitter, and other modes of citizen
journalism (e.g., Lewis et al., 2010). These industry-wide
transformations have coincided with considerable job losses. According
to a report published in early 2019, the number of journalism jobs have
declined by 14 percent since the mid-2000s (Molla, 2019). Such
precarity was accelerated by the global pandemic of 2020–1, which
upended labor markets and led to additional furloughs and layoffs (Luo,
2020).
Meanwhile, those still employed have had to adapt to a multiskilled
logic that demands that news be produced 24/7 and circulated across a
raft of platform instances – from Facebook and Twitter to Snapchat and
Instagram (Petre, 2018). Interviewing editors at the New York Times,
Nikki Usher observed that journalists’ obligation to continuously adapt
online content, in addition to keeping tabs on emerging stories on
Twitter and blogs, amounted to workplace dynamics that were
“grueling and unyielding” (2014: 9). Further intensifying their
reporting demands is the expectation that journalists engage with
online audiences in earnest. A key symptom of the market for news
amid platformization is the ascent of so-called “entrepreneurial
journalism” – an unabashedly self-promotional model of reporting
which is touted by media outlets, university courses, and champions of
Silicon Valley (Cohen, 2015, 2016; Deuze & Witschge, 2018; Holton &
Molyneux, 2017). For journalists, this directive to engage in self-
branding practices can be disorienting at best, disquieting at worst. In
some cases, guidelines for producing news from a neutral, impassioned
stance have been supplanted by directives for journalists to inject their
personalities into their stories (Moestrup, 2021).
The game industry illustrates yet another dimension of platform-
dependent cultural labor. On the one hand, some of the well-established
labor practices in legacy segments of the game industry – such as the
market for PC and dedicated console games – persist under the
auspices of internationally operating game publishers, such as

Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Tencent. Here, barriers to entry
remain quite high – a trend that owes much to its capital-intensive,
formalized modes of production and circulation (Keogh, 2019). On the
other hand, as discussed in the irst half of the book, mobile and social
platforms, coupled with a new generation of affordable game
production toolsets, have drastically lowered the costs to develop and
distribute games. Similar to social media entertainment, then, large
parts of the game industry are signi icantly more accessible to
newcomers.
Among the most visible outcomes of the proliferation of more
accessible game platforms and the subsequent growth in demand is the
lourishing of “indie” (independent) game production. In theory, at
least, game makers who are “independent” from legacy game
publishers enjoy increased inancial and creative independence (Garda
& Grabarczyk, 2016). Political economic and business studies research,
however, shows that the new platforms tend to reify, rather than
challenge, existing economic, institutional, regional, and sociocultural
hierarchies (Parker et al., 2018).
While platformization does not necessarily involve a democratization of
cultural production, careers in mobile and social game development are
– much like the creator economy discussed at the beginning of this
chapter – considered domains where labor and leisure blend
harmoniously. “You get paid to play games all day” is one of the many
common career myths (O’Donnell, 2014). Large game publishers, for
their part, have little interest in dispelling these misconceptions;
instead, they hype play on their recruitment pages as one of the many
job perks. Yet reports on the lived experiences of game developers –
both indie developers and those funded by game publishers – point to
much less favorable conditions. In addition to accounts of an
unremitting work culture (Schreier, 2017; Woodcock, 2019), research
reveals that the game industry’s deep fault lines – including those that
exclude women and people of color – persist (Bailey et al., 2021; Cote,
2020; Shaw, 2014).
The inequalities that have long mired the game industry index wider
patterns of inequality and exclusion in cultural markets. These
disparities are, moreover, discernible across intersectional categories

such as gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, class, age, and ability. To be
sure, any claims that the culture industries were inclusive or egalitarian
should be treated as suspect, especially given the extensive research
documenting systematic inequity (O’Brien et al., 2016; Saha, 2018).
Platform-dependency seems to be enhancing, rather than challenging,
some of these deep-seated power imbalances. As discussed in Chapter
2, the blockbuster economics that drive cultural markets allow for a
handful of “superstar” developers, directors, creators, and reporters to
accumulate a disproportionate share of attention and revenue. The
average hourly rate of a blockbuster creator – be it advertising revenue
or a sponsorship deal – is virtually unlimited. But beyond such
illustrative cases, it remains to be seen whether platform-dependent
instances of popularity and status allow for traditionally
underrepresented groups to become visible in ways that challenge
structural hierarchies.
As the opening discussion suggests, platformization introduces new
dimensions into cultural labor markets while also amplifying some of
the enduring features of work in the cultural industries: precarity,
individualization, and systematic inequalities, to name a few. These
trends do not wholly subvert the notion that platforms – from Twitter
to TikTok, and from Wattpad to SoundCloud – open up new
opportunities for cultural producers to secure audiences, generate
revenue, and participate in the creation of creative and democratic
practices. In the irst two decades of the twenty- irst century, media and
communication researchers offered wildly different perspectives on the
opportunities engendered by sites like WordPress, Yelp, and Television
Without Pity – all of which invited audiences into the production
process. What came to be known as the “digital labor” debate (Kuehn &
Corrigan, 2013) pivoted on whether these activities could be
understood as democratized modes of creative expression or,
alternatively, whether they represented regimes of “free labor”
exploited in the service of capitalism (Andrejevic, 2008; Jarrett, 2016;
Terranova, 2000).
The centralization and concentration of power within just a few
platform corporations warrants a re-evaluation of this debate. Indeed,
it is becoming increasingly clear that the continuous evolution of

platform markets, infrastructures, and governance frameworks, as
discussed in the irst half of the book, both prompts and responds to
changes in the labor of cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization. Against the background of such changes, this chapter
explores how particular shifts in labor practices take shape across
different platforms, industry segments, and geographic regions. More
precisely, we examine how the interplay between platforms, cultural
producers, and a wide variety of other complementors engenders
speci ic labor routines – namely those that are characterized by
particular regimes of visibility, forms of organization, and modes of
economic distribution and security.
Whereas in the irst half of the book, we considered power to be
relational, in this chapter and those that follow, we work from the
perspective that power is productive. We trace how power circulates in
the relations among platforms, cultural producers, and other
complementors, producing the norms and values of platform-based
cultural production. Exploring these normative dimensions, we not only
analyze the interaction between platforms and complementors, we also
look at how these interactions correspond with the norms and values
that govern society at large. Thus, special attention will be devoted to
the particular historical, institutional, and societal settings in which
processes of platformization unfold.
We structure the analysis along four key tensions, which cultural
workers experience in platform-based labor: (1) visibility versus
invisibility, (2) collective versus individual, (3) job security versus
insecurity, and (4) equality versus inequality. As should become
apparent by the end of this chapter, these tensions are not discrete but,
rather, they overlap in telling ways. By exploring the four tensions in
depth, we gain systematic insight in the lived experiences of cultural
producers working through platforms.

Invisibility
To explore the valuation of particular career sectors, sociologists of
work and labor have found rich analytical purchase in the notion of
visibility and, conversely, invisibility (Crain et al., 2016; Daniels, 1987).
Through these concepts, scholars have probed – and often challenged –
the placement of various kinds of labor in wider con igurations of
social, political economic, and cultural power. In the narrower context
of cultural production, these concepts have provided useful insight into
why, for instance, gendered and racialized regimes of emotional and
communications labor have long gone unacknowledged (Kerr &
Kelleher, 2015; Mayer, 2014; Mazumdar, 2015). As Erin Hill contends of
the seeming invisibility of women in early Hollywood, “they often
simply weren’t documented as part of it because they did ‘women’s
work,’ which was – by de inition – insigni icant, tedious, low status, and
noncreative” (2016: 58).
The rise of digital media platforms has, we contend, made the concepts
of visibility and invisibility all the more salient to understanding
cultural production, particularly in light of the algorithmic “regimes of
visibility” (Bucher, 2012) discussed in Chapter 4. The platform logics of
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, after all, cast visibility and “presence”
as key mechanisms for success within a reputation economy (Gandini,
2016; Hearn, 2010; van Dijck & Poell, 2013). Studies of aspiring
creative laborers, moreover, have demonstrated something of a
preoccupation with platformized visibility. During interviews with
current and aspiring creative professionals on Instagram and TikTok,
for instance, participants detailed concerted efforts to have their
content “seen,” to “build an audience” and “get attention,” to craft “posts
that get more traction,” and – to use an oft-repeated euphemism for
metric success – to “do well.” Crucially, such motivations were
overwhelmingly cast in terms of professional advancement, rather than
personal self-interest (Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021).
At the same time, these and other platforms rely upon a much broader
set of cultural laborers, ranging from full-time, salaried employees –
software developers and marketing experts, for instance – to contract-

based content moderators supplied by third-party irms. The work of
the latter is, as Sarah Roberts convincingly demonstrates, invisible by
design, meaning that their roles are strategically concealed to wider
publics (2019: 3). Noting why such invisibility is doubly problematic in
the context of platforms dominated by marginalized worker
subjectivities, Niels van Doorn asked: “How does one value something
one cannot and often does not want to see?” (2017: 899).
Given the fraught nature of visibility across such sprawling industry
segments, the following sections offer two particular modes of
in/visibility – social and political – that can help us understand changes
and continuities in labor amid the platformization of cultural
production.
Social (in)visibility
Whereas socially visible jobs are those regarded as meaningful or
signi icant by powerful factions of society, socially invisible jobs
typically lack such stature and recognition. There are, undoubtedly,
noteworthy overlaps between the level of social visibility ascribed to a
position and its compensation (and what we might consider “economic
visibility”): higher prestige positions tend to command higher salaries
regardless of the actual characteristics of the work. “Women’s work” –
including the reproductive, care, and domestic labor disproportionately
shouldered by women – is an especially acute example of a form of
work that has been profoundly undervalued, both socially and
economically (Federici, 2012; Jarrett, 2014). And, unfortunately, the
specter of such identity politics persists: some of the least socially
visible jobs are those held by historically marginalized populations,
including women, racial/ethnic minorities, and immigrant populations.
As media production scholar Vicki Mayer (2014: 57) has argued: “Sex
segregation of media jobs and the feminization of media work conspire
to render women in media industries less visible relative to a handful of
men whose names we are more likely to know as the movers, shakers,
and newsmakers.”
As Mayer’s reference to the “movers, shakers, and newsmakers” of
media attests, socially visible professions tend to attract large numbers
of audiences and aspirants alike. In the context of the contemporary

cultural industries, this includes actors/entertainers, musicians,
professional gamers, and social media creators. But despite the
attention lavished on these occupational categories, a yawning visibility
gap structures the production and promotion of platform-dependent
cultural content. Thus, while platform logics compel cultural laborers to
be hyper-visible in various online contexts, their creative output is
enabled by a sprawling network of laborers who are scarcely seen. The
latter group of invisible laborers includes content moderators who play
a role in governance decisions, the intermediaries who help broker
deals and manage the self-brands of certain online stars, and the
audiences themselves, who can up or downvote certain kinds of content
through their affective expressions (e.g., shares, likes, favorites,
comments, etc.). Each of these categories of workers are de ined by
their concealed status, as evidenced by the conceptual lexicon of
internet studies scholars. They are called: “behind-the-screen laborers”
(Bulut, 2015); “ghost workers” (Gray & Suri, 2019), and “invisible
workers” (Roberts, 2019; van Doorn, 2017).
In/visible labor plays out in the context of platform content, too. While
content moderators are tasked with ensuring that “objectionable”
content remains invisible to audiences, other categories of behind-the-
screen workers have emerged to make media and journalistic content
supremely visible: talent intermediaries, optimization specialists, and
publicists, among others. Some of these – like social media editors – use
platforms to engage in a timeworn cultural industry practice: publicity.
More speci ically, social media editors manage the promotion of
particular cultural commodities and brand messages across a hyper-
saturated content marketplace. Their work is thus both enabled and
shaped by platform infrastructures and data intermediaries, and they
deploy strategic visibility tactics – from search engine optimization
(Halavais, 2017) to automated scheduling tools – in earnest. Then
again, research suggests that the level of social visibility assigned to this
profession is quite low (Duffy & Schwartz, 2018). A social media worker
for a news organization, for instance, will retool a feature story with a
search-optimized headline or a pithy tagline on Twitter that is more
likely to generate retweets. But unlike the reporter who is credited with
a byline, the social media editor’s work takes place in the shadows of
the organization; it is, by de inition, socially invisible (Levinson, 2016).

What is more – and owing to the high concentration of women in these
roles – these jobs are often denigrated as frivolous, “ luffy,” and hence
less important (Mayer, 2014; Shade & Jacobson, 2015).
Thus, for all of the promises of visibility ascribed to the platform
economy, certain modes of labor are characteristically, perhaps
strategically, obscured to the wider public. Further, as we discuss below,
the invisibility of cultural labor continues to map onto traditional social
lineages, hierarchies, and inequalities.
Political (In)visibility
For a category of workers to be politically visible, its members must be
afforded legal and/or regulatory protection. Politically invisible work,
by contrast, lacks formal mechanisms of support, leaving workers
without access to legal security or recourse (Crain et al., 2016; Gray &
Suri, 2019). A key example from the traditional realm of media
production involves the (mis)classi ication of unpaid interns as
independent contractors. This means that, in most parts of the world,
interns fail to meet the of icial designation of employees; as such, they
lack the legal rights and protections afforded by traditional employer–
employee relations (Perlin, 2012; Rodino-Colocino & Berberick, 2015).
Freelance workers seeking protection from employment
discrimination, similarly, are not covered by equal employment laws
(Nickolaisen, 2020). And since very few countries have unions that
represent freelancers, these itinerant workers often lack collective
bargaining power – another symbol of their political invisibility (Cohen,
2015).
Platform companies, meanwhile, have routinely sought to downplay
their own status as employers of cultural workers. For instance, the
social media personalities active on video-sharing networks like
YouTube and DouYu are not considered “employees” of the platforms;
consequently, they are not protected under employment law: “If the
creators [were reclassi ied as] employees,” MIT Technology Review’s
Angela Chen explained, “YouTube would be responsible for bene its like
vacation, minimum wage, severance, and more” (2019: para. 8). This
situation becomes all the more complex when accounting for
local/national variance in regulatory frameworks. In the US, “kid-

luencers” – that is, social media in luencers of a very young age – fall
under the protection of child labor laws in their particular state,
regardless of the reality that their content lows across national and
international borders (Wong, 2019). YouTube representatives, like
many platform executives, seek to evade existing regulatory
frameworks by implying that they are neutral in their role as
aggregators who intermediate between content producers and end-
users (Gillespie, 2018).
This discursive positioning on the part of platform companies should,
as discussed in the irst half of the book, be seen as a strategic decision
afforded by their institutional organization, including their operation of
multisided markets and relatively open data infrastructures. But,
importantly, platforms’ efforts to shirk responsibility for the labor of
content creators, moderators, and promoters exacerbate the politically
invisible nature of platform-dependent cultural production. What is
more, notions of invisible labor reveal how the move away from
organized cultural industries to individual cultural producers
corresponds with shifting notions of responsibility and governance.

Individuality
A second key tension propelling cultural labor amid platformization is
that between collective and individual forms of organization. A
seemingly obvious consequence of the individualized nature of
platform-dependent work is that laborers are atomized and – without a
proverbial shop loor on which to organize – have fewer opportunities
for solidarity-building. Recent controversies in platform governance
have brought cultural workers’ lack of collective bargaining power into
stark relief. Recall from Chapter 1 the Adpocalypse of 2017, wherein
YouTube creators’ dispersed nature initially made it dif icult for them to
challenge platforms’ regulatory interventions. Confounding such power
asymmetries is the fact that guidelines about content production and
promotion are fuzzily de ined, at best, and in constant lux. Across
platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, reports abound of those
banned or delisted by a platform without any clear information of why
(Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021; see also: Gerrard & Thornham, 2020; Myers
West, 2018).
At the same time, the networked capabilities of these and other
platforms have enabled new collective formations to emerge. As
Cunningham and Craig contend in their exposition of social media
entertainment, “the communicative affordances of social media have …
introduced a set of more communal, supportive, mentoring and
collaborative labor practices,” which challenge the more formal and
competitive character of Hollywood (2019: 83). YouTubers based in the
EU, for instance, are pursuing unionization in a concerted effort to
thwart the one-way low of power between Google and its creator class
(Tiffany, 2019). In 2020, meanwhile, in luencer unions launched in both
the US and the UK. The founders of the UKbased The Creators Union
(TCU) endeavor to challenge the inancial exploitation of in luencers,
such as when “brands steal images, write legally unsound contracts,
ignore invoices and coerce newbies into working for nothing” (Tait,
2020).
Within journalism, employees of web-only companies have sought to
replicate the labor organizations of legacy news companies. In June

2015, the now-defunct entertainment news site Gawker became the
irst major digital journalism organization to form a union, and
companies like Vice, Thrillist, Mic, Salon, Jacobin, ThinkProgress, and Al
Jazeera America followed suit soon thereafter. As HuffPost’s labor
reporter noted, “Once Gawker did it, other folks said, ‘We could do this,’
and it quickly became the norm in the new media world” (cited in
Cohen & de Peuter, 2020). In the game industry – an industry segment
notorious for forcing its employees to structurally work overtime or
adhere to “crunch time” – Game Workers Unite has engaged in nascent,
yet promising, attempts to encourage collective labor action (Ruf ino &
Woodcock, 2020). Founded in 2018, the latter bills itself as an
“international grassroots movement and organization dedicated to
unionizing the game industry,” with local chapters dispersed
throughout Europe.3
Accordingly, some platform-based collectives emulate the grassroots
forms of resistance taking shape across the wider gig economy (Chen &
Qiu, 2019; Rosenblat, 2018). Digital freelancer communities, for
instance, enable networked factions of cultural workers to pool
information about employment opportunities. Summarizing
conclusions from interview-based studies of freelance journalists, Errol
Salamon noted the bene its of such collectives where journalists deploy
“digital technology to ind work, network with other workers, and cope
with their employment relationships, working conditions, creators’
rights, and pay” (2020: 188; see also, Cohen & de Peuter, 2020).
Meanwhile, other groups rely upon indirect means to challenge
platforms’ mechanisms of control. Recall, from the previous chapter,
how Instagram creators negotiate platform governance. In 2017, after a
change to Instagram’s algorithm abruptly made creators’ content much
less visible, communities began to rely on so-called “engagement pods.”
Pod-members agree to reciprocally “like” and comment on each other’s
posts in the hope that such increased engagement will boost the odds
of appearing on news feeds or recommended pages (Cotter, 2019; Petre
et al., 2019). As Victoria O’Meara concluded in her analysis of
engagement pods: “They are organized efforts to manipulate the
algorithm that has inserted itself between content creators and their
audiences, and are an attempt to take control of the process whereby

they are data ied, measured, and assigned value” (2019: 9). Such efforts
to wrest power away from platforms while still operating within their
boundaries attest to the fraught nature of agency and resistance in
platform-dependent cultural production.
A quite different form of organization is furnished by talent agencies,
which purport to mediate the relationships between platform
companies and individual cultural producers, especially content
creators (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Lobato, 2016; Stoldt et al., 2019).
Ruhnn, a Chinese talent agency founded in 2016 with support from
Alibaba, provides “a suite of services for KOLs [key opinion leaders] to
connect with fans on [the] one hand and brands and retailers on the
other” (Liao, 2019). Noting the value to individual creators,
TechCrunch’s Rita Liao (2019) explained that the start-up “takes care of
the full e-commerce cycle, from product design, manufacturing,
warehousing, delivery (which it enables through third-party logistics
irms) all the way to after-sales services.” However, as research on
Chinese live-streamers demonstrates, the for-pro it nature of talent
agencies means they fail to provide the same type of advocacy and
support as labor unions (Zhang et al., 2019). Whereas the latter
emphasize collective rights and shared responsibilities, talent
intermediaries subject individual content creators to intense scrutiny.
The “guilds” that organize streamers on DouYu require creators to “sign
a contract to give the guild exclusive rights to use their image, persona,
and live streaming content for commercial purposes” (Zhang et al.,
2019: 347). In return, they provide streamers with a base income, but
make additional commissions dependent on their performance (i.e., the
number of virtual gifts they receive). This reward system likely
aggravates the key issue discussed in the previous section by
incentivizing creators to be permanently socially visible – while also
pitting workers against each other (Zhang et al., 2019).
The movement away from collective labor support and toward
individualized worker subjectivities has coincided with a rampant
discourse of self-enterprise or – to use a more faddish term –
entrepreneurialism. Noting the implications of this orientation for
cultural workers, Mark Deuze and Mirjam Prenger contend that the
“entrepreneurial mindset reinforces the idea that making media is not

just a way to make a living – it becomes your identity. Making media …
is not something you do, it’s something you are” (2019: 21; emphasis
added). To be sure, the individualization of labor is not unique to the
platform-dependent segments of the cultural industries; it is, rather, a
product of wider transformations in the political economies of
employment that began to unfurl nearly four decades ago. Such
developments include: (1) the increasing reliance on inexpensive
sources of labor – especially workers in the global South, (2)
postrecessionary labor restructuring, which accelerated the
casualization of the workforce, and (3) the upbeat recasting of
“independent” work as self-enterprise under discourses and practices
of neoliberalism (McRobbie, 2016; Neff, 2012; van Doorn, 2017).
A particular designation of individualism – and one that is dif icult to
ignore in the context of platformization – is the notion of the individual
as self-brand (Gehl, 2011; Gershon, 2017; Marwick, 2013). Personal
branding directives are based on unabashedly promotional logics and,
as such, tend to draw on tactics popularized by legacy cultural
industries (Gandini, 2016; Hearn, 2010). And, crucially, platforms’
emphases on self-presentation and reputation management is in part
by design: that is, mainstream social media networks do not foreground
pages and collectives, but pro iles and personalities (Ellison & boyd,
2013; van Dijck, 2013).
It is against this backdrop that current and aspiring media workers are
exhorted to invest time, energy, and even inancial resources into the
development and maintenance of their personal brands (Duffy, 2017;
Gershon, 2017; Scolere, 2019). But cultural producers’ experiences
with self-branding mandates are highly variable; not only do
prescriptions for self-promotion vary across industrial, sectoral, and
geographic contexts, but they are also deeply implicated in
constructions of social identity (Scharff, 2015). What is more, some
cultural laborers feel that such expressly commercial mandates brush
up against the ideal of creative artistry.
We can discern some of these tensions in the context of music. While
promotion has long been crucial to the monetization of recorded music,
marketing activities now fall more directly on the shoulders of
individual artists. Nancy Baym’s (2018) book-length treatment of the

contemporary music industry highlights the ambivalent nature of social
media publicity, particularly how self-promotional activities seamlessly
blur with expressions of meaningful social connectivity. To describe
cultural producers’ investments in building and maintaining audience
relationships online, Baym offers the term “relational labor.” Through
this concept, she shows that, despite the potential pleasure afforded by
such modes of intimacy, it is also a time-intensive, oft-invisible form of
work. To this end, Colten Meisner and Andrew Ledbetter’s (2020)
research on live streamers makes clear how the construction of one’s
self-brand also hinges on the real-time involvement of audiences. They
label this phenomenon “participatory branding,” which suggests that
“the audience is not only present for content creation, but they take an
active role in coconstructing content alongside the creator” (2020: 13).
For journalists, meanwhile, news reporting and self-branding have
been framed as strange bedfellows (Molyneux et al., 2018). Indeed,
Avery Holton and Logan Molyneux (2017) challenged the assumption
that platform-based expressions represent a self-expressive boon; they
found, rather, that workers feel that expression of personal identity has
been hampered. An especially worrisome outcome was that journalists
“supplanted much of their personal information, content, and
conversations with more professionally driven, organizationally aligned
messages” (2017: 203). To this end, guidance on how cultural workers
should burnish their social media pro iles can be quite restrictive. In
2019, a cluster of high-pro ile Australian newspapers – including the
Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Brisbane Times, and WAtoday –
unveiled a social media policy that instructed journalists to:
take care with what they retweet; not use social media to make
customer service complaints; not live tweet events if it interferes
with their work; not share breaking news or tips from other
organisations without attribution or con irmation; not use social
media to directly attack rival journalists or publications and not
attack trolls, even if abused. (Meade, 2019)
Perhaps not surprisingly, journalists deemed such policies
overwhelmingly “unworkable” (Meade, 2019). In other words,
journalists are expected to take responsibility for the visibility of the
content they produce; yet they also confront explicit and implicit

restrictions that inhibit personal and democratic expression – a topic
we will explore in greater depth in Chapter 7.
More broadly, such writings and accounts indicate that individualism
and entrepreneurialism do not necessarily imply greater personal
freedom and personal empowerment. Instead, they, too, signal
collective in luences on labor, with constraints wrought by employers,
audiences, peers, and competitors.

Insecurity
Notions of “good” and “bad” work are intrinsically subjective;
nonetheless, theorists have offered a series of conditions under which
particular vocations or employment categories can be considered more
or less ideal. David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, for example,
suggest that in the realm of cultural production, the roster of
characteristics for the former should include “decent pay, hours and
safety; autonomy; interest and involvement; sociality; esteem and self-
esteem; self-realization; work–life balance; [and] security” (2013: 17;
emphasis ours; see also Oakley, 2013). To this end, this section explores
the role of platforms in the dichotomy of secure and insecure labor.
While the former connotes work that is stable and promises to continue
in the future, the latter refers to positions that are intermittent (e.g.,
contract-based work), lack prospects, and provide few opportunities
for professional advancement. For workers, insecure work often means
“coming to terms with having little or no control over ‘what happens
next’ in your professional career” (Deuze & Prenger, 2019: 21).
While the COVID-19 crisis has drawn widespread attention to the
instability of many career sectors, we noted earlier that such volatility
is in fact a well-documented feature of cultural work. That is, the labor
practices of novelists, artists, ilmmakers, and musicians have
traditionally been bound up with a rather unpredictable market for
cultural goods – one predicated on capricious audience tastes and the
mercurial preferences of gatekeepers (e.g., DJs, book and movie
reviewers). Of course, such precarity impacts categories of cultural
workers unevenly. Analysts of game development, for instance, have
noted how ickle work cultures tend to limit the talent pool to young
workers (O’Donnell, 2014). Drawing on his analysis of US-based game
testers, Ergin Bulut concluded that labor conditions were de ined by a
pervasive sense of irregularity, with workers sometimes doing – in the
words of one informant – “anything to get by” (2020: 129). Research on
the European game industry, including studies of Polish game testers
(Ozimek, 2019) and Ireland-based game community managers (Kerr &
Kelleher, 2015), reveals similar patterns of unpredictability.

But the neoliberal mandates of contemporary work – combined with
the saturated marketplace for cultural content – seems to have
ampli ied the level of precarity across many creative sectors (Duffy,
Pinch, et al., 2021; Glatt, 2021). What is more, the much-hyped features
of independent work – including its assurances of freedom and
lexibility – are the very mechanisms through which work is rendered
insecure and intermittent. Thus, while participants in Birgit Mathisen’s
(2019) study of Norwegian freelance journalists expressed gratitude
for the autonomy and job satisfaction afforded by their lexible jobs,
they also “experience precarity and vulnerability more than ever.” She
continued: “Income is insecure, and they describe a cynical work life
where the media companies invest in temporary workers to whom they
have fewer obligations. Their state of precarity and insecurity also
leads some freelancers to take assignments outside pure journalism,
such as PR work and business communication” (2019: 1006).
Journalists’ efforts to acquire piecemeal work in tangential ields is a
testament to a wider trend in multiskilling – wherein cultural
producers feel compelled to be proverbial Jacks and Jills of all trades.
Developing multiple pro iciencies can thus be understood as a bulwark
against the vagaries of an insecure cultural labor market. Scholars of
journalism, in particular, have noted how the logic of multiskilling has
important implications for workers’ senses of professional status and
self-worth (Deuze, 2004; Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2009).
Importantly, while these earlier accounts of news multiskilling tended
to focus on entirely different professional subsectors (i.e., web versus
print), the new exigencies of journalism involve pro iciencies across
multiple platforms. In an analysis of job posts advertising journalism
positions, Lei Guo and Yong Volz (2019) found that employers’
demands for multimedia skills were second only to their demands for
good writing, with ads recruiting those able to “tell stories on multiple
platforms.”
Much like the cross-platform pro iciencies of contemporary journalists,
content creators are increasingly compelled to create branded personae
that span the social media ecology. Creator-entertainers who once
devoted their energies to a single platform – YouTube, Instagram,
Twitch, DouYu, or WeChat – are responding to wider directives to

maintain a presence across two or more social networks. Cunningham
& Craig (2019: 94) use the term “platform precarity” to describe the
level of instability that compels creators to develop cross-branded
personae. Doing so represents a concerted effort to mitigate the
uncertainty of platforms’ rapidly evolving economic, infrastructural,
and governmental dimensions. As in luencer Kelly told us during an
interview:
[My fellow creators advise], “Don’t put your eggs in one basket.” A
lot of bloggers put all their time and attention in Instagram. But I
know a lot of people have said don’t do that because Instagram, or
social media in general’s always changing. I feel like Facebook ten
years ago was the thing. Then, here comes Instagram. Now,
Instagram’s the thing. But what’s going to be next? Is it going to be
Instagram? We don’t know. There’s Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube … if
you put all your time and focus in one platform, you’re in some
trouble. (Cited in Duffy & Hund, 2019)
Kelly’s comments point to the uncertainty that creators experience
when they dedicate too much time and/or attention to a single
platform.
Such risk-reduction on the part of creators makes sense in the context
of platform evolution. In the irst half of the book, we discussed the fact
that, while some platform companies achieve unparalleled success,
many fail to strike a balance between infrastructural investments to
draw in more end-users/complementors and the sustenance of a
sustainable business model. The rise and fall of video-sharing service
Vine brought such platform precarity into stark relief. When the
platform shut down abruptly in 2017, legions of Vine stars struggled to
transition their audience and migrate to new platforms; others seemed
to simply perish. A similar scenario played out in 2020, when US-based
TikTok creators were confronted with the threat of a potential ban. To
inoculate themselves against lost revenue streams, creators started to
encourage their audiences to follow them on Instagram, YouTube, and
the like (Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021).
Together, such accounts reveal how cultural production in a platform
environment requires both the ability and the willingness to adapt to

major institutional shifts, particularly those involving the distribution
and monetization of content.4 Even if a platform does not wholly
disappear, platform owners’ sociotechnical tweaks and governance
models can wreak havoc on the labor processes of creators (Arriagada
& Ibá ñ ez, 2020). Decisions to ban or censor certain types of content, in
particular, can forestall their ability to earn revenue (Caplan & Gillespie,
2020). So, too, can unanticipated algorithmic tweaks or updates that
threaten to render a creator’s content invisible. Recall, from the
previous section, Instagram’s decision to move from a chronological
feed to an algorithmically curated one. At the same time that many
creators critiqued a move which rendered their visibility far less stable,
they also acknowledged the implicit mandate to be lexible. Cotter’s
analysis of the “Instagram game” quotes one poster: “You need to have
the attitude of if you can’t beat ’em you might as well join ’em … It
sucks, but we can’t change it, so you gotta just adapt or get left behind”
(2019: 902). Elsewhere, we have described the mode of uncertainty
that stems from algorithmic tweaks as “algorithmic precarity” (Duffy,
Pinch, et al., 2021). For creators, then, anticipating platforms’
incessantly changing algorithms is understood as a necessary part of the
job. More broadly, such accounts reveal the additional layers of
insecurity that platform-dependent cultural producers face – one of
which, as we noted in Chapter 4, amounts to conditions of structural
uncertainty.

Inequality
Despite the much-vaunted status of cultural industry workplaces,
recent years have shone a spotlight on the patterned systems of
inequity sullying these ields, among them: staggering wage gaps;
exclusionary practices that inhibit the progress of women, people of
color, and members of the LGBTQ community; and informal work
cultures that normalize discrimination and harassment (Gill, 2014;
Lopez, 2020; O’Brien et al., 2016; Saha, 2018). Systematic biases and
inequalities, moreover, traverse industrial and cultural-geographic
boundaries. Take, for instance, the news industry. A report by the
European Journalism Observatory (2018), which included an analysis
of the state of journalism in eleven countries, revealed various indices
of gender bias, including marked disparities in bylines and images. The
starkest of these gender imbalances was found in Germany, where 58
percent of bylines listed men, whereas only 16 percent credited women
reporters (European Journalism Observatory, 2018; see also Byerly,
2016). More recently, the Nieman Lab’s report, “Race and the
Newsroom,” highlighted prominent racial and ethnic gaps across the US
news sector. The report offered a meta-analysis of a series of studies
published in recent years and concluded that “journalism has a race
problem” (see Merre ield, 2020: para. 1). In addition to the low number
of Black and Hispanic journalists employed in newsrooms (compared
to the larger population), the report also noted the implications for the
nature and extent of racerelated coverage.
News organizations are by no means unique in this regard; research on
the ilm, television, and music industries (Lopez, 2020; Mayer, 2011;
Berkers & Schaap, 2018) highlights systematic inequality of varying
degrees and kinds. Meanwhile, the game industry has drawn a spate of
criticism for its exclusionary – if not openly hostile – treatment of
workers from marginalized communities. As Suzanne de Castell and
Karen Skardzius (2019) argue, these issues go beyond mere “number’s
issues.” The women professionals who stay in the game industry are
compelled “to perform the added affective labor of justifying their role
and in luence as workers who ‘ it in,’ a rhetorical stance which

simultaneously prohibits them from critiquing misogynistic working
conditions endemic to the industry” (2019: 837). Efforts to redress the
inequalities in the cultural industries often fall short, especially when
they focus on economic factors at the expense of progressive structural
change (Saha, 2018).
As noted earlier, digital platforms’ lowered barriers to market entry are
often associated with democratization and, more precisely, discourses
emphasizing their potential to challenge narrowly de ined cultures of
production. The early rhetoric surrounding social media platforms was
that they provided marginalized communities with enhanced
opportunities to engage in cultural production. To be sure, in some
cases, they seem to be ful illing this potential, especially for worker
communities that experienced economic and/or geographic barriers to
entering the cultural industries. For example, examining Kuaishou, one
of the leading Chinese video-sharing apps, Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet
observe how the app “enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese
living outside the urban center of the country to become ‘unlikely’
creative workers” (2019: 1). Meanwhile, Aymar Jean’s Christian’s
(2018; Christian et al., 2020) research on and development of the
platform OpenTV – billed as “a platform for intersectional pilots and
series, supporting Chicago artists in producing and exhibiting indie
series” – provides a model of how alternative platforms enable
marginalized communities to lourish; in so doing, platforms like
OpenTV nurture a greater breadth of talent and, consequently, content.
But crucially, these accounts of labor successes are offset by less
favorable reports of the impact of platformization, especially those that
testify to bias and/or discrimination. For instance, some of the
professional sectors that are emerging in platform-dependent ields of
cultural production appear to replicate gendered divisions of cultural
labor through what sociologists describe as “occupational clusters”
(e.g., Bose & Rossi, 1983). As we have noted elsewhere (Duffy &
Schwartz, 2018), social media editing/management – a category of
work largely carried out by women – is marked by patterned forms of
social devaluation. To see how this diminishment plays out, we
compare social media editors to the overwhelmingly masculinist
culture of social media development and coding. While the work of both

social media editors and software developers is concealed behind the
screen, only the latter – overwhelmingly White men – enjoy the perks
and privileges of such high-status work. As such, we argue that “social
media employment has transplanted ‘women’s work’ into the digital
economy, largely through jobs that remain marginalized at the
periphery” (Duffy & Schwartz, 2018: 2985). The realms of social media
in luence/content creation also seem to reproduce wider systems of
identity-based worker devaluation. As scholars like Sophie Bishop
(2018) point out, many of the top creators are located within genres
that reproduce stereotypical gender roles: women in beauty and
fashion, men in games, comedy, and tech.
Compensation for these genres is also characteristically uneven. In
2020 a group of in luencers of color publicly called attention to the
profoundly lopsided system of remuneration that structures the social
media marketing economy (Cochrane, 2020). Critiquing the tendency of
brands to pay Black creators with the oft-deferred promise of exposure
or free swag – rather than with inancial compensation, Instagrammer
Lydia Okello noted:
“I’ve worked as a Black creative all my adult life and I’ve noticed
that there’s often an assumption that you should feel lattered that
this large company is reaching out to you, that it has noticed you,”
they said, “and that re lects a greater cultural narrative that the
creative work of marginalised groups is less valuable.” (Cited in
Cochrane, 2020)
While these critiques note the marginal status of certain categories of
labor, it is important to include the role of platform governance
frameworks – particularly algorithms – in amplifying such inequalities
and instances of discrimination (Gerrard & Thornham, 2020; Noble,
2018). As discussed in Chapter 4, creator communities have accused
platforms like TikTok and YouTube of racist moderation and curation
practices (Kelly, 2020).
Finally, the game industry serves as a reminder of how platform-
dependency is far from a panacea when it comes to disrupting
longstanding inequalities. As noted earlier, the game industry has
suffered from decades of subcultural entrenchment, with publishers

and platform operators catering – pandering, if you will – to a relatively
homogenous audience of young, male gamers (Kirkpatrick, 2013; Shaw,
2014). While access to mobile app stores has resulted in numerical
diversity – an increase of the number of games available – there are few
signs this has translated into worker diversity (Nieborg, Young, Joseph,
2020). The status of the aforementioned cadre of below-the-line game
workers (game testers, community managers, outsourced laborers) is
still undervalued, and the industry as a whole is very much a domain
dominated by young White men (Bailey et al., 2021; Cote, 2020).5

Conclusion
Through an examination of cultural practices of labor amid
platformization, this chapter has complicated essentialist narratives of
platforms as either wholly democratizing forces or wholly
monopolizing forces. Recall how, in the irst half of the book, we
challenged these narratives by showing how platformization
simultaneously involves both a decentralization and concurrent
recentralization of power in cultural production. In this chapter, we
added a new layer to this analysis by examining how power circulates
in the work and labor practices of platform-dependent modes of
cultural production. We showed how the interplay between platforms,
cultural producers, and other complementors produces con igurations
of labor that are characterized by speci ic regimes of visibility, forms of
organization, and modes of economic distribution and security. At the
individual level, these new labor formations enable a select few to
challenge traditional regimes of power and even prosper; however, in
aggregate, the less auspicious elements of cultural work – precarity,
individualization, and systematic unevenness – seem to be ampli ied.
To examine how these elements interact, we identi ied four core
tensions in platform-dependent cultural labor: (1) visibility versus
invisibility, (2) collective versus individual, (3) job security versus
insecurity, and (4) equality versus inequality. In accordance with the
larger theme of continuity woven throughout this book, it is important
to note that these tensions are not altogether new but, rather, are
challenged, reaf irmed, or recon igured in processes of platformization.
Platform-dependent cultural labor can thus be seen as a continuation
and intensi ication of the long-term neoliberal restructuring of
employment, leading to the individualization of risk (Neff, 2012).
These tensions, moreover, do not operate discretely, but, rather, they
intersect or diverge in patterned ways. For instance, a key element of
the platform-dependent labor market is the abundance of platforms
wherein independently employed cultural workers vie for visibility and,
subsequently, work. Companies like Upwork, Fiverr, and Elance allow
employers to recruit temporary, project-based workers whose value is

communicated through quanti ied reputation scores (Gandini, 2016;
Popiel, 2017). A new regime of visibility revolves around incessant
competition, which further enhances individualism, economic
insecurity, and social inequality. While some cultural producers succeed
in becoming hyper-visible and economically successful, overall
platform-dependent labor is characterized by nested systems of
precarity (Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021). Much of this precarity is rooted in
the wider turbulence and lux of platform markets, infrastructures, and
governance. Amid such incessant transformations, cultural producers
feel compelled to respond at whim. Not surprisingly, these conditions
leave many cultural workers feeling exhausted and anxious about their
prospects for the future.
Despite the precarity and entrenchment of power relations we see in
platform-dependent cultural production, it is important to observe that
there are counter movements. Indeed, recent years have seen new
forms of collectivity emerging, with factions of laborers springing up
from the very same platforms. They vary in size and organization –
from grassroots collectives prompted by social media personalities to
the more organized efforts of journalists to secure unionized support.
Also noteworthy are efforts to challenge systems of social inequity that
are rife in the media and cultural industries; movements like
#oscarssowhite and #metoo reveal how platforms enable networked
publics to resist inequality, a topic to which we return to in Chapter 7
on democratic politics. Going forward, it is vital, however, not just to
celebrate these collective efforts, but to critically assess whether they
effectively enable cultural workers to strengthen their position within
the cultural industries and vis-à -vis platform companies.

Notes
1.
https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UC78cxCAcp7JfQPgKxYd
yGrg/realtime.
2. As Matthews & Onyemaobi (2020) emphasize, this construction of
precarity, especially that which circulates in the cultural industries,
is based upon a Western notion and thus doesn’t translate evenly to
non-Western contexts.
3. See: https://www.gameworkersunite.org.
4. To be sure, such a deliberate multi-platforming strategy on the part
of creators is not without precedent; rather, it marks an instantiation
of what business studies scholars call “multihoming” (Landsman &
Stremersch, 2011).
5. We should note that, while platforms bear responsibility for this
enduring misalignment, so do game publishers and self-proclaimed
“gamers,” who are allowed to keep aggressively policing the
boundaries of “their” subculture (Consalvo & Paul, 2019).

6
Creativity

Introduction
In late 2019, TikTok became the target of a cross-generational clash
when the snub “OK boomer” began to circulate among its
thenpredominantly young userbase. Soon, the phrase – and, along with
it, the platform on which it was born – was thrust into wider popular
culture through news features, memes, and comical reaction videos.
While some attributed the generational affront to age-related tech
disparities or the splaying of long-fomenting social divisions (e.g.,
Lorenz, 2019b), others questioned, glibly, “What is TikTok?” In an essay
published that same year, digital media researchers Milovan Savic and
Kath Albury (2019) provided a compelling explanation for the
bewilderment: older adults’ initial unfamiliarity with the platform was
largely – in their words – “by design.” After tracing its corporate
evolution from the Chinese start-up Musical.ly to the billion-dollar
acquisition by the Beijing-based tech company ByteDance, they
described how TikTok prevailed in capturing a global audience of pre-
teens by appealing foremost to the ideal of creativity. “From the
beginning, Musical.ly presented itself as a tool for creativity and play
rather than a social media platform,” they argued. Even the original
description of Musical.ly in the app store designated it “the world’s
largest creative platform” (Savic and Albury, 2019: para. 7; italics added
for emphasis). “This tactic,” Savic and Albury explained, “enabled
Musical.ly to alleviate parental concerns associated with children’s use
of social media.” In other words, the platform’s discursive positioning –
one that launted creative expression above all else – was a product of
strategic communication, engineered to evade parents’ weariness about
more mainstream social networking apps like Instagram and Snapchat.
By late 2020 – in the wake of record-breaking downloads, a noteworthy
spike in usage among those aged 18+, and a steady queue of media
coverage, some of it quite incriminatory (Parham, 2020) – TikTok’s so-
called “identity crisis” had passed (Kaye et al., 2021). The platform, it
seemed, had effectively branded itself as a forum for creative
expressions in the minutia of everyday life. Its popularity was in part
ascribed to its alleged “authenticity” – a designation that made it the

antidote to more performative, aspirational platforms. As reporter
Abrar Al-Heeti noted of TikTok’s comparative appeal in the platform
ecology, it furnishes “un iltered personality and humor not typically
found on sites like Facebook-owned Instagram” (2020: para. 5). Such
attraction owes much to the short-form video platform’s unique
infrastructural features, including its accessible, built-in editing tools,
the individually curated “For You” page that supplies an endless stream
of video content, and an algorithm that purports to subvert the
celebrity pecking order by privileging novel creators over well-known
personalities.
To be sure, TikTok is by no means the irst platform to tout itself as an
agent of creative self-expression. Rather, platform companies have a
well-documented history of hailing users in ways that foreground the
potential for artistic practice while glossing over how the value of such
user-creativity feeds back into their business models (Andrejevic, 2008;
Hoffmann et al., 2018; John, 2016). On YouTube, for example, cultural
producers are not labeled as artists, in luencers, or actors; they are,
rather unequivocally, creators. The patterned usage of this term is not
incidental, but instead re lects a slick move by YouTube execs. As
technology journalist Taylor Lorenz (2019a) contends, when YouTube
started to systematically deploy the language of creators, it elevated
this designation above other labels and, by 2017, “was so successful at
pushing the term creator that other platforms soon co-opted it.”
New creators, new forms of creativity?

For current and aspiring cultural producers, platforms provide
extensive opportunities for the creation, distribution, monetization, and
marketing of content. In addition to the creative potential supplied by
mainstream platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok/Douyin, and
Twitch, there are innumerable niche platforms in the creative space –
from Streamlabs (streaming) and Cameo (personalized videos), to
Parklu (in luencer marketing) and Clubhouse (audio). According to a
2020 venture capital report, the category of “creation” – fuzzily de ined
as it may be – ranks among the “fastest-growing type of small business”
(Yuan & Constine, 2020). Platform companies, for their part, tend to
peddle a model of creativity that differs from that of legacy media

industries in marked ways. Speci ically, these platforms tend to
emphasize grassroots or bottom-up forms of creativity, reviving a
perspective on the glori ied possibilities of self-expression that steered
early narratives about Myspace, Flickr, and LiveJournal (van Dijck,
2013: 35).1
While critics have sought to correct the excessive optimism that seemed
to reign in the aughts, platforms are still widely understood as conduits
for what digital culture scholar Jean Burgess (2007) termed
“vernacular creativity.” In contrast to industrially produced content,
vernacular creativity describes everyday practices of cultural
production that are enacted at the hands of ordinary people. This
concept helps explain why the personalities populating platforms are
often – if only super icially – presented as categorically distinct from
the “professionals” of legacy media industries. Compared with the
latter, digitally enabled creators project relatability and sustain an open
dialogue with their audiences, or rather their community (Abidin, 2018;
Baym, 2018; Christian, 2018). Then again, there is considerable cross-
pollination between “amateurs” and “professionals”: ilm and TV
celebrities enlist social media platforms for brand-building and fan
engagements, while famous YouTubers and Instagrammers have made
inroads into pop culture through TV appearances, magazine features,
and the like. Yet platform companies are keen to play up these
distinctions by hyping creator communities as “ordinary” and
“authentic”: they are, we’re assured, just like us. In the app store, TikTok
eschews appeals to professional expertise and wellorchestrated
production routines by noting that its “short-form videos are exciting,
spontaneous, and genuine.”
The concept of vernacular creativity offers a useful framework within
which to situate the profound growth of social media formats that defy
categorization into familiar genres like comedy, drama, or hybrid
designations such as crime drama or mockumentary (Burgess & Green,
2018; see also Fagerjord, 2010). YouTube’s kaleidoscopic offerings, in
addition to well-known categories like “DIY” (Do It Yourself) and live-
streaming games, include haul videos (where individuals display their
shopping “hauls” from various retailers), Autonomous Sensory
Meridian Response (ASMR) videos (where people use sound cues –

such as whispering or tapping – to try to elicit sensory experiences
from viewers), Mukbang (which involves the interactive consumption
of food), and a catchall genre called “Grossness.” While top-performing
videos in these groupings can ratchet up tens of millions of views, the
success of these subgenres can be attributed to the fact that they do not
appeal to an audience of “everyone.” Rather, they cater to granular-level
audience niches – more faddishly known as “taste communities”
(Lynch, 2018).
Of course, some of these taste communities map onto markers of social
identities, including gender, race, ethnicity, class, and ability. Take, for
instance, Black Twitter, a collective that is not only a vibrant site of
activism and counter-public participation; it also furnishes a
community long marginalized from the mainstream cultural industries
with a forum for creative expression (e.g., Florini, 2019; Sharma, 2013).
On YouTube, meanwhile, creators like Marques Brownlee (MKBHD)
challenge the narrowly de ined, overwhelmingly white culture of tech
industry reviews and content. According to digital studies theorist
André Brock, Jr., channels like MKBHD not only “address the perceived
lack of coverage of technology by, for, and about African Americans” but
they also help to challenge wider structures of “black exclusion from
the capitalist economies of social media” (2020: 57).
In the games industry, meanwhile, publishers and platform operators
alike have invoked the creativity ideal while providing amateur
developers with access to the means of game development. In the early
2000s, game studios developing so-called irst person shooter games
like Doom, Quake, and Battle ield made the “game engines” – the
software necessary to “run” a game – freely available to amateur
developers (Banks, 2013). Such openness at the hands of aspiring
amateurs or semi-professional teams resulted in thousands of
modi ications – dubbed “mods” – to the original themes, settings,
and/or modes of gameplay. As “proprietary extensions” of the core
games, these mods catered to thousands of niche communities – from
pirate a icionados to history buffs seeking to recreate their favorite
battle (Nieborg & van der Graaf, 2008). Nearly two decades later,
popular titles such as Minecraft and Roblox have taken the principle of
modding a few steps further with their easy provisions of in-game

creation; they have, consequently, become full- ledged platforms in
their own right.
Creativity counts
In both of the aforementioned cultural industries – social media and
games – metrics function as important, albeit imperfect, proxies for
creativity. Indeed, whereas social media creators vie to produce content
that will ratchet up quanti ied likes, favorites, and shares, the game
industry relies on data about sales igures and/or app downloads. But
these are by no means the only sites of cultural production being
recon igured by quanti ication imperatives. News producers, in
particular, have an especially fraught relationship with metrics.2 With
digital data offering quanti iable proxies for evaluating workers’ output,
many news organizations are struggling to balance journalistic ideals
with the directive to become what Caitlin Petre (2015) described as
“traf ic factories” (see also Belair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018; Fink &
Anderson, 2015). Perhaps not surprisingly, journalists initially tended
to treat such metric mania – one that both encourages and rewards
data-driven quanti ication and targeted advertising – with considerable
cynicism. Such skepticism points to a broader, longstanding tension in
the cultural industries – namely, that between creativity and commerce.
When exploring tensions such as this, we should be mindful of how
these frictions can shift – and even dissipate – over time. A case in point
is the changing perception of the strain between platform metrics and
journalistic creativity. As discussed in Chapter 4, early studies in the US
and the UK indeed underscored journalists’ initial reluctance to
integrate platform metrics into their daily work routines (MacGregor,
2007; Usher, 2013). More recent research, however, shows, a distinct
shift, with many journalists perceiving analytics in a more favorable
light, and not necessarily at odds with editorial autonomy and
creativity (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016; Hanusch, 2017). Of course, it is
important to acknowledge that substantial variation exists in how
creative tensions are experienced in particular cultural industry
sectors. For example, in public service media, which play a key role in
television and news production in most European countries, creative
autonomy and integrity are institutionally protected. This has

implications for how these media become active in a platform
environment. Research on the Dutch public service broadcaster shows
that it was precisely the tension between creative autonomy and
platform metrics that made the broadcaster attempt to establish “an
autonomous online public service domain,” independent from
commercial platforms (van Es & Poell, 2020: 7). Such a strategy of
“splendid isolation” is neither feasible nor desirable in the case of
commercial media companies.
With these caveats in mind, this chapter explores the evolution of the
long-fraught relationship between creativity and commerce as it takes
shape in platform-dependent cultural production. Since it would be
something of a fool’s errand to offer a singular de inition of such an
elusive term as “creativity,” we instead call attention to the discursive
sites in the cultural industries where debates about power and creative
practice circulate, including within discussions of creators and creative
content. Whereas the former is hitched to romantic ideas of creator
autonomy, the latter is, as discussed in Chapter 7, related to cultural
diversity, marked by a plurality of voices and/or products.3 Of course,
these ideals of creative personnel and creative content tend to operate
in tight lockstep and are together shaped by the in luence of various
actors and power relations.
What is more, the binary opposition we invoke between creativity and
commerce is in part arti icial or, at least, exaggerated. Accordingly, we
espouse an approach outlined by Keith Negus in the mid-1990s: rather
than think of creativity as antithetical to commerce, it is more
productive to understand the relationship as “a struggle over what is
creative, and what is to be commercial” (1995: 316). Our own
approach, similarly, acknowledges that creativity and commerce are co-
constructed through a broader system of creative lows and constraints.
Or, in terms of power, we examine how particular modes of creativity
and commerce are mutually produced and articulated within platform-
dependent cultural production.

Tensions
In the specter of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s (1944/2006)
polemical critique of the homogenized “culture industry,” there are
lingering concerns about the impact of external constraints on creative
practice. Often, such concerns point to the perverse power of
commercialism and, more pointedly, to the corrosive threats of
concentrated systems of corporate ownership (McAllister, 1996;
Meehan, 1991; Wasko et al., 1993). As political economist Ben
Bagdikian (1983: 151–2) cautioned four decades ago: “The media are
no longer neutral agents of the merchants but essential gears in the
machinery of corporate giantism.” While his critique foregrounded the
stakes of hyper-commercialized media content for Western ideals of
citizenship and democracy, commercial pressures also threaten the
creative autonomy of individual cultural producers.
In many respects, these worries are just as pressing today – if not more
so – than they were in the era of legacy media monopolies. As we
argued in Chapter 2, the markets for live-streaming, apps, podcasting,
and digital advertising, to name a few, are highly concentrated, with a
handful of platform companies aggregating disproportional pro its and
numbers of end-users. This is not to say that corporate concentration is
an inherent threat to creativity or cultural diversity. As many media
economists have noted, identifying a causal relation between
ownership and creativity is a dif icult, if not futile, exercise (Herbert et
al., 2020).
Instead, the economic asymmetries constituting platform markets are
re lected in the tightly controlled mechanisms they use to govern access
to platform infrastructures. By controlling access to the means of
distribution, platform companies have largely replaced legacy
gatekeepers such as physical retailers. What is more, platforms provide
what we detailed in Chapters 3 and 4 as “boundary resources,” which
allow them to control, secure, and standardize cultural creation. This
points to the infrastructural and governmental affordances of
platforms, which not only enable platform-based cultural production,

but also steer creative expression in accordance with the
technocommercial objectives of platforms.
Discussions of platforms and technological objectives often conjure up
wider cultural angst about the role of technologies in thwarting creative
expression. Since the late 2010s, such conversations, as we saw in the
opening of this chapter, have focused on media companies’ growing
reliance on data-driven analytics and the perils of data ication (Myers
West, 2018; van Dijck & Poell, 2013). Highlighting how data ication and
automation are making inroads into the creative process, a 2012 MIT
Technology Review essay offered:
It’s widely accepted that creativity can’t be copied by machines.
Reinforcing these assumptions are hundreds of books and studies
that have attempted to explain creativity as the product of
mysterious processes within the right side of the human brain.
Creativity, the thinking has been, proves just how different people
are from CPUs. But now we’re learning that for some creative
work, that simply isn’t true. Complex algorithms are moving into
creative ields – even those as nebulous as music A&R [artists and
repertoire] – and proving that in some of these pursuits, humans
can be displaced. (Steiner, 2012: para. 3)
As this quote makes clear, the production logics hitched to
platformization – including algorithmically generated predictions –
have a somewhat fraught relationship with traditional notions of
creativity. Is it, after all, possible to evaluate creativity? And, further,
who sets and evaluates the parameters of creativity within the cultural
industries? These questions bring to mind a longstanding debate about
the ontology of creativity: while some believe that creativity stems from
the insight or genius of the creator, others locate it more centrally in the
subjectivity of the receiver. Only the latter is knowable – albeit
super icially – through tools and technologies of audience
measurement (Baym, 2013). As noted in the preceding discussion of
analytics, new business models and infrastructural integration have
both accelerated and intensi ied the demand for indices of audience
attention.

To be clear, we are well acquainted with the perils of technological and
economically deterministic models and, like many, attribute Adorno
and Horkheimer’s unabashed pessimism to the cultural context within
which they were writing. Moreover, platforms have furnished a
staggering array of new, innovative creative practices at the level of
both creator and content. Exploring these practices, we will show that
the interaction between cultural producers and platforms generates
particular normative dimensions that guide cultural content and
expression. The following sections explore these norms through the
concepts of nichi ication, metri ication, branding, and authenticity,
which can be seen as productive power mechanisms. We will examine
the tensions between these mechanisms and legacy perspectives on
audiences, cultural content, and creative workers. Much like the wider
ield of cultural production, platform-based creative practices are
ambiguous, contested, and negotiated (Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Saha,
2018). Four tensions that structure discourses and practices of
creativity in platform-dependent cultural production stand out: (1)
mass versus niche, (2) quali ication versus quanti ication, (3) editorial
versus advertising, and (4) authenticity versus self-promotion. These
tensions do not denote a sharp break with past practices of cultural
production, but rather signal an intensi ication of long-term trends in
the cultural industries, as well as the manifestation of broader
economic and societal shifts.

Nichification
Despite the industrially constructed nature of the “mass audience”
(Turow, 1997), it is also something of a technological realism. That is,
the media systems of the early twentieth century were de ined in part
by their potential to reach large swaths of the population: newspapers
and, much later, broadcasts, covered issues deemed relevant to
widespread publics, while the highest circulation magazines were
de ined as “general interest.” It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that
the fragmentation of media outlets and coincident rise of market
segmentation practices fundamentally destabilized this notion of “the
mass” (Ettema & Whitney, 1994; Sender, 2005; Turow, 1997, 2008). At
that time, specialized cable channels began to upend the dominance of
the broadcast networks, while magazines targeted narrowly de ined
consumer segments. In more recent decades, data-driven targeting
activities and content customization have largely eroded concerted
attempts to sway mass audiences (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2013; Turow,
2011). Instead, platform-dependent cultural production is driven by
processes of nichi ication, de ined as the structuring of production and
consumption by narrowly de ined interest communities (see, e.g., Bolin,
2011; Couldry, 2009).
To understand the potential implications of nichi ication for creative
practice, it seems necessary to acknowledge the well-worn
disparagement of mass appeals within the cultural industries. Cultural
products targeting a large, heterogeneous audience – Hollywood
blockbusters, Top-40 hits, and iction bestsellers, to name a few – are
commonly thought to trade creative ingé nue for widespread success.
They are, in pejorative terms, lowest common denominator fare (Hirsch,
1969) – scoffed for their appeal to all-encompassing, crudely discerning
consumer tastes. The rationale supplied is often an economic one:
success begets success, and consumers will presumably lock toward
existing franchises, brands, series, sequels, spin-offs, and other textual
derivatives (Elberse, 2013). For cultural producers, the demand to
create products that will appeal to everyone (i.e., a “hit”) is thus
considered a constraint on the creative process. Products tailored to

niche tastes (the so-called “misses”), by contrast, are held in high
regard, considered a product of creative risk-taking.
It is in this vein that that early internet proponents marveled at the
internet’s capacity for customization: while Nicholas Negroponte
(1995) hailed the potential of a customized media diet with his idea of
“the daily me,” Chris Anderson (2006) suggested that internetenabled
economies would engender a new creative renaissance. To explain this,
Anderson, the founding editor of Wired, proposed a “long tail” model of
cultural markets amid digital distribution.4 In a pseudo-eulogy on the
blockbuster era of entertainment, Anderson proclaimed: “For too long
we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowestcommon denominator fare,
subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop.
Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are
actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching – a market
response to inef icient distribution” (2006: 16). To Anderson,
companies such as Amazon, Net lix, and Apple were disrupting
traditional media economies in ways that allowed them to bene it from
the “misses” just as much as from the “hits.” Anderson’s argument was
as much a technological one as an economic one: the availability of
cultural products was no longer constrained by physical storage
systems (i.e., store shelves or distribution warehouses); instead, digital
content encoded as 1s and 0s could lourish without material
constraints.
Even though Anderson’s faddish notion made intuitive sense and was
embraced by many tech acolytes and business executives, others –
including scholars with a background in media economics – pointed to
notable laws in his argument (Elberse, 2013; Napoli, 2016). For one,
the “hits” and “misses” of the cultural industries are not mutually
exclusive. On the contrary, as discussed in Chapter 2, because platform
markets are driven by network effects, hits are larger – or, in the words
of Anderson, more “tyrannical” than ever before. Moreover, some argue
that the recommendation systems of platforms merely amplify the
same hits, enabling a so-called “monoculture” to endure (Chayka,
2019). Challenging the myth of in inite choices and hyper-customized,
curated media diets, New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo (2019)
concluded: “Despite the barrage of choice, more of us are enjoying more

of the same songs, movies and TV shows. We are not nearly as siloed as
we tend to think we are.”
Such critiques notwithstanding, niche taste communities abound in
today’s platform-dependent era of cultural production. Economically
speaking, hits may be bigger than ever before, but, in sheer numbers,
access to every kind of digital content is virtually limitless. Take, for
instance, the earlier mentioned ASMR videos – a genre that has
amassed a loyal audience of viewers despite seeming rather “bizarre” to
those outside this subcultural community (Castillo, 2017). As one
creator told the press, “ASMR videos tend to have low production costs,
but have a massive replay-ability factor” (Castillo, 2017). In an
advertising-driven environment that favors popularity and frequent
engagement, its creators thus have the potential to monetize content
within a system that communication researcher Jessica Maddox (2020)
refers to as “transactional tingles.” As the representative for one ad-tech
company said of YouTube’s “weirdest, wildest niche communities”: “We
segment consumers into attitudinal, mindsetbased communities … That
works better than the default target demographic of boys, age 14 to 20”
(Grif ith, 2016). In other words, broad-ranging demographic segments
such as gender, age, and income are far less relevant in an era of hyper-
niche “taste communities” – an idea made all the more popular by
services like Net lix (Lotz, 2017).
In games, too, niche strategies and classi ications are supplanting the
conventional, demographic-based categorizations of audiences. As
advertising practitioner Daine Taylor (2019) wrote in an essay on the
limits of marketing to a singular group of gamers, demographic
groupings are crude at best. She explained that “even the casual-to-
hardcore spectrum is fairly useless in discerning distinct audiences,
because casual and hardcore gamers alike will have wildly different
individual habits, attitudes, and beliefs tied to their preferences in
genre, hardware, content creators, and beyond.” Research in game
studies con irms these observations by identifying the imprecise – and
even problematic – nature of the term “casual” that animates the
popular understanding of game and platform imaginaries (Chess &
Paul, 2019; Consalvo & Paul, 2019; Juul, 2010).

Nichi ication has important implications not only for creative practice,
but also for the news and informational products that circulate in the
digital public sphere. In some cases, hyper-localized coverage of civic
issues is considered a boon for community citizens; yet strategies of
niche customization have the inherent potential to create and/ or
exacerbate political siloes (Pariser, 2011). Here it seems worth noting
that, from the outset, reveries about in inite customization have been
accompanied by fears of social fragmentation, insulation, and group
polarization. In 2001, for instance, Cass Sunstein pointed to the dark
side of Negroponte’s earlier-mentioned “daily me,” maintaining that
“because the Internet makes it easier to ind like-minded individuals, it
can facilitate and strengthen fringe communities that have a common
ideology” (Sunstein, 2001: 58). In turn, this can lead to extremism and
balkanization (2001: 65–72).
Social divisions get rei ied outside the political domain too, particularly
as end-users are increasingly segmented into what Joseph Turow
describes as “data-driven niches with news and entertainment aimed
primarily at reinforcing their sense of selves” (2008: 148). While
Turow’s concerns about the nichi ication of the media and advertising
industries addressed the threat to a shared social fabric, the rise of
narrowcasting has important implications for representational identity
politics. According to media scholar Katherine Sender (2018), the rise
of big data and hyper-speci ic taste cultures undermines identity-based
categorizations that long guided the creation of media content. Once-
meaningful categories such as “the gay market” are rendered less
relevant in light of advertisers’ increased mechanisms for targeting
consumers on individual bases. To be clear, markers of social identity
abound in platform environments – from Black urban youth who
display markers of gang violence in drill music videos (Stuart, 2020) to
the creators of the clips populating Sapphic TikTok, which Emma Carey
(2020) describes as “a place where lesbian and bisexual femmes can
ask questions about sexuality and gender identity, support one another,
and post thirst comments.” Instead, these subcommunity genres must
be assessed alongside the individualized targeting facilitated by
data ication and algorithmic personalization.

Taken together, platform-dependent cultural industries are sites where
the longstanding trend of media fragmentation accelerates. Such
processes of nichi ication have a strong normative dimension, too: they
raise deep-rooted assumptions about frictions between mass audiences
and creativity. As data-driven systems make cultural content ever more
customized and ostensibly “predictive,” demographic categories get
swapped for narrowly de ined taste communities. While scholars have
begun to question the implications of a digital media system that
undermines identity-based categorization, much remains to be seen. In
particular, it seems crucial to consider how niche customization affects
corresponding sociopolitical identities, as well as creative practices that
have developed in relation to these categories.

Metrification
Cultural producers of various stripes – from independent authors to
network executives – have long relied upon numeric systems of
evaluation and feedback. Audience metrics – TV ratings, magazine sales,
or box of ice receipts, for instance – have been deployed to validate the
success of a cultural product, or justify its lack thereof. Popularity is by
no means a perfect proxy for creativity, but, within the cultural
industries, numbers help to render audience tastes legible, while also –
invoking a phrase from Gitlin’s (1983: 32) sociology of prime-time
television – helping to predict the unpredictable.
The 2010s saw a data-driven revolution in audience measurement, as
traditional evaluation tactics were supplanted by instantaneous,
automated regimes of visibility and feedback (Beer, 2016). As Nancy
Baym put it: “[A]cross Internet platforms, audience members
instantaneously and continuously look at Web sites, click like and play
buttons, follow, ‘friend,’ tweet and more, generating data on massive
scales in forms that can be counted and mined” (2013: para. 1). Such a
demand for quanti ication within the cultural industries signals the
pervasiveness of a metric logic, de ined as the proliferation of platform-
based measures in all aspects of cultural production and distribution. It
corresponds to what Gillespie (2014: 192) has called “algorithmic
logic” – an orientation that depends on the “proceduralized choices of a
machine, designed by human operators to automate some proxy of
human judgment or unearth patterns across collected social traces.”
However, given that we are concerned with the proliferation of metrics
beyond platform companies and with their take-up within the larger
cultural ield, we have opted to use a more encompassing framework.
Metric logic is not only driven by platforms; it also relies on creative
practices that actively integrate numeric benchmarks into production
and distribution processes (Meisner & Ledbetter, 2020). This logic is, in
other words, co-constructed by platforms and cultural producers, and
propelled by advertisers, data intermediaries, talent agencies, and
more.

What this means for individual cultural producers – from magazine
writers (Duffy, 2013) and news journalists (Petre, 2018) to freelance
creatives (Scolere, 2019) and game developers (Bulut, 2020) – is that
they face an incessant demand to produce works that will garner metric
visibility. As noted in the preceding chapter, the careers of social media
creators and in luencers are indelibly shaped by their compulsion to
“do well” – a pithy euphemism conveying analytical achievement
(Hund, 2019). Friends, followers, fans and the like operate as de facto
currency within the social media economy. While writing a book on
aspiring in luencers, one of us learned about the emotional toll this
fetishization of numbers can exact. As a social media entrepreneur
confessed: “You can drive yourself [senseless] paying attention to
numbers, and I have” (Duffy, 2017: 149). Although Instagram’s efforts
to “hide” likes have been billed to the public as an attempt to mitigate
the potential correlation between metrics and emotional health, this
move has done little to divert the quanti ication imperative that
structures in luencer culture. Or, as reporter Rebecca Jennings (2019)
concluded of “[the] platform that rewards follower counts above
literally all else”: “No matter how many new features or policies it
implements, Instagram won’t ever become a bastion of realness and
authenticity.”
A different strand of research explores the impact of this metric logic on
musicians and the music industry (Herbert et al., 2019; Morris, 2020;
Prey, 2016). Baym (2013, 2018), for instance, has examined how
changes in the digital environment – including the visibility of metrics –
have impacted the relationship between musicians and their fans.
Historically, she notes, it was rare for musicians to be able to directly
access their own record sales igures. As she explains, “if they
quanti ied audiences at all, they likely did it in terms of what venues
they could ill, fan club memberships and the number of people who
signed up for their (snail mail) mailing lists” (2013: sec. 3.2). Now, by
contrast, musicians are expected to rely on these igures in earnest.
Meanwhile, the emergence of so-called “data fans” (shù jù fě n, 数据粉)
in Asian entertainment markets testi ies to audiences’ ability to exert
in luence over metrics in the hope of shaping musicians’ success (Zhang
& Negus, 2020). Explaining how fans “act socially to strategically

manipulate, modify and intensify the data traf ic about idols,” Qian
Zhang and Keith Negus note how certain audience metric “experts”
emerge in a con iguration known as the data team: “a group of
dedicated, skilled fans with extensive knowledge of digital platforms,
and who understand the technical processes driving algorithms and
enabling loopholes. Team members collect data from various platforms
and prepare strategies for intervening, guiding other data fans who may
not have such technical knowledge” (2020: 505). Data fans are thus
quite re lexive about their agentive potential to shape the trajectories of
pop musicians as star personae. Some of their practices are not entirely
distinct from fan practices in the analogue era; buying an album,
attending a concert, and requesting radio plays from on-air DJs are all
well-established mechanisms of supporting musicians. But this
example also highlights the novelty of fan practices – including the
deployment of shared expertise to seemingly “game” the metric system.
In this way, data fan practices are not unlike those used by social media
creators seeking to understand the algorithmic vagaries that shape
platforms’ metric logic. Because platform companies limit access to
data, those hoping to wield control over algorithmic systems must
resort to “folk theories” (Bucher, 2017; DeVito, 2017) to try to make
sense of the largely concealed systems that govern the visibility of
cultural content. A whole cottage industry of data intermediaries has
sprung up that makes metrics legible and works hard to sustain the
idea that platform data can tame, predict, or help to better understand
audiences (Beer, 2018; Chan, 2019). Within the realm of social media
content creation, this includes self-anointed YouTube “experts” (Bishop,
2020), as well as members of in luencer engagement “pods” trying to
collectively in late the placement of content in Instagram feeds
(O’Meara, 2019; Petre et al., 2019; Cotter, 2019). What makes these
“folk theories” especially fraught is the precarious nature of algorithmic
updates, as well as the ickle whims of audience tastes which make any
effort to “predict the unpredictable” a formidable challenge (Duffy,
Pinch, et al., 2021).
Social media creators’ felt obligation to “do well” is not dissimilar to
that experienced by journalists who increasingly struggle to balance
their sense of quality news reporting with data ied benchmarks of

success (Anderson, 2011; Petre, 2018). As we noted earlier in the
chapter, initial early accounts of metric-driven newsrooms chronicled
how the uptake of services like Chartbeat beguiled editors while
striking panic in the minds of journalists. In recent years, however, this
tension between editorial and automated judgment has become less
acute (Christin & Petre, 2020). In 2018, for instance, Vox reporter
Jeffrey Chin (2018) described Chartbeat as “a persistent distraction on
virtually every editor’s screen, jittering and luttering with concurrents
and trending content”; at the same time, he conceded that “real-time
analytics aren’t entirely evil.”5 Despite a wider tendency among
journalists to, in Angele Christin and Caitlin Petre’s (2020) phrasing,
engage in relational work to “make peace with metrics,” some data-
driven efforts still generate blowback. In 2021, after the Daily Telegraph
(UK) announced they would be tying journalists’ pay to the popularity
of articles, a journalist told the Guardian: “It’s grotesque. Algorithmic
commissioning linked to pay is a crime against journalism. It will tip the
Telegraph down a clickbait plughole” (Bland, 2021).
The faith that many media executives place in platform metrics speaks
in part to their potential to foreground the demand of cultural products.
Companies like the Los Angeles-based start-up Cinelytic, for instance,
use data and arti icial intelligence to try to “predict” whether a certain
actor or plot is more likely to lead to successful box of ice igures
(Vincent, 2019). Of course, we should be careful not to overemphasize
the data-driven nature of platform-dependent creative practices. Based
on her interviews with Hollywood-based writers, communication
researcher Annemarie Navar-Gill re lects on how platforms and portals
strategically deploy data to different ends. She identi ies “a substantial
interpretive gap between the many metrics offered by the audience
data that streaming platforms have and the actions that they decide to
take because of them” (2020: 9). The notion that media companies base
their creative decisions solely on (big) data is, as Navar-Gill shows,
largely a product of popular lore.
While some cultural producers contest such metric mania on the basis
of its power to brandish explanations for success (i.e., a tendency to
infer quality from quantity), metrics are also treated with skepticism
because of their potential to be lawed and feigned. In the wake of

widespread concerns about automated fakery (i.e., fake followers) in
the national elections of the US and across Europe, popular media
outlets began to draw attention to the pervasiveness of “fakes,”
especially on Facebook (Howard et al., 2018). Concerns about fakery
circulate on Instagram, too, including with platforms’ own morally
in lected accusations of “gaming the algorithm” – more extensively
discussed in Chapter 4 (Cotter, 2019; Petre et al., 2019; Ziewitz, 2019).
As a technician working to develop audit tools for Instagram told the
BBC: “We found that 20–30% of in luencers will be arti icially in lating
their metrics in some way, shape or form, whether that be buying fake
followers, fake likes, comments or even story views” (Lane, 2019).
Spotify, for its part, has struggled to maintain a distinction between
optimizing playlists and using more nefarious tactics to entice listeners
(Morris, 2020). In lated metrics of a different kind can be found on
Douyin, where the supposed grassroots nature of user comments and
clips is called into question because of state-sanctioned efforts to
spread “positive energy”; unlike TikTok, Douyin has a dedicated section
in the app for videos that promote this top-down ideology (Chen et al.,
2020). What this example shows is that the constraints on creativity are
not only structured by commercial interests; political factions, too, can
exert powerful limitations on cultural producers’ creative expression.
As platform metrics have become central to key ields of cultural
production, they trigger anxieties over the perceived loss of creative
autonomy. Across industry segments, there have, consequently, been
calls to ward off what we call metric logic. To understand how this logic
nonetheless persists, it is important to recognize that various
stakeholders in the cultural industries have vested interests in these
metrics. Quanti iable benchmarks are not just the province of
platforms; they are embraced by media companies eager to predict
demand, used by cultural workers to track performance, and
manipulated by fans to enhance the visibility of their idols. Advertisers,
data intermediaries, and talent agencies further impel cultural
producers to integrate metrics into their daily operations. But while
metri ication is driven by a broad range of cultural industry actors,
platform metrics generate considerable skepticism about what exactly
they measure – and whether they are to be trusted. This combination of
angst, economic interests, and skepticism makes the tension between

metri ication and creativity acute, as well as highly variable across
sectors and contexts.

Branded Content
As many critics have noted, advertisers and other commercial entities
have sought to wield in luence over media industries in ways that are
both profound and problematic (Herman & McChesney, 1997; Wasko et
al., 1993). This in luence, moreover, seems to have intensi ied at
technological in lection points, most especially during the introduction
of “new” media technologies. During the last decades of the twentieth
century, technological innovations that ceded greater media control to
audiences – from the VCR to user-generated content – provoked
marketers to seek out bolder persuasive tactics (Turow, 1997). The
ever-more fragmented media landscape of the 1980s and 1990s thus
saw the rise of subtle, and even surreptitious, marketing tactics – from
product placement in movies to the type of “complementary” editorial
copy that remains a ixture of women’s magazines (Steinem, 2007). In
the mid-2000s, the longstanding practice of product placement was
swapped for the more lucrative practice of product integration, wherein
a product or brand was woven centrally into the script or plotline;
cross-media promotions, too, seemed to abound (La Ferle & Edwards,
2006; Lotz, 2014).
Advertisers’ patterned response to technological innovations provides
context for understanding the dual framing of platformization as both a
threat to and an opportunity for their commercial objectives. One
opportunity is the so-called “branded content” that runs rampant in
commercial platform environments (van Dijck et al., 2018; see also
Einstein, 2016). Facebook’s of icial de inition of branded content as
“creator or publisher’s content that features or is in luenced by a
business partner for an exchange of value” (Facebook, n.d.) belies the
fact that such promotional materials mimic the look and tone of non-
sponsored articles and imagery.
Much as in the legacy media environment, the demand for platform-
dependent cultural producers to accommodate commercial pressures is
considered a constraint on the creative process. Navigating this
constraint is especially fraught for news journalists, especially given the
longstanding professional obligation to keep editorial content distinct

from advertising – a mandate captured by the metaphor of the “wall of
separation between church and state.”6 Particularly in Western
democracies, journalism is cast as a “fourth estate” that privileges the
editorial independence of news workers. In the past, industry stalwarts
have sought to legitimize this norm by, for example, ensuring that news
and business teams were located in different parts of the facility. But
the challenging economic realities of the news business have led to a
situation where “the metaphorical wall has been effaced by [a] ‘rhetoric
of survival and industry crisis’” (Coddington, 2015: 78–9). In other
words, as news companies are forced to reckon with competition from
and pressures toward social media, they are much more willing to
accommodate advertisers (Cornia et al., 2020).
It is in this vein that the threat of so-called “native advertising”
(Einstein, 2016) looms large in contemporary news organizations.
According to a de inition supplied by the Columbia Journalism Review,
native ads “take on the appearance of real news stories, and are crafted
by people inside news publications who want to create and spread
commercial messages that don’t look like traditional advertisements
that overtly push product” (Sirrah, 2019). In addition to the pressures
felt by individual journalists enlisted for such “craft[ing],” such
emergent conditions call for – in the words of journalism scholar Matt
Carlson – “a new critical perspective on journalistic autonomy” (2015:
861). But while journalists’ efforts to stave off commercial pressures
follow a well-trodden path, the boundaries are less discernible in the
context of the social media creator economy, wherein advertising and
sponsorships are among the means to monetize one’s labor. And while
the individualized nature of their careers means less institutional
pressures to bracket off advertising from creative content, creator
communities understand that unabashed commercialism may annoy
their networked audiences. In their sweeping analysis of social media
entertainment, Stuart Cunningham and David Craig (2019: 154)
describe a “discursive logic that attempts to render brand relationships
subordinate to the dominant discourses of authenticity and
community.” In other words, creators feel compelled to prioritize their
projections of authenticity and intimacy over inancial opportunities –
lest they be accused of “selling out.”

The allure of in luencer marketing is, of course, predicated on the
notion that these personalities are sharing honest self-expression with
their audiences; therefore, their recommendations and product reviews
are presumably less tainted by commercial pressures (Abidin, 2018;
van Driel & Dumitrica, 2021). But while such discourses of
“authenticity” presumably help to move products, they also raise
considerable ethical questions for cultural producers and consumers
alike. Indeed, despite – or perhaps because of – the wider casting of
in luencer marketing as “the Wild West,” in luencers must abide by
ever-evolving regulatory protocols about advertising disclosures.
Crucially, in luencer rules and regulations vary across platforms as well
as across regional/geographic contexts. At the time of writing, Belgium,
Canada, the Netherlands, Peru, and the UK have regulatory guidelines
expressly aimed at in luencers (International Council for Advertising
Self-Regulation, 2020). The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority
released guidelines for in luencers in an eighteen-page document, with
the footer, “legal, decent, honest, and truthful” (Advertising Standards
Authority, 2020). The report details how in luencers who receive any
form of payment for content – which could include “monetary payment;
commission; a free loan of a product/ service; a free product/service
(whether requested or received out of the blue); or any other incentive”
– are legally required to disclose the promotion to readers as part of
consumer protection laws (2020: 5). Despite the variety of best
practices and more codi ied requirements for disclosures, enforcement
is dif icult. As Simon Owens (2019) wrote in a New York Magazine
exposition: “With the rise of ‘nano’ and ‘micro’ in luencers – social
media personalities who are able to sell promoted posts despite only
having a few thousand followers – this world has become too fractious
for any single government agency to monitor [it] effectively.” This
balancing act is rendered all the more challenging as platform
governance is constantly evolving, as discussed in Chapter 4.
More broadly, it seems that platform-dependency challenges creative
norms, in part by displacing regulatory mechanisms that provided
legacy cultural industries with careful guidance on promotional
relationships. In 2019, Spotify representatives announced that, for the
irst time, record companies (and other industry players) would be able
to pay to have their artists promoted by targeting fans within the

Spotify ecosystem via a “Brand New Music For You” pop-up ad (Ingham,
2019). As Spotify is as much in the business of streaming music as it is
in advertising (Prey, 2020), the platform has a clear incentive to pull
advertising back into the walls of its own platform.
In sum, cultural producers have long struggled with how to
accommodate the demands of commercial entities while retaining their
creative economy; platformization further complicates these tensions.
Adapting to the platform environment, advertisers have focused on
developing and sponsoring forms of content that are abidingly
conducive to advertising. In turn, this puts pressure on the traditional
separation between creative and commercial content. How cultural
producers respond to this pressure very much depends on the
particular industry segment. In journalism, it has led to fundamental
re lections and debates on how to protect the integrity of editorial
content, whereas other industry segments must balance commercial
demands with audience expectations and ever-evolving legal mandates.

Authenticity
In the previous section, we noted how social media creators and
in luencers routinely assure audiences of their sincerity or – to invoke
what is perhaps the resonant ideal of the contemporary moment – their
authenticity. Importantly, the authenticity ideal is by no means novel
within the cultural industries. The valuation of cultural products – from
music (Grazian, 2005) and magazines (Duffy, 2013) to talk shows
(Grindstaff, 2008) and reality programming (Holmes, 2004) has been
wrought by production conventions and creator appeals that seem to
run against the mainstream’s grain. Authenticity, in other words, is
imbued with both cultural merit and economic value.
And, so, following on from theorist Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2012) insight
on the productive – and necessary – ambivalence between authenticity
and promotional culture, this section examines how this tension
structures creative practice in platform environments. More speci ically,
we examine the diverse ways cultural producers project creative
authenticity given what we described in Chapter 5 as the unyielding
mandate to self-promote. A broader framework within which to situate
this tension is that between internal creative drivers and external
constraints. On the one hand, the institutional dynamics of platforms –
much like in traditional media contexts – seem to represent “an
impersonal industrial system that is ‘not true to’ genuine cultural
production, since it is governed by instrumental rationality rather than
by the creative energies of artists” (Frosh, 2001: 544). On the other,
cultural practices that dominate social media harness authenticity for
commercial ends, amounting to what Jefferson Pooley (2010) has aptly
described as processes of “calculated self-making.”
Such authentic self-promotion abounds in social media creator
communities. Instagram in luencers, for instance, use a common refrain
to reconcile authenticity and self-promotion, namely that they only
hype a product or service if they really love it. As one fashion creator
explained to us when discussing her social mediaborne career: “I don’t
want to just be another person out to make money; I just want to do it
’cause I truly enjoy it” (Duffy, 2017). In Cunningham and Craig’s earlier-

mentioned account of the authenticity axiom in social media
entertainment, the authors similarly note how creators routinely
de lect crass money-making claims; to this end, many creators ind
themselves in a culture where “any and all claims to authenticity are
tested continuously in a call-and-response rhetorical ield with the
community called into being by such claims” (2019: 154). Recent
examples abound of creators being “called out” for failing to project
themselves as authentic – to the point that some regularly engage in
modes of self-censorship (Duffy & Hund, 2019). As we have argued
elsewhere, ruthless “authenticity policing” is especially pronounced for
members of marginalized communities, wherein it can take the forms
of hate and harassment (Duffy & Hund, 2019). As research on
musicians (Baym, 2018), feminist cultural producers (Pruchniewska,
2018), and urban gang members pursing digital celebrity (Stuart,
2020) attest, authenticity is deeply imbricated with identity politics.
Put another way, constructions of authenticity vary markedly across
platform and cultural contexts. Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet’s analysis of
the algorithmic-based video platform Kuaishou highlights the diverse
ways in which creators convey “grassroots authenticity” to both
creative and economic ends:
From their pro ile photo to their username, everything that can
give end-users a sense of what the account is about needs to be
deliberately designed and optimized. To be creative through the
digital, one has to know what, how, and when to create, and for
whom. The constant posting and streaming also requires good
time management skills. (2019: 10)
The authors note that such pressures are often an upshot of the need to
build and maintain an “audience.” In the music industry, as Baym notes
in her discussion of relational labor, “the further musicians are from
commercial pressures, the more authentic they are seen to be” (2018:
172). Not only does Baym reaf irm what many scholars understand is
the constructedness of authenticity, but she notes how this value is
increasingly expressed through cultural producers’ intimate
expressions with audiences (2018: 173).

Compared with social media and music, constructions of authenticity
and, correspondingly, self-promotion in journalism seem markedly
different. Such divergence owes much to institutional histories that
privileged the lofty ideal of objectivity over subjective, personal
meaning-making (read: authentic). But in the wake of highly charged
political movements, such as global Black Lives Matter protests, the
stakes for journalists’ subjective assessments seem to have intensi ied.
As Andrew Heyward (2020) noted of this tension:
[There is a] sometimes tricky balancing act between traditional
journalistic standards and credibility on the one hand and the
natural instinct of up-and-coming journalists – often encouraged
by their bosses – to express deeply held moral convictions, re lect
their own life experiences, and connect with their viewers and
followers in ways that are – well, human.
Platforms are, evidently, key sources for these journalists to express
such humanness. Of course, authenticity is not tantamount to
effortlessness. As the preceding chapter made clear, providing
communication and intimate connection in the service of “authenticity”
requires time, energy, and labor.
Taken together, such accounts reveal how authenticity is a longheld
ideal in the cultural industries, but crucially one that sits in tension
with self-promotional injunctions. In platform-dependent cultural
production, the increased demand for authenticity has coincided with
the ever-more forceful push of commercial/promotional constraints.
Not only do cultural producers’ ability to reconcile these demands
differ across platforms and sectors, they also vary across creator
subjectivities. Going forward, it seems necessary to consider how the
creativity–commerce relationship is especially vexed for journalists – a
faction for whom authenticity is a relatively new imperative.

Conclusion
Notions of creativity lie at the heart of the media and cultural
industries. While some believe the intrinsic value of a cultural product
hinges on its originality, others see the creativity ideal as a fundamental
point of tension: is creativity (i.e., self-expression) an end in itself, or a
mere means (i.e., pro it) to an end? For individual cultural workers,
meanwhile, creativity may function in a way that McRobbie (2016)
describes as dispositif, “part of an ideological incitement to take
pleasure in work” (see also Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Accordingly, this
chapter has sought to examine the ways in which platformization is
impacting creative practice in the interrelated contexts of creators and
content. In lieu of a singular de inition of creativity, we note how it is
often constructed through its positioning to external constraints, most
especially economic (commerce/commercialism) and technological
(data ication/nichi ication) pressures.
In the context of creators, claims that the multiplicity of platforms is
engendering more diverse creator communities seem dif icult to refute.
Video-sharing platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Kuaishou, and Twitch
assure talented aspirants that they can potentially garner visibility –
without confronting the barriers to access that have long impeded
independent artists. In this capacity, some platform-based creator
communities pose a direct challenge to narrowly de ined genres of
cultural production that long de ined traditional media industries.
Perspectives on the role of platforms in nurturing convent diversity are
more ambivalent. Across the sprawling social media ecology, content
offerings seem boundless, defying as they do conventional generic
classi ications. But there is also evidence that what critics dub
“monoculture” – meaning homogenized, recombinant culture – is all the
more prevalent in an era of algorithmic systems (Chayka, 2019). In the
context of news, it seems important to consider the stakes when mass
publics are being supplanted by a much narrower notion of “public”
(Peters & Witschge, 2015).

Key to understanding the dynamism and diversity of creativity is to
consider it through the framework of new logics ampli ied by
platformization, including nichi ication, metric logic, branded content,
and authenticity. It is overly simplistic – and quite deterministic – to
suggest that platformization causes these pressures. To the contrary,
these forces have deep roots in the histories of the cultural industries.
However, the de ining elements of platformization – its customization,
its traceability, its incessant spaces for promotional content – intensify
these forces, shaping creative practices in patterned ways as they eke
out attention and hence data.

Notes
1. For instance, Henry Jenkins noted that a hallmark of what he dubbed
“convergence culture” was the “emergence of [a] new strategy of
media production and distribution” in “a moment when new digital
tools and new networks of distribution have expanded the power of
ordinary people to participate in their culture (2006: 145, 162;
emphasis added). Upbeat perspectives of this ilk celebrated a model
of cultural production no longer geographically bound to urban
centers or economically limited to skilled, industrial actors.
2. Although journalism is not considered as inherently creative as, say,
art or television or music, we follow arguments made by Mark Deuze
(2019) and Tamara Witschge and colleagues (2019), which show
how journalism operates as creative practice. As Deuze noted:
“Creativity plays a part in all aspects of the journalistic product cycle,
starting with story ideation and inspiration; creative approaches to
researching, gathering, selecting, and verifying information; the
production process, promoting, publishing, and distributing the
news, up to and including creative ways to engage the audience”
(2019: 130).
3. The notion of creator autonomy has been productively nuanced by
the work of Hesmondhalgh (2019) and McRobbie (2002).
4. The notion of the “long tail” is derived from a power law graph that
visualizes a short “head” of the bend, a downward curve that
contains a disproportionally small number of occurrences with a
high rank (e.g., sales, views, etc.), versus a long “tail” that captures a
large number of occurrences with declining rankings.
5. Chartbeat counts as “concurrents”: the total number of people on a
site at any given moment.
6. For instance, the consumer magazine industry’s advertising
guidelines are codi ied by a trade organization for magazine editors
(Duffy, 2013), while radio producers have been expected to adhere

to guidelines on the circulation of music, including the banning of so-
called “payola” practices, where money or gifts are exchanged for
favorable reviews.

7
Democracy

Introduction
Los Angeles-based cook and actress Tabitha Brown ascended the ranks
of internet celebrity in 2020. All it took to catapult her career was a
global pandemic. In March of that year, Brown uploaded her irst clips
of easy-to-cook vegan meals onto TikTok – reportedly at the coaxing of
her 18-year-old daughter. Whether it was her soothing voice, her
affable demeanor, or her humorous quips – “add as much as you want,
’cause that’s your business” – Brown’s resonance with TikTok
audiences in the early months of COVID-19 was unmistakable. Within
two months of joining the platform, she had racked up an astounding
3.1 million followers. A New York Times feature documenting Brown’s
rapid ascent to fame described the 41-year-old as an “unlikely TikTok
star” (Garcia, 2020). Not only did her age place her outside the typical
demographic of the young-skewing platform, but Brown seemed to defy
the structural barriers of the tech industry that far too often
disadvantage women of color (Benjamin, 2019; Christian et al., 2020;
Noble, 2018).
Indeed, at the same time that Brown was amassing an audience on
TikTok, the platform was mired in controversy for its treatment of
marginalized communities. In early 2020, critics observed that the
platform was making video recommendations on the basis of physical
characteristics in a person’s pro ile picture (Gassam, 2020). Then, in the
wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests that began in the US and
took on an urgency worldwide, reports surfaced that videos of the
demonstrations were being algorithmically concealed from the public.
Although the platform apologized, billing the controversy as a
“technical glitch,” its efforts to support creators of color were –
according to those who populate the site – mere lip service. This
backstory makes Brown’s rise to success all the more notable.
Her trajectory parallels the abrupt uptake of TikTok itself, which saw a
signi icant increase in app installations in the early months of COVID-
19’s spread. With countries across the globe on lockdown, internet
usage spiked as hundreds of millions of users became suddenly
dependent on platforms and apps for work, socializing, attending

classes, and entertaining themselves (Comunian & England 2020;
Eikhof 2020; Nieborg et al., 2020). In case there was any previous
doubt, the sudden onset of the pandemic and the subsequent spike in
platform usage underscored the centrality of platforms to public life
(Vlassis, 2021).
Notwithstanding the success stories of those who found sudden fame
on TikTok, the majority of cultural producers did not fare well during
the pandemic. As discussed in Chapter 5, work in the cultural industries
is notoriously precarious (Gill & Pratt, 2008), and platform labor is
especially so (Close & Wang, 2020). Just weeks into nationwide
lockdowns, countless media and cultural workers were furloughed or
ired, and freelance gigs were in short supply. Tabitha Brown’s sudden
fame may be aspirational, but it stands in stark contrast to the careers
of thousands of fashion and travel in luencers on TikTok, YouTube, and
Instagram, who saw their main sources of revenue – advertising and
paid sponsorships – dwindle away (Tsapovsky, 2020). The abrupt
collapse of the creator economy led Vanity Fair to ask: “Is this the end of
in luencing as we knew it?” (Bryant, 2020).
Information crisis
In 2020, the cultural sector was impacted not only by a
pandemicinduced economic crisis, but also by an informational one. As
early as February of that year, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-
General of the World Health Organization (WHO), cautioned: “We’re not
just ighting an epidemic; we’re ighting an infodemic. Fake news
spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as
dangerous”; grimly, he prognosticated: “We are headed down a dark
path that leads nowhere but division and disharmony” (see Naughton,
2020).
Put on high alert by election interference and the ongoing “fake news”
crises of the years leading up to the pandemic, platform companies
quickly responded to Ghebreyesus’s warning. Facebook, Twitter, and
Google began to add labels to contested COVID-19 information and
included links to authoritative news sources and public health
organizations (Newton, 2020b). Despite their best efforts,
disinformation – like the virus itself – spread at an astonishing clip.

Attempts to distribute veri ied information by public health
organizations were continuously countered by peddlers hyping
pseudoscienti ic cures across Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Meanwhile, fake testing kits circulated in the most unlikely of places,
including LinkedIn (Heilweil, 2020). Studying this dynamic, José van
Dijck and Donya Alinejad observe that “social media are deployed to
both undermine and enhance public trust in scienti ic expertise during
a health crisis” (2020: 8).
A prime illustration of how the creation and circulation of
disinformation are part and parcel of cultural production in a platform
environment is Plandemic. In May 2020, this twenty-six-minute
conspiracy video, featuring anti-vaccine activist Judy Mikovits,
generated considerable attention across the social media landscape. In
an interview with video producer Mikki Willis, Mikovits waged a series
of incendiary accusations, including that the coronavirus had been
“manipulated,” can be effectively treated with the malaria medicine
hydroxychloroquine, and is part of a secret plot by global elites to gain
political power (Funke, 2020). These claims were immediately refuted
by scienti ic evidence and, well, common sense. Plandemic did,
nevertheless, manage to capitalize on social media’s economy of
attention: before it was removed, it generated more than 8 million
views on YouTube and 1.8 million on Facebook (Newton, 2020a).
Ironically, to spur the circulation of their ideas, conspiracy theorists
employed tried-and-tested in luencer tactics, including “collabs” – on-
screen collaborations with other creators – with prominent YouTubers.
Mikovits, for example, appeared in an interview with Patrick Bet-David,
a inancial YouTuber with more than 2 million subscribers. In addition,
the video was widely shared by a handful of popular health and itness
in luencers, NFL players, and celebrities, such as the comedian Larry
the Cable Guy (Zadrozny & Collins, 2020). As Abby Ohlheiser (2020),
editor at MIT Technology Review, points out, “collabing with bigger,
respected names – or jumping on subculture drama – is a pretty
reliable method for any YouTuber to gain views and subscribers.” For
“disgraced doctor” Mikovits, the publicity certainly was pro itable: the
renewed attention to her antics catapulted her books to the top of

bestseller lists and, in so doing, provided them with a thin veneer of
legitimacy (Dickson, 2020a).
While the twin economic and informational crises were induced by the
pandemic, they are indicative of the more general precarity and
unpredictability of platform-based cultural production. As we have
seen throughout this book, becoming platform-dependent produces
new opportunities for creative expression in all its variations. Yet, at the
same time, we have observed how it further enhances the precarity of
cultural workers and increases various kinds of inequality. Both
dynamics have been on full display during the pandemic. As relatively
open platform markets and infrastructures lower the costs of cultural
production and provide access to large and heterogenous audiences, a
wider range of cultural producers – including those previously on the
fringes of the media landscape – may play a more central role in the
cultural industries. This allowed Tabitha Brown to become an “unlikely”
breakout star, but it also enabled Judy Mikovits and Mikki Willis to
spread disinformation far and wide. These dynamics will continue to
play out in the post-pandemic world as well.
In this chapter, we analyze how these dynamics of platformization
contest and af irm democratic practices. In the context of cultural
production, democratic practices refer to the participation of cultural
producers in public and civic life. As David Hesmondhalgh (2019)
emphasizes, cultural production is distinct from other forms of
production, such as manufacturing or agriculture, as it revolves around
the production of symbolic meaning (see also Neff, 2012). As such, it
enables democratic re lection and debate to lourish. Therefore, it
matters greatly who can participate in this meaning-making process in
the different phases of cultural production, under what conditions, and
what kind of meaning is produced.

Democratic ideals and tensions
Techno-utopian discourses have long emphasized the potential of
emerging media technologies to democratize cultural production (John,
2016; Karppi & Nieborg, 2020). Building on scholarly accounts that
productively challenge these discourses, the previous chapters have
complicated narratives of redistributed power lows on several fronts.
Indeed, while legacy media companies may lose some control over
markets and infrastructures, this does not necessarily translate into the
empowerment of individual creators, journalists, app developers,
musicians, and so on. Rather, platforms increasingly govern particular
segments of the cultural industries, as cultural producers align their
business models and integrate their infrastructures with those of
platforms. Moreover, we chronicled the new tensions that emerge in
practices of cultural labor and creativity, which exacerbated the
precarity of cultural work and put additional constraints on creative
autonomy. This chapter concludes this inquiry into cultural practices by
exploring how the attainment of democratic ideals – equality of access,
diversity, protection, and truthfulness – is complicated as platforms
become more central to cultural production.
Mass media – television, radio, newspapers, recorded music, cinema –
have historically maintained the balance between these different
democratic ideals through the creation and editorial curation of
information and entertainment. Decades of mass media critique make
clear, however, that precisely how various media industries maintain
this balance is far from unproblematic. Critics allege that mass media
organizations tend to privilege “authoritative” sources and content that
serve dominant political economic interests by reaf irming the status
quo. As the interests of these organizations are closely entwined with
those of advertisers and governments, mass media generally have a
conservative outlook (Bennett, 1996; McChesney, 2015; Wasko, 2013).
In their in luential monograph Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman
and Noam Chomsky went as far as equating US mass media to a
propaganda system, which carries out a “system-supportive” function
(2002: 381).

An important upshot of this critique is the observation that mass media
exclude those factions of society that threaten to upset the existing
balance of power. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, a range of
critical media researchers noted, for example, how social activists in the
US and Europe were systematically denounced as “deviant” or rendered
speechless by mass media (Becker, 1967; Hall et al., 2013; Young,
1981). While contemporary researchers have substantially quali ied
these early critical studies, demonstrating that marginal groups can –
under particular circumstances – become primary mass media sources,
the consensus remains that activists ind it dif icult to have their voices
heard in the mass media (Cottle, 2003; Deacon & Golding, 1994; Sakr
2007). This assessment pertains not only to activists, but also to
members of any marginalized community who – to use Larry Gross’s
(1991) phrasing – “ ind themselves outside of the mainstream.”
It is against the background of these mass media critiques that a group
of in luential new media theorists – from Howard Rheingold (2000)
and Henry Jenkins (2006) to Clay Shirky (2008) and Axel Bruns (2008)
– pinned their hopes for democratic expression on the internet and
eventually on digital platforms. From their perspective, the internet
was set to resolve the democratic problems that plagued cultural
production in the era of mass media. With the bene it of hindsight, it
would be tempting to say that these scholars were naive about the
power of technology to reshape broader social, cultural, and economic
inequalities. At the same time, their optimism was also a product of a
cultural moment in which it was not yet fully evident how the “social”
would leave its imprint on the internet. It should, however, be noted
that, when these authors were espousing the virtues of digital
technology, an alternative view of new media was emerging, from
critics attuned to the Web’s darker sides (Chun, 2006; Lovink, 2003;
Nakamura, 1995).
Today, it seems axiomatic to contend that internet connectivity and
digital platforms are not going to magically solve the democratic
de icits that characterize the mass-mediated public sphere. In many
cases and contexts, platforms seem to reproduce – or even intensify –
existing inequalities. It is worth asking why one would expect US-based
commercial platforms to deviate from the script. As scholars like Fred

Turner (2010) and Alice Marwick (2017) have made clear, the Silicon
Valley behemoths are led by a small cadre of incredibly privileged men,
who have been quite effective in mixing utopian ideals with libertarian
ideologies that promote “entrepreneurialism” and “meritocracy.”1
In light of these considerations, this chapter explores the frictions that
emerge when the sociocultural and political economic realities of
platform-dependent cultural production clash with the democratic
ideals historically associated with the cultural industries. In so doing,
we call attention to four particular ideals.
First, to enable democratic re lection and debate, cultural producers
need equal access to the means of creating and distributing content. For
economic, infrastructural, and legal reasons, such access has
historically been limited. Platforms, then, are said to challenge or
“disrupt” economic orthodoxies in any industry they enter. Such
orthodoxies include business models (i.e., how money is made), or,
more speci ic to the cultural industries, access to intermediaries,
production tools, and intellectual property regimes. Yet, as we have
observed in previous chapters, simply focusing on access to platform
resources (or not), misses the point. Instead, we should be equally
concerned with the conditions of access throughout the four key
moments of cultural production: creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization. During any or all of these phases, platforms may provide
cultural producers with new opportunities and affordances while
simultaneously enhancing inequalities among them.
Discussions of democratic practices must also account for diversity –
both of production cultures and of the content that gets circulated to
various publics. Despite decades of utopian Silicon Valley rhetoric,
platformization certainly does not inherently facilitate progressive
identity politics. To the contrary, the systemic discrimination of cultural
workers along intersectional lines – including gender, race, sexuality,
and class – remains a major issue in platform-dependent cultural
production (Christian et al., 2020; Close & Wang, 2020). Furthermore,
platform companies tend to veer toward conservatism when curating
and moderating cultural content (Gerrard & Thornham, 2020; Gillespie,
2018; Zolides, 2020). While such moves are often billed as efforts to
“protect” consumers, they can have insidious impacts on creator

communities and individual cultural producers. Over the past few years
alone, there have been numerous instances of platform companies
purposely hiding pro iles of sex workers, demonetizing LGBTQ content,
or allowing for the work of Black creators to be shamelessly
appropriated (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; McCluskey, 2020; Parham,
2020).
Third, cultural production can only be considered democratic if cultural
producers are protected from harm when creating, distributing,
marketing, and monetizing their content and services. While the safety
of cultural producers, especially in journalism, has always been a
concern, this issue has become even more explicit on platforms. The
relative openness of platform markets and infrastructures exposes
cultural producers to harassment and abuse (Vickery & Everbach,
2018; Lawson, 2018). Examining how these platforms try (and often
fail) to address this problem, the tensions between the ideals of safety
and freedom of expression come into sharp focus.
Lastly, cultural production is considered to be of key democratic
importance as it generates trustworthy content. We will discuss how
the widespread circulation of “disinformation” through platforms
reignites longstanding debates about the truthfulness of news and
information. Re lecting on the current information crisis, we call
attention to a marked shift in the production of truth, which has been
accelerated by platformization (Waisbord, 2018). Although there is
substantial variation in how this transformation unfolds around the
globe, it presents a universal challenge to cultural producers concerned
with the veracity of news and information.

Access
Given that platforms constitute relatively open markets and
infrastructures, they appear – super icially, at least – to resolve barriers
of access to the means of cultural production. As Clay Shirky pithily
summarized, with digital communication, “everyone is a media outlet”
(2008: 55). The idea that platforms allow everyone to become a cultural
producer is particularly resonant in narratives of the creator economy.
Drawing on Angela McRobbie’s (2016) exposition of the cultural
industries’ “creativity dispositif,” we note how today’s media hype the
myth of social media as inherently democratic, with “a path to [career]
success accessible to all” (Duffy & Wissinger, 2017: 4664). More
recently, Zoë Glatt (2021) has called attention to the “pervasive myth
extolled by industry insiders and in popular media representations,
[namely] that social media content creation is far more open and
egalitarian than more established cultural industries” (see also Bishop,
2020). But as these and other works make clear, the discourse of equal
access and opportunity effectively obfuscates the hierarchies and
inequalities in platform-based cultural production.
Of course, these structural inequalities are in part wrought by
institutional factors, including the degree of access to boundary
resources. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, this collection of APIs,
SDKs, tools, associated guidelines, and documentation affords cultural
producers the ability to integrate with platforms. In practice, however,
access to these resources is not granted evenly. Platform companies
give particular complementors – most prominently legacy media
companies – preferential access through partnership programs, badges,
and certi ications (Helmond et al., 2019).
In the case of YouTube partnerships, Robyn Caplan and Tarleton
Gillespie (2020) conceptualize the platform’s variegated system of
rewards as indicative of “tiered governance.” This concept emerged
from indings that Google, which owns YouTube, distinguishes among
different types of creators on the basis of popularity metrics. Through
its coveted “Partner Program,” Google allows those who generate high
levels of engagement to access its so-called “creator spaces” – physical

studios owned and operated by YouTube. Moreover, partners with more
than 100,000 subscribers are provided with a dedicated manager. The
Partner Program is, in turn, situated within YouTube’s larger
hierarchical system, which includes “whitelisted” legacy media
organizations that sell their own ads, “channels supported by third-
party multi-channel networks (MCNs),” and “Google preferred
channels” (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020: 6). The rewards bestowed on
members in this system reveal how platforms’ appeals to meritocracy
are perfunctory. While any creator can freely upload their videos to
YouTube, there are profound hierarchies in terms of their ability to
effectively monetize their content.
YouTube’s uneven provision of rewards makes sense, of course, in a
capitalist economy that grants speci ic cultural actors and institutions
preferential treatment as part of platforms’ business models. This
uneven system is characteristic of the game industry, too. The advent of
digital distribution in the early aughts promised to displace the
reigning titans of the game industry by enabling “indie” (small
independent) game studios to emerge. In theory, new generations of
game platforms, particularly mobile platforms, lowered the
infrastructural barriers to create and distribute content. While indie
development and publishing have become integral to the contemporary
game industry, exploratory economic research has found that the
“complementary assets” held by publishers – for example, marketing
skills, relationships with platform companies, and brand value – are
still tremendously relevant (Broekhuizen et al., 2013). Game publishers
with decades-long histories, the likes of Electronic Arts and Activision
Blizzard, are still among the most pro itable game companies in the
world. While we should be careful not to generalize these insights and
project them onto other cultural industry segments, these indings
signal the enduring relevance of legacy institutions and the importance
for cultural producers to keep cultivating relationships with platform
companies.
Whereas the history of the game industry sheds light on the dubious
promise of access in upending lows of power at the moment of
distribution, the transformation of the news industry allows us to see
how access to platform boundary resources impacts marketing and

monetization. Similar to the game industry, those news organizations
with access to resources – old and new – are much better positioned to
effectively negotiate platform curation. Likewise, well-capitalized irms
can invest in data-intensive production practices, giving them a major
strategic advantage in marketing their content. In this sense, platform-
based news production has been undergoing a process of
“industrialization” – one that leads not only to the unequal allocation of
monetization opportunities, but also to a disparity in the ability to
contribute to public conversations and civic life.
Such disparities reveal a trajectory of journalism that is quite divergent
from the democratic era of newsgathering and reporting that was
hyped at the turn of the century. Much like the wider technoutopianism
detailed above, the reigning perspective on internetenabled journalism
in the early aughts was auspicious (Atton, 2003; Rosen, 1999). So-called
“citizen” journalists, or “the people formerly known as the audience,”
were seen to have the potential to “employ the press tools they have in
their possession to inform one another” (Rosen, 2008). This mode of
news production was initially associated with blogs and alternative
news sites, such as Indymedia. Later, the focus of upbeat discourses of
democratized news shifted to social media, most prominently to
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Papacharissi, 2009; Wall, 2015). On
such platforms, the practices of citizen journalists were considered of
vital democratic importance – not only because they enhanced the
participatory character of the news-making process, but also because
these platforms could function as a corrective to professional,
institutionalized forms of journalism (Bruns, 2008; Gil De Zú ñ iga et al.,
2009; Kau hold et al., 2010).
Of course, in light of our previous observations about unequal access
and asymmetrical power relationships, these claims seem suspect, at
best. Research on coverage of the Arab Spring protests suggests, for
example, that despite the large amount of citizen journalism that
circulated on social media, mainstream news organizations continued
to dominate the news on these protests (Aday et al., 2013). What is
more, when news consumers were confronted with citizen content, it
was curated and shared by mainstream news organizations (Nanabhay
& Farmanfarmaian, 2011). Such examples highlight the continued

importance of legacy news institutions as gatekeepers (Wardle et al.,
2014). As journalism scholar Nikki Usher observes in this context: “The
patterns of distribution of Web traf ic, the spread of content across
social networks, and new social discovery companies enhance the
power of media organizations to control citizen content” (2017: 248).
Such perspectives closely dovetail with our assessment of shifts in
power relations in the cultural industry amid platformization:
platforms often fail to reallocate resources and hence control. Attaining
visibility on platforms requires substantial resources and connections –
something that citizen journalists tend to lack. News organizations are
not only furnished with built-in followings, they also have access to
dedicated data tools, such as Facebook’s CrowdTangle and Chartbeat’s
real-time analytics and optimization tools (Petre, 2015; van Dijck et al.,
2018). Thus, while platforms have boosted the production of news by
citizen journalists, the political economy of platformization makes it
unlikely that this opportunity translates into a widespread
democratization of news distribution.
Similarly, in entertainment-based cultural industries, only a limited
number of cultural producers reap the economic bene its of
platformenabled access. As David Hesmondhalgh observes in
responding to the nagging question of whether or not music streaming
is “bad for musicians”: “It may well be the case that more musicians
rather than fewer can now earn money from recorded music. But it
seems clear that the current system retains the striking inequalities and
generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors”
(2020: 18).
This assessment is akin to the one offered on other realms of cultural
production, wherein only a very limited number of producers can
command persistent public attention (Duffy, 2017; Glatt, 2021). But
while current research allows us to describe the contours of the
dynamic relationship between platforms and different types of cultural
producers, exactly how these relations are organized remains to be
seen. Researchers lack reliable economic data on the distribution of
revenue in particular cultural industry segments, including how this
varies across genres, regions, or platform subsidiaries. What is more,
researchers are only beginning to reckon with how different regimes of

platform visibility – governance frameworks and algorithmic curation –
impact economic opportunity and equality (e.g., Bishop, 2019; Caplan &
Gillespie, 2020). More detailed economic comparisons warrant
additional research.

Diversity
Whereas the preceding section addressed how platform-dependent
cultural production is structured by tensions related to democratic
notions of access, this section turns to questions of diversity. As we will
discuss, the two concepts are closely connected: access and
opportunities in platform-based cultural production appear to be
unequally distributed in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and
ethnicity. Before we turn to these issues, we irst need to consider the
notion of diversity.
As Philip Napoli (1999) makes clear, discussions of diversity in cultural
production tend to invoke the “marketplace of ideas” framework. This
framework is based on the assumption that a wellfunctioning
democracy relies on the widest possible distribution of content from a
broad array of sources. Following this argument, we can think of
diversity as a multilayered concept that includes “source diversity,”
“content diversity,” and “exposure diversity” (1999: 11). As our inquiry
focuses on the relationship between platforms and cultural producers,
the former two categories – source and content diversity – are of
particular relevance. Here, it is important to address how these ideas
relate to wider ideals of creator diversity within cultures of production.
Conceptualizations of source diversity in the mass media have tended to
focus on three levels, namely diversity in the (1) ownership of content,
(2) ownership of media outlets, and (3) workforce within media outlets
(Napoli, 1999). Translating this conceptual schema to the platform
environment immediately triggers complicated questions and critical
concerns. First, content ownership is a rather fraught issue in the
context of platforms. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, platform
companies, in a concerted effort to evade responsibility and pay for IP
licenses, do not claim ownership over the content shared by
complementors. They do, however, claim the right to distribute, use,
copy, modify, and translate such content (Gillespie, 2018). Similarly,
while US-based platform companies have long avoided the “media”
designation (Napoli & Caplan, 2017), in their role as aggregators, they
ultimately decide the scope and scale of institutional relationships in

the platform markets they operate. As such, they shape the content and
services that cultural producers provide – albeit more indirectly than
mass media. This suggests that, in platform ecosystems, ownership of
content is not necessarily an apt indicator of diversity.
This brings us to the ownership of media outlets. Although there may
be a wide array of media outlets operating in a platform market, the
platforms themselves are owned by only a handful of large companies.
In this regard, the big media conglomerates of the twentieth century,
critically examined by Robert McChesney (2015) and Eli Noam (2009),
among others, have primarily been complemented by even larger
platform companies. As these companies minutely govern how media
outlets can operate within their markets and integrate with their
infrastructures, the extreme concentration of platform ownership can
be seen as an important indicator of the lack of diversity in platform-
based cultural production. The same argument pertains to the diversity
of the workforce. Whereas the overall population of platform-
dependent cultural producers might be highly diverse, what ultimately
matters is how platform companies set the conditions under which
different types of producers can create, distribute, market, and
monetize their content and services. As extensively discussed in
Chapter 5, platform companies have a rather spotty track record in this
regard. They tend to further exacerbate structural inequalities in labor
relations in the cultural industries.
As writings on traditional media industries attest (e.g., Saha, 2018), an
issue closely related to the diversity of sources is the question of
content diversity. Napoli makes clear that “policies designed to enhance
source diversity are generally implemented under the assumption that
increased source diversity will increase content diversity” (1999: 14).
Content diversity has traditionally referred to multiplicities in (1)
program-type format, (2) ideas and viewpoints, and (3) demographics
(gender, race, age, class ethnicity, sexuality) of the people featured in
media content. While these forms of content diversity were already
dif icult to measure and regulate in mass media contexts, the sheer
scale of content circulating on platforms further complicates systematic
assessment.

What we have seen throughout this book, however, is that platform
markets are characterized by strong winner-takes-all dynamics. The
hits tend to be even bigger than the blockbuster movies and
charttopping hits that reigned during the mass media era. Such a reality
runs counter to popular discourses on multipluralism and progressive
identity politics in the platform economy, which suggest that
platformization facilitates the creation and distribution of diverse
content. Earlier, much-hyped predictions by WIRED editor-in-chief
Chris Anderson (2006) about the “long tail economy,” marveled at the
unlimited potential of digital distribution to offer diverse content and
services. More recently, Anderson’s work has been thoroughly
debunked (Elberse, 2013; Napoli, 2016). Platformization has far from
enabled this pluralist utopia. Although platforms do mark a
quantitative increase in diverse content and individual users do
consume more diverse offerings, collectively they continue to lock to a
few hits. It bears repeating that platform governance frameworks have
done little to truly break down these accumulative network effects
(Rietveld et al., 2020). This means that cultural producers on the
margins still have a hard time building a sustainable business and
gaining visibility. Therefore, from the perspective of democratic
practices, source and content diversity are deeply enmeshed.
Observations by Stuart Cunningham and David Craig about the social
media entertainment industry testify to the ambivalent nature of
diversity in platform contexts. On the one hand, the “activist
trajectories” of highly successful YouTubers – including those from the
Asian American and LGBTQ communities – signal important strides in
the advancement of progressive identity politics. LGBTQ creators, they
note, have publicly shared journeys that extend “beyond coming out
and show an increasingly overt political engagement with calls to
action in support of the LGBTQ community and other progressive
issues” (2019: 186). On the other hand, as Cunningham and Craig
explain, “activist-creators” are compelled to maintain a delicate balance
between their political allegiances and commercial considerations –
including the conditions of advertising sponsors (2019: 220).
Crucially, despite their consistent, tenacious claims of neutrality,
platform companies do maintain the power to either ensure or upset

the equilibrium between politics and capital. YouTube, for instance, has
reportedly stymied creator monetization efforts through various kinds
of algorithmic discrimination, such as demonetizing or delisting videos
that use terms like “transgender” (Alexander, 2019). In fact, in 2019 a
group of YouTubers issued a lawsuit against Google’s platform
subsidiary, alleging that YouTube uses “unlawful content regulation,
distribution, and monetization practices that stigmatize, restrict, block,
demonetize, and inancially harm the LGBT Plaintiffs and the greater
LGBT Community” (Ohlheiser, 2020). TikTok, meanwhile – a platform
that was once hailed as “the soul of the LGBTQ internet” – has also been
mired in accusations of discrimination. According to 2019 reports in
the Guardian, TikTok has banned “any content that could be seen as
positive to gay people or gay rights, down to same-sex couples holding
hands, even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal”
(Hern, 2019). The case of the LGBTQ community on YouTube and
TikTok illustrates how contemporary platforms have signi icant sway
over elevating or thwarting the voices of marginalized communities.
Nowhere is the suppression of content so explicit as in cases of
sexualized material. In the traditional cultural industries, the line
demarcating art from pornography has long been fraught, subjective as
it is, bound up with considerable disparity across cultural, religious,
and political contexts (Tarrant, 2016). But in recent years, platforms
have played an increasingly central role in shaping public discourse
about the acceptability of certain kinds of sexualized expressions
(Gillespie, 2018; Paasonen et. al, 2019). Accordingly, Instagram came
under ire in 2019, after announcing that it would demote content
deemed “sexually suggestive” – regardless of whether or not it was in
accordance with its terms of agreement (Cook, 2019). Research on
moderation of “sexual content” on Twitch demonstrates similar
patterns of conservativism (Ruberg, 2020; Zolides, 2020).
Another striking case to consider in terms of content diversity – or lack
thereof – is OnlyFans. After its launch in 2016, the subscription-based
platform grew quickly, especially because of pornographic content
created by sex workers. In 2020, however, when it was on the verge of
becoming a mainstream platform, various sex workers reported that
their accounts had been deactivated or even deleted for violating

OnlyFans user guidelines (Dickson, 2020b). Ambiguities like these open
the door for unconscious bias, if not outright discrimination, in guiding
what is deemed permissible. As one creator, whose Instagram account
focused on erotic art, confessed to HuffPost’s Jesselyn Cook (2019):
I just have to guess what I can and can’t post and hope for the best
… The rules are not black and white. They couldn’t be more vague.
How will [algorithms] be able to differentiate [between] a woman
in lingerie and a woman in a bikini at the beach? A itness model?
Where do they draw the line?
In other words, not only is sexualized content suppressed, it is also
fundamentally unclear what the precise criteria for suppression are.
The regulation of sexualized content is made all the more problematic
by variations in regional and ethnic norms. Describing platforms’ role
in delineating objectionable (NSFW) from acceptable (SFW) content as
a form of cultural boundary work, Susanna Paasonen, Kylie Jarrett, and
Ben Light remind us that “criteria regulating obscenity are, due to the
largest social media platforms’ country or origin, overwhelmingly
de ined according to community standards speci ic to US culture and
suited for the preferences of their various commercial partners in a
markedly conservative vein” (2019: 40). Compare this to the live-
streaming platform BigoLive, which is based in Singapore, but has a
sizeable presence in India; as such, we witness again how country-
speci ic standards for the regulation of (women’s) bodies clash. While
BigoLive’s senior executives purport to follow “local rules and norms”
by employing dozens of Indian content moderators in order to police
“vulgarity, porn, [and] indecent exposure,” this can be dif icult in
practice (Mandavia, 2019). What is more, some analysts noted that the
site’s treatment of women creators tended to be uneven. Speaking on
behalf of these creators, Apar Gupta, director at the Internet Freedom
Foundation, contended: “Consensual sexual expression should not be
penalised if there are enough safeguards to ensure safety of these
women. The regulations need to focus on consent, service conditions
and their strict enforcement” (Mandavia, 2019). Gupta’s comment not
only called attention to the challenge of platform-based enforcement of
norms in a global context, but also to the dif iculties of governance (see
Chapter 4).

What we can take away from these examples is that while platforms
proclaim their unwavering commitment to marginalized groups, they
continue to reinforce conservative values by deploying large-scale
systems of algorithmic curation and moderation. Clare Southerton and
colleagues point to the role of platforms in constructing normative
frameworks:
By seeking to af irm the possibility of these mechanisms being
corrected to adequately distinguish between sex and sexuality, the
responses from YouTube and Tumblr construct a queer subject
without desire as the “good” sexual citizen in their online
communities. Their content moderation policies attempt to
cultivate a belief in the possibility of a future of LGBTQ inclusion
that is predicated on separating sexuality from queer sexual
identity, such that queer can be acceptable “content” only if queer
bodies are not sexualized. (2020: 13)
Naturally, normative dimensions of citizenship are not limited to
members of the LGBTQ community; rather, platforms play a critical role
in enabling or inhibiting various expressions of diversity.
Platform companies – with their notoriously homogeneous work
cultures – are ill-equipped to navigate the intricacies of identity politics.
Guided by commercial interests and country speci ic norms, these
companies tend to veer to the conservative side of the equation in
curating and moderating cultural content. At the same time, cultural
producers have little recourse when their content has been removed or
made invisible though algorithms or other mechanisms of moderation.
As a result, the interplay between platforms and cultural producers
further complicates the quest for cultural diversity, both in terms of
sources and content.

Protection
As the preceding section makes clear, platforms can threaten
democratic practices of cultural production when they moderate
content too heavy-handedly – or, perhaps more aptly – too unevenly.
But excessive moderation is not the only problem; another is a relative
lack of moderation in particular contexts – especially those that leave
cultural producers vulnerable to networked hate and harassment. In a
democratic public sphere, cultural producers should be protected from
harm of various degrees and kinds. While this seems selfevident, it can
sit in tension with the ideal of free expression. Cultural producers,
political stakeholders, or anonymous end-users may wage their claim
to freedom of expression as a justi ication for critiquing, denigrating, or
threatening creators with whom they disagree.
Before discussing platforms’ roles in enabling or mitigating hate and
harassment, we need to acknowledge the historical vulnerability of
cultural producers. Indeed, creators of cultural content have long faced
risks borne by their professions: actors have been stalked; musicians
have been mobbed; and iction writers have been recipients of hate
mail – all, presumably, consequences of their careers in industries that
foreground symbolic or cultural expressions. But it is, above all,
journalists who have had to confront more direct threats to their
personal safety and wellness (Carlsson & Pö yhtä ri, 2017; Siapera,
2014). The risks that journalists across the globe face are, of course,
heightened amid turbulent political moments. A 2018 report by Article
19, a British Human Rights organization, found that the safety risk for
journalists reached a historical peak: “The price of protecting the right
to freedom of expression and information has become extremely high:
death, detention, and fear loom large for communicators and activists
across the globe, and the space for meaningful discussion and
communication is under siege” (Waterson, 2018). In the early months
of COVID-19, for instance, reports began to circulate of two Chinese
citizen journalists who went missing after speaking out about the
unfolding crisis in Wuhan. The New York Times suggested that the
disappearance could be linked to the Chinese government’s “sweeping

campaign to purge the public sphere of dissent, censoring news
reports, citizen journalists and shutting down news sites” (Herná ndez,
2020).
In platform-based cultural production, the direct line of communication
between cultural producers and their audiences adds an additional
layer of harm, namely the potential for networked hate, harassment,
and trolling (Phillips, 2015). Marginalized groups – including women,
people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community – are especially
vulnerable to targeted hate. In an assessment of the ways in which
online environments nurture antagonism, sociologist Sarah Sobieraj
(2018) describes “a steady drumbeat of sexism directed at many
women who participate in public discourse,” including “female
journalists, academics, political igures, activists, and bloggers, [who]
for example, often ind themselves targeted for abuse.” What is more,
she adds, “identity-based attacks have become so common that they
have been normalized as inevitable, something that ‘goes with the
territory’ if you are a woman participating in digital publics” (2018:
1701).
A recent survey among women and gender nonconforming journalists
in the US and Canada showed that the vast majority see online
harassment as the greatest threat to their profession (Westcott, 2019).
One of the key reasons why online harassment has dramatically
increased over recent years, as Silvio Waisbord (2020: 2) makes clear, is
“relative ease of public access to newsrooms coupled with the visibility
of journalists and news organizations in digital platforms.” Access and
visibility are promoted by news organizations, which expect journalists
to engage with audiences through social media (Chen, 2017; Coe et al.,
2014). Interviewing seventy- ive women journalists in Germany, India,
Taiwan, the UK, and the US, Gina Masullo Chen and colleagues (2020)
found that interviewees have developed a variety of strategies to deal
with abuse. These include “limiting what they post online, changing
what stories they report on, and using technological tools to prevent
people from posting offensive words on the journalists’ public social
media pages” (2020: 878; see also, Lewis et al., 2020). In combination,
these accounts are indicative of the vulnerability of journalists, and
cultural producers more broadly, in platform ecosystems.

Outside journalism, an especially well-known example of platform-
based harassment against women cultural producers is the Gamergate
controversy. The so-called “movement” began in 2014, when trolls
attacked prominent female game developers, journalists, and scholars
with a torrent of abuse, including threats of rape and death (Mortensen,
2018; Nieborg & Foxman, 2018). Drawing attention to the platform
environments that enabled Gamergate supporters to coalesce, Adrienne
Massanari (2017: 333) notes that Reddit, in particular, functioned “as
both a channel of coordination and harassment,” largely because of its
lack of central leadership. What is more, the platform’s culture of free
expression meant that “Reddit administrators [were] loathe to
intervene in any meaningful way in content disputes, citing Reddit’s
role as an impartial or ‘neutral’ platform for discussion” (2017: 339; see
also Reagle, 2013). Regardless of Reddit’s supposed neutrality,
journalists and academics, particularly women, faced the brunt of these
attacks (Chess & Shaw, 2015).
In other cases, platforms have intervened in networked expressions of
hate and harassment by banning or suspending accounts; the collective
impact of such regulation, though, is considered negligible. Take, for
instance, the targeted attack of Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones on
Twitter. In 2016, she became marked by trolls who bullied her with
racist and sexist Tweets; as a result, Jones confessed to fans she felt like
she was in “a personal hell” (Fisher & McBride, 2016). Although Twitter
eventually responded by banning the account of one of her key abusers,
many felt it was too little, too late. Examining this case, Caitlin Lawson
identi ies a number of interrelated “platform vulnerabilities” that were
foregrounded during the attack on Jones, including the inability of
social media platforms to combat harassment – “and the vulnerabilities
of women of color, as well as the links between the alt-right’s rise and
the mainstreaming of explicitly racist, misogynistic behaviors” (2018:
819). Given how prevalent online harassment has become since the
early 2010s, these vulnerabilities have a bearing on platform culture at
large by posing an insidious challenge to platforms as spaces for
democratic practices.
Creators on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other platform instances
have also fallen victim to online antagonism, particularly through a

logic where visibility entails vulnerability, especially for marginalized
groups. In recent years, reports of social media personalities facing
online hate and abuse from uninhibited, mostly anonymized audiences
have emerged at breakneck speed. Among the many targets of such
vitriol are trans creators on TikTok (Perrett, 2021); a Dubai-based
itness in luencer who was vili ied – and later arrested – after
encouraging her Instagram followers to defy the “stay at home” orders
issued by health experts amid the COVID pandemic (Arab News, 2020);
and a slew of US-based in luencers who were criticized for – as one
critic told the Guardian – “treating protests like Coachella” (Paul, K.,
2020). In the latter case, LA-based creator Kris Schatzel allegedly
received hundreds of death threats after uploading a photo of herself
among the Black Lives Matter protesters (Paul, K., 2020). Such
examples are by no means isolated incidents. Rather, they testify to the
sprawling call-out culture of the platform ecosystem – one where
cultural producers of various stripes are regularly confronted with hate,
harassment, and/or public shaming on and through platforms (Duffy,
Miltner, et al., 2021). Moreover, platforms furnish creators with very
few mechanisms for thwarting or evading harassers. Faced with such
patterned harassment, some cultural producers have been forced to
retreat from the cultural industries altogether.
Undoubtedly, the blanket assurance of “free expression” in platform-
dependent cultural production is complicated by its structural
unevenness, particularly when cultural practices become entangled
with social identity politics. As such, platforms often have to balance
competing actors’ claims to democratic ideals in order to stave off
public vitriol and protect the cultural producers who populate their
sites.

Truthfulness
Another threat to the utopian casting of platforms as spaces for
democracy is the proliferation of what has been differentially labeled
“fake news,” “disinformation,” or “network propaganda” (Benkler et al.,
2018; Shu et al., 2017; van Dijck et al., 2018). Across cultures and
contexts, a hotchpotch of conspiracy theorists, in luencers, extremist
news sites, fake news entrepreneurs, politicians, and states have used
social media to distribute intentional falsehoods – in some cases, to
great effect (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). This fabricated information – which
mimics news and often draws on existing popular beliefs – has been
employed to in luence elections and referenda, challenge public
institutions, and attack political opponents (Bennett & Livingston,
2018; Fletcher et al., 2018). While this information crisis exceeds the
boundaries of the cultural industries, platforms and different types of
cultural producers lie at its core. This section discusses how the
platformization of cultural production gives new urgency to
longstanding debates on the truthfulness of news and information. We
will see how the current information crisis plays out on multiple levels
at the same time. It concerns the exchange of (dis)information between
cultural producers and audiences, but it is embedded in the
relationships among states, platforms, and cultural producers.
As many scholars have observed, the notion of “fake news” is fraught.
For one, it suggests that there is something like “real,” “accurate,” or
“objective” news – an idea that has been irmly contested since at least
the late nineteenth century (Schudson & Anderson, 2008). What is
more, the term has been employed to wildly different ends. Quickly
after it became a trending term in the US, it was “occupied” by the
populist right, most prominently by President Trump, to dismiss critical
news reporting and mainstream media outlets (Benkler et al., 2018;
Boczkowski & Papacharissi, 2018). Meanwhile, when spouted by ill-
informed journalists, the term “fake news” tends to cast responsibility
for the current information crisis on incorrect knowledge or ignorant
audiences. As Silvio Waisbord (2018: 1868–70) argues, however, the
proliferation of disinformation is symptomatic of a structural shift,

namely, “the rise of epistemic democracy” and “the collapse of the old
news order.” Mass publics increasingly lack shared epistemologies – a
basic condition for the construction of shared truths. In such a
con iguration, truth is inherently disputed. While the collapse of the old
news order has been a long time in the making and is driven by a
complex combination of political, economic, and cultural developments,
it has certainly been pushed along – if not expedited – by
platformization. Providing relatively open markets and infrastructures,
platform companies allow cultural producers from a wide variety of
backgrounds and regions to develop competing media networks, which
circulate particular truth claims.
Given the fundamentally ideological nature of the information crisis,
most critical scholars prefer to use the concepts of “disinformation” and
“network propaganda,” which suggest intentionality and organization.2
From this perspective, the widespread circulation of such beliefs is not
just the result of ad hoc, organic user activity; rather, it is highly
concerted. Like the citizen journalists we pointed to earlier in this
chapter, content that is created and shared by conspiracy theorists,
in luencers, and far right news sites can only reach mass audiences
through platforms because the distribution of this content is embedded
within larger media ecosystems (Bounegru et al., 2018). As Alice
Marwick and Rebecca Lewis observe in their report on disinformation
in the US context:
A range of prominent online trolls, gamers, ideologues, and
conspiracy theorists hold outsized in luence among the other
actors and play a distinct role in media manipulation efforts. As
signi icant nodes in these networks, they hold the power to
amplify particular messages and make otherwise fringe beliefs get
mainstream coverage. (2017: 20)
This corresponds with the analysis by Yochai Benkler and colleagues
(2018), who explored information-sharing patterns through Twitter
and Facebook in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election. They
found that the platform-based proliferation of disinformation was
enabled by a tightly integrated right-wing media network, which not
only included radical right-wing sites but also broadcasting outlets,
chie ly Fox News.

The US is, however, by no means the only cultural geographic region
where disinformation lourishes; media systems around the globe
facilitate or inhabit the widespread circulation of disinformation. From
this perspective, China presents an interesting case. Instead of
constituting a hyper-partisan media network, it is the state that uses
platforms to actively spread disinformation. Examining the mechanisms
of dissemination, Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts (2017)
found that the Chinese government pays up to 2 million social media
commentators to systematically disseminate propaganda. Collectively,
these commentators produce hundreds of millions of social media
comments a year. Strikingly, the researchers observed that most of
them “are about cheerleading and positive discussions of valence issues
which, we infer, is a strategy designed to actively distract and redirect
public attention from ongoing criticism, other grievances, or collective
action” (2017: 485). In a followup publication, Roberts called this
“distraction propaganda,” which “competes with information that
authoritarian governments would like to hide by diluting it and
distracting from it” (2018: 6).
These tactics can be observed in both online and traditional news
outlets in China and correspond with broader Chinese social media
strategies. Examining the short video-sharing app Douyin, researchers
Xu Chen, Bondy Kaye, and Jing Zeng (2021) observe how the
considerations of state actors shape both the production and
distribution of content. Through a study of the “Positive Energy
trending section” on Douyin, they demonstrate that central to the
governance of Chinese social media entertainment is the discourse of
“positive energy,” which has been promoted as a mainstream political
ideology since 2012. Though framed as a “grassroots” form of
patriotism, such “positive” content is directed by the state, in
collaboration with platform companies. Thus, in the case of China we
can see how the creation and distribution of cultural content is
fundamentally intertwined with state propaganda.
This state-platform nexus presents a formidable challenge – not only
for Chinese journalists concerned with verifying news and information,
but also for creators and in luencers active on the very same platforms.
The challenge is heightened during times of crisis, such as the

pandemic, or instances of collective action, when government agencies
are more likely to inhabit the free low of information. Yet, some
journalists have tried to push back against these powerful actors. As
Zeng and colleagues (2019) note, citizen journalism has emerged as a
critical form of platform-based cultural production in China. Through a
case study of the online communication that emerged in the wake of the
2015 Tianjin explosions, in which 173 people were killed, the authors
show how Weibo users not only criticized of icial accounts of the blasts,
but “also collectively curated information to fact-check rumour-
debunking messages from state media and the police” (2019: 29).
While emphasizing the signi icance of such forms of citizen journalism,
Zeng et al. (2019) maintain that it is often dif icult to distinguish it from
professional journalism. Building on earlier research by Xiao Qiang
(2011), the authors point out that many professional Chinese
journalists are compelled to lead double lives: of icially working for
state media, while simultaneously collecting, verifying, and
anonymously distributing information through social media (Zeng et al.
2019: 30). Although such efforts are impressive and courageous, it is
clear that these investigative journalists are ighting an uphill battle.
Confronted with an online “information overload” of “dis- and mis-
information, fake pro iles and sources, and massive amounts of opinion
journalism that is presented as professional journalism,” their struggle
with a united state-platform front is a Sisyphean task (Xu & Gutsche,
2020: 2).
While it is particularly challenging for critical Chinese journalists to
verify news and information, the rise of platforms has complicated this
process around the globe. On the one hand, concerns over the
truthfulness of news and information have triggered the development
of a wide range of fact-checking initiatives. Not surprisingly, these
initiatives have been embraced by platform companies (Graves, 2016).
In a patterned disavowal of their role as arbiters of public discourse,
platforms have tried to outsource the veri ication of content. On the
other hand, the current information crisis shifts the very position of
legacy news organizations within the public sphere. The latter, which
continue to play a key role in the production, legitimization, and
veri ication of content, are no longer the sole gatekeepers of public
discourse, controlling what can and cannot appear in public, and what

is and isn’t news. In epistemic democracy, legacy media become one of
a variety of players in the truth-making process. This led Steen
Steensen to conclude that journalism is pushed “towards an epistemic
reorientation beyond the right/wrong and true/false dichotomies”
(2019: 185). Such a reorientation requires, according to him, “source
criticism as attitude and practice” in journalism, encouraging
journalists not only to verify news and information, but also to make
the political and cultural inclinations and tendencies of news sources
transparent. In other words, journalism is “pushed towards displaying
uncertainty” (2019: 188).

Conclusion
In the aughts, platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo
were ushered in with a wave of enthusiasm. With their relatively open
markets and infrastructures, they promised to democratize cultural
production by allowing a wide variety of producers at the margins of
the cultural industries to create, distribute, market, and monetize their
content and services. A more detailed and critical assessment, however,
reveals the frictions between the economic and cultural realities of
platform-dependent cultural production and the democratic ideals that
historically have been associated with the cultural industries. This
chapter demonstrates that the connection between platforms and
democracy is shot through with ambivalence.
First, we observed that the conditions under which different types of
cultural producers can work on and through platforms are highly
uneven. Compared with individual cultural producers, large media
companies are often granted more privileged access to platform
boundary resources and, as such, they are able to more effectively
employ these resources in their operations. Consequently, citizen
journalists, social media creators, indie game developers, and the like
tend to have a hard time gaining public visibility through platforms. The
differences in access and opportunities in platform-dependent cultural
production are especially troublesome from a democratic perspective
because these differences map onto historical inequalities in terms of
gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. Although there are promising
examples of cultural producers from marginalized communities that
are able to use platforms for emancipatory purposes, we would argue
that these are the exceptions to the rule. Guided by advertiser interests,
platform companies generally have a conservative approach to curating
and moderating cultural content, limiting the space for progressive
identity politics.
Second, we have seen that the relative openness of platform markets
and infrastructures facilitates the proliferation of hate speech,
harassment, and disinformation. This becomes an endemic problem
when the circulation of this type of content is facilitated by institutional

actors, including media organizations and states. While there is
widespread consensus that these problems urgently need to be
addressed, this chapter also showed that there are no easy or
straightforward solutions. As we have seen in Chapter 4, platforms have
shied away from an editorial role, touting instead their supposed
“neutrality.” And when platform companies do moderate content –
moves often prompted by commercial interests – they are inevitably
accused of censorship by key stakeholders. Faced with platforms’
inability to adequately govern public communication, cultural
producers are developing new strategies to protect their safety and
contribute to the evaluation of news and information. While cultural
producers might ind ways to adjust to the platform environment, the
current state of platform-based cultural production is clearly a far cry
from the democratic utopia that was originally envisioned.

Notes
1. In more recent instances in which in luential ex-employees and
investors do engage in public pushback, they tend to point at the
individual responsibilities of end-users, rather than addressing the
institutional asymmetries at the heart of platform economies
(Karppi & Nieborg, 2020).
2. Disinformation refers to “intentional falsehoods spread as news
stories or simulated documentary formats to advance political goals”
(Bennett & Livingston, 2018: 124). It can be distinguished from
“misinformation,” which is understood as the “unintentional spread
of inaccurate information without malicious intent” (Weedon et al.,
2017: 5). Benkler et al. (2018: 24) describe network propaganda as
“the ways in which the architecture of a media ecosystem makes it
more or less susceptible to disseminating these kinds of
manipulations and lies.”

8
Conclusion: Power
While platforms have been making inroads into the cultural industries
for more than a decade, the global pandemic seemed to both intensify
and accelerate the role of companies like Facebook, Amazon, and
ByteDance in recon iguring cultural production. The upward trajectory
of these platform companies has been swift and – at times – quite
dramatic. By various markers – revenue, pro it, market share, active
users, and users’ average time spent – their power is staggering.
Yet the corporate mouthpieces of these platforms offer a consistent
refrain to downplay their impact: platforms, they assure us, are mere
instruments of their users. Indeed, when defending their accumulated
wealth to regulatory bodies, platform executives call attention to the
ierce competition structuring the broader platform ecosystem
(Hindman, 2018). Amid such a hyper-saturated marketplace, they
reason, other platforms vying for the attention of end-users are “just
one click away.” This patterned invocation of market competition is true
to a certain extent: tens of thousands of start-up companies have
launched apps and platforms that many of us have never heard of – and
probably never will. Take Quibi, the short-form video streaming app
that, in 2020, despite billion-dollar investments, was forced to close
down after failing to secure enough customers (Lewis, 2020). But
barring dramatic government interventions, it seems hard to imagine
that the reign of Google, Amazon, or Facebook will end any time soon.
What motivated us to write this book is to move beyond quantitative
indicators of platform dominance – such as revenue and pro it – to offer
a broader perspective on the lows and relations of power in platform
environments. Already, scholars have productively probed these
interrelations in the contexts of the platform society (van Dijck et al.,
2018), platform cultures (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Tiidenberg &
Nagel, 2020), platform economics (Couldry & Mejı́as, 2019; Srnicek,
2017; Steinberg, 2019), and platform governance (Gillespie, 2018);
others, meanwhile, have traced the histories of individual platform
companies such as Facebook (Bucher, 2021; Vaidhyanathan, 2018) and

Twitter (Burgess & Baym, 2020), or individual platform instances, such
as Instagram (Leaver et al., 2020), YouTube (Burgess & Green, 2018),
and WeChat (Chen et al., 2018). These contributions tend to focus on
either the power of platform companies or, alternatively, the activities
of end-users. In so doing, they consider important critical questions
that range from “digital dominance” (Moore & Tambini, 2018) to
algorithmic bias and discrimination (Benjamin, 2019; Eubanks, 2018;
Noble, 2018).
Our goal has been to complement these investigations by exploring the
institutional positioning and cultural practices of key actors in many
advanced platform markets: cultural producers. In the context of this
book, we de ined cultural producers as the broad range of actors and
organizations engaged in the creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization of symbolic products. What we have called platform
subsidiaries – e.g., ByteDance’s TikTok, Facebook’s Instagram, and
Google’s YouTube – derive much of their economic value and cultural
relevance from the content and services provided by creative
entrepreneurs and media companies. While there is considerable
crossover between cultural producers and end-users, our focus on the
former is in part an attempt to draw attention to their unique
institutional position. Unlike end-users, platform-dependent cultural
producers must remain carefully attuned to platforms’ evolving
business models, tool documentations, interface standards, guidelines,
and moderation regimes; after all, their livelihoods depend on it.
To explore the relations between platforms and cultural producers, we
have taken a decidedly interdisciplinary approach, leaning on writings
from business studies, critical political economy, software studies,
media industry studies, and cultural studies. While scholarship in these
traditions has produced a wealth of insights into the changing relations
between platforms and cultural producers, they have scarcely been
brought into productive dialogue. This book responds to this paucity by
offering a holistic approach that shows how institutional changes in
markets, infrastructures, and governance are fundamentally entangled
with shifts in cultural practices of labor, creativity, and democracy.
What this approach allows us to do is, irst, examine how the relations
between platforms and cultural producers are formed and maintained

within existing markets, infrastructures, governance frameworks,
cultures, and industries. It is not a given that platformization will
radically alter prevailing power relations within the cultural industries.
Instead, we are witnessing the intensi ication of long-term trends,
problems, and tensions in the cultural industries that – for the most
part – predate the rise of Facebook, Tencent, and Amazon. Hence, one
should avoid starting one’s platform analysis at “year zero,”
disregarding the long-term trends and developments in the cultural
industries that precede the rise of platforms.1 Mindful of the trap of
platform essentialism, the book has examined the changes as well as the
continuities in the institutional relations and emerging practices of
Second, we have examined the relations between platforms and cultural
producers across cultural industry segments – with particular attention
to games, news, music, and social media – segments typically studied in
isolation. We have demonstrated, moreover, how similar economic
mechanisms, infrastructural relations of dependency, and governance
frameworks set out by platform companies are negotiated, adopted, or
rejected in different ways, across different industry segments. At the
same time, the tensions between platforms and cultural producers in
terms of labor, creativity, and democracy are markedly consistent.
Third, we have simultaneously observed vital differences between
industry segments and geographic regions in how relations between
platforms and cultural producers are articulated. These differences are
bound up with the institutional histories of speci ic industries and
cultural contexts; however, they are also wrought by the particular
strategies of cultural producers. As platformization is not only a top-
down process, but also shaped and driven by the practices of cultural
producers, it takes a wide variety of forms.
In this concluding chapter, we re lect on the main takeaways from our
analysis and sketch an agenda for future research on platforms and
cultural production. We start by discussing how power shifts from an
institutional perspective, when cultural creation, distribution,
marketing, and monetization are organized through platforms. We then
focus, from the perspective of cultural practices, on how power
circulates in the interactions among platforms, cultural producers, and

other complementors. We conclude by exploring the variations in
platformization within industrial and cultural contexts.

Institutional Power
In terms of power, one of the key questions we have grappled with is
whether the platformization of cultural production involves either the
centralization or the decentralization of capital and control. As a
rejoinder, we invoke David Hesmondhalgh’s call “to recognize
contradiction as a part of a critical analysis of cultural production under
capitalism” (2019: 433). In other words, processes of centralization and
decentralization are often concurrent. Offering an institutional
perspective on platformization, we have shown how power shifts in
seemingly contradictory ways across categories of cultural producers
within industry segments, as well as between cultural producers and
platforms.
This institutional perspective is built on the back of business studies,
software and platform studies, and critical political economy.
Theorizing platforms as “multisided markets,” business studies – that
is, strategic management, orthodox economics, and information
systems research – provides us with a versatile set of concepts with
which to analyze institutional relationships in platform ecosystems
(Constantinides et al., 2018; Rietveld & Schilling, 2020; Tilson et al.,
2010). In turn, work in software and (critical) platform studies has
deepened our understanding of platform infrastructures and the
uneven relations that develop around these networks, systems,
gateways, and tools (Helmond et al., 2019; Plantin et al., 2018; van Dijck
et al., 2018). Of particular bene it to our institutional analysis has been
research at the intersection of business and platform studies, which
focuses on data infrastructures and platform boundary resources
(Gawer, 2020; Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013). Finally, drawing on
critical political economic scholarship ensured that we remain
cognizant that institutional relationships are ultimately social
arrangements (Mansell & Steinmueller, 2020; Mosco, 2009; Srnicek,
2017). These arrangements – between platforms, cultural producers,
and other complementors – tend to be unequal and asymmetrical –
much as they have always been. The novelty of our approach thus lies in
combining the theories and concepts from these traditions, in order to

retrace how shifts in economic, infrastructural, and governmental
power mutually articulate each other in the platformization of cultural
production.
Because platform power is relational, our approach considers it as
inherently dynamic. Multisided markets exist and grow by virtue of
platform companies’ ability to aggregate both end-users and cultural
producers. Failing to attract and retain end-users, cultural producers,
and other complementors would spell the inevitable demise of any
platform company. Therefore, platforms – or, more precisely, their
business models and boundary resources – constantly oscillate
between being more open and being more closed to cultural producers.
Business scholars Panos Constantinides and colleagues call this the
“paradoxical tension” between “the generative and democratizing force
of digital platforms and the monopolistic and controlling force of digital
infrastructures” (2018: 389).
Openness
Let us start with the “generative force” of platforms. Early discourses on
platforms were all about their perceived openness. In recent years, this
aspect has been overshadowed in both public rhetoric and academic
research by the attention paid to their constraints. The ballooning
market capitalization of the leading platform companies and their
failure to adequately govern their users has recast attention toward
their controlling side. Yet to understand how platforms have become
such central actors in various segments of the cultural industries, it is
important to recognize their ability to attract and retain many millions
of cultural producers.
For one, as discussed in Chapter 2, platforms constitute relatively open
markets. Platform companies, or, to be more precise, their subsidiaries,
enable cultural producers to distribute and market content and
services to end-users. The end-user population comprises a platform
market’s “demand-side,” which, in the case of major platform
companies, tends to be global in scope and vast in scale. This shift –
which amounts to the lowering of the economic and infrastructural
barriers for cultural producers to supply global audiences with cultural
goods – is historically unprecedented. Cultural producers of all stripes –

from media companies (e.g., newspaper publishers, game studios, and
record labels) to individual creators – have bene ited from these lower
barriers to entry. That said, joining a platform market involves certain
trade-offs for cultural producers, as these markets display “monopoly
tendencies” (Srnicek, 2017: 48). The high market shares of YouTube,
Instagram, WeChat, and others are buffers against uncertainty that
allow them to crowd out alternatives or competitors. An upshot is that
cultural producers seeking to distribute content to end-users are
increasingly compelled to align their business models with dominant
platform subsidiaries.
The economic opportunities furnished by platforms are closely
connected with the infrastructural openness of platform boundaries. As
discussed in Chapter 3, to facilitate infrastructural access, platform
companies provide “boundary resources” (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson,
2013), which allow cultural producers to build on the economic and
material affordances of platforms in creating, distributing, marketing,
and monetizing content. Boundary resources enable platforms to
aggregate institutional connections by allowing cultural producers to
organize key stages of cultural production through platforms, cutting
the costs of running their own infrastructures. As platforms grow,
platform infrastructures tend to become more comprehensive,
providing an attractive value proposition to cultural producers when
they decide to integrate their own systems, networks, and tools with
those of platforms.
On the surface, the combination of open platform markets and
infrastructures appears to facilitate a decentralization of power within
industry segments: individual producers – creators, journalists, game
developers, and musicians – can circulate their content without having
to rely on the distribution capacity of legacy media companies. Whether
such a transfer of power effectively takes place, however, is debatable.
Recall from Chapter 7 how platform companies’ upbeat assurances of
“democratization” gloss over new costs, constraints, and uncertainties.
The economic realities of cultural production still apply in aggregate.
That is, cultural producers of any size still face blockbuster dynamics
that reward small clusters of winners or stars. These dynamics help
explain the staying power of legacy media companies, particularly

transnational media conglomerates such as The Walt Disney Company,
Bertelsmann, or Vivendi. Their ability to leverage existing assets (e.g.,
capital, ongoing institutional relationships, brands, and the skills of
individual workers) provides them with a signi icant advantage over
individual cultural producers and newcomers.
To this end, the political economy of platform markets provides another
reason to approach cheering claims of platform “openness” with a
healthy degree of skepticism. While platforms have indeed lowered the
costs of cultural creation and distribution, such bene its and ef iciencies
are largely offset by new competitive pressures. The accessibility of
digital markets translates into an increased supply of cultural talent,
and hence competition. An important consequence is thus amped-up
requirements for marketing: cultural producers are tasked with
deploying sophisticated data analytics along with promotional
expertise. Without a doubt, factions of individual creators ind success –
seemingly overnight. However, sustaining such success often requires
the continued provision of resources (Duffy, 2017). Such demands are
especially discernible in “mature” platform markets, such as YouTube
or app stores (Bä rtl, 2018; Bresnahan et al., 2014; Nieborg, Young,
Joseph, 2020; Rieder et al., 2020).
Control
Platform companies simultaneously use a wide range of governing
instruments to control how, and what kind of, content and services are
shared through their platforms. To stimulate audience and revenue
growth, as well as to protect their brands against legal liability, platform
companies are acutely aware that much of their appeal derives from
their ability to decrease any kind of market friction. End-users do not
want to wade through endless reams of mediocre content, whereas
cultural producers expect transactions to be safe and standardized.
This requires platform companies to clearly de ine who can access their
markets and infrastructures and under what conditions. When cultural
producers align their business models and integrate their
infrastructures with platforms, platform governance frameworks –
discussed in Chapter 4 – codify what can and cannot be created through
their boundary resources. Likewise, platforms decide the visibility and

discoverability of cultural content through algorithmic and editorial
curation and moderation activities. Thus, in platform-dependent
industry segments, we can observe both a concentration of economic
power and a centralization of infrastructural and political power on the
part of a few platform companies.
What makes the position of cultural producers vis-à -vis platforms
particularly precarious is the breakneck pace at which platforms
change their boundary resources and their regimes of visibility. We
have framed such incessant shifts as platform evolution. As platforms
grow and mature, they evolve in somewhat patterned ways: they
deprecate old APIs and introduce new ones; they change monetization
schemes, partner programs, and curation systems; they update
algorithms and moderation practices, and so on (Helmond & van der
Vlist, 2019; Rietveld et al., 2020; Arriagada & Ibá ñ ez, 2020). As we have
emphasized throughout this book, small changes in governance by
platforms can have a signi icant economic and cultural impact.
Accordingly, platform-dependent cultural producers are expected to
adjust their operations at whim, potentially making it dif icult to build
sustainable businesses.
Another reason to be attentive to platform evolution is that it seems to
coincide with ebbs and lows of cultural producers’ individual
bargaining power. Early in a platform’s development, platform
companies are keen to attract cultural producers, thereby providing
them with more favorable economic conditions. Yet, as platforms
attract more complementors, individual cultural producers become less
economically signi icant. In other words, the precarity of cultural
producers in relation to platforms increases as the latter become more
successful.
Future directions
While our accounts of social media, games, and news indicate how
institutional relations in platform ecosystems take shape, much
remains unknown. For instance, despite the short-term boon to cultural
producers who enter into new platform markets, we know far less
about the long-term implications of infrastructural integration. How do
they weigh the bene its of joining a platform against the costs of

structural uncertainty that follows from platform evolution? Who are
the economic winners and losers in the platform economy, and what
factors enable the former to succeed? To what extent does their success
endure? So far, such questions have only been partially addressed, as
business scholars have shown little interest in the inancial and
sociocultural predicaments of cultural producers and other
complementors. Media and communication scholars, meanwhile, have
largely shied away from empirical economic analyses of platforms.
Uncertainty about infrastructural integration triggers further research
questions. We know that cultural producers gain access to platform
infrastructures through boundary resources. Yet, there is surprisingly
little scholarship on the exact kind of resources platform companies
provide, to whom, under what conditions, and how these conditions
change over time. It also seems important to consider alternatives to
commercial resources. Are comparable platform-independent tools and
infrastructures available? If not, should they be developed? What would
they look like? Finally, exploring platform infrastructures from the
perspective of cultural production, we found that it is dif icult for both
scholars and cultural producers to gain a comprehensive understanding
of their capabilities and evolution. This is in part due to platform
infrastructures’ relative invisibility – a fact that makes critical inquiries
all the more urgent.
An infrastructural perspective inevitably leads to questions of platform
governance. How are platform boundaries policed? More speci ically,
what kind of cultural content and services do platform companies
enable – and thwart – through their provisions of boundary resources?
How does this impact cultural norms and forms of expression? And,
how do cultural producers negotiate the limits set by these resources,
as well as changes therein? Platform governance has been high on the
research agenda of media and communication scholars. However, with
some notable exceptions, the focus has primarily been on the
relationships between platforms and end-users. Therefore, when
analyzing platform curation and moderation, let us also ask what kinds
of creative content and cultural services become prominently
discoverable and visible – and why these? And, vice versa, what is
prohibited and removed? Are there major differences between the

regimes of visibility engendered by traditional media? Not only are
platform governance and infrastructure intimately related, so, too, are
the politics of boundary resources and economic opportunity. We are
quite keen to know more about how changes in platform curation and
moderation impact the income of cultural producers in different
industry segments and what the implications are for social justice in
terms of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality – and, in addition, how
these cultural producers strategically adapt to such changes.

Productive Power
The second half of the book examined how speci ic labor, creative, and
democratic practices develop though the interactions between
platforms and cultural producers. While such practices are shaped by
the institutional power relations examined in the irst half of the book,
they denote a different type of power – one that emerges in practices,
negotiations, and contestations of institutional frameworks. Simply put,
these practices constitute the lived reality of platform-dependent
cultural production. Examining these practices, we traced how power
circulates in the relations between platforms, cultural producers, and a
wide variety of other complementors. Power is thus understood as
productive (Foucault, 2012; Rose, 1999), in that it produces particular
worker subjectivities and responsibilities, forms of inequality, regimes
of visibility, types of logics, and modes of meaning-making. By
highlighting such normative dimensions of platform-dependent cultural
production, we have sought to show how the interaction between
platforms and cultural producers is embedded within wider political
economic and sociocultural relations. From this broader perspective,
we have observed both continuities and breaks with past practices of
cultural production. Again, we challenge the “year zero” fallacy that is
far too common in platform discourses.
Our inquiry both builds upon and engages with a number of media and
communication subdisciplines, including media sociology, political
economy of communication, and critical cultural studies. We situate our
discussion of labor within the cross-disciplinary ferment that has
emerged over the contemporary nature of media work (Deuze, 2013;
McRobbie, 2016; Neff et al., 2005; O’Brien et al., 2016) and on the
industrial contexts that shape it (Havens & Lotz, 2017; Hesmondhalgh
& Baker, 2015; Mayer et al., 2009). Notions of visibility – and,
conversely, invisibility – provide rich analytical purchase in our analysis
of platform-dependent cultural work, much as they do in wider
inquiries into platform and/or gig economies (Gray & Suri, 2019;
Roberts, 2019; Sannon & Cosley, 2019). In view of the kaleidoscopic
creative practices engendered by platforms, our discussion of creativity

draws upon what Jonathan Sterne articulated as “cultural studies of the
Internet” (1999: 260). Given a surge of interest in the people, processes,
and products of platforms, we may usefully consider “cultural studies of
platforms” as a distinctive sub ield in its own right (Burgess & Baym,
2020; Striphas, 2015). Finally, our evaluation of platformization from
the perspective of democracy further develops and broadens these
lines of inquiry, drawing on political economy, sociology of
communication, and critical cultural studies (Napoli, 2016; Usher,
2017; Waisbord, 2018).
Individualization and commercialization

For all of the hopes pinned on platforms to re-energize the labor
market and revive creative expression, the platformization of the
cultural industries has coincided with intensi ied structures of worker
individualization and commercialization. In Chapter 5, we discussed
how platform companies systematically dodge responsibility for the
labor of complementors. By positioning themselves as intermediaries –
rather than employers – platform companies have thus far avoided the
legal obligations that characterize traditional employer–employee
relationships. Just as these companies do not want to be held liable for
the content and services shared through their platforms, so they seek to
evade accountability when it comes to the economic welfare and social
wellbeing of the cultural workers who create and distribute content
(Sterne, 1999). As such, these workers are designated as independent
contractors – or, more euphemistically, entrepreneurs (Tiffany, 2019).
While this economic con iguration is legitimized through a persistent
ideology of economic freedom and lexibility, in reality it places
platform-dependent cultural laborers in a fundamentally insecure and
vulnerable position (e.g., Mehta, 2019). The vulnerability of workers is
especially evident in the context of creators and in luencers, where
many cultural laborers piece together varied income streams just to
make ends meet (Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021; Glatt, 2021).
To be sure, these worker con igurations and labor practices are by no
means natural or inevitable. They can, instead, be situated on a
historical timeline that began well before the rise of YouTuber
careerists and mandates about entrepreneurial journalism. As many

scholars and cultural analysts have noted, the neoliberal restructuring
of employment has in recent decades led to an individualization of
social responsibility and risk (Neff, 2012; McRobbie, 2016; Ross, 2009).
Around the globe, the scaling back of systems of social security,
corporate pressures that frustrate unionization, and the curtailing of
labor rights has profoundly exacerbated labor precarity (Harvey, 2007).
From a historical perspective, then, the relationship between platforms
and cultural workers continues political economic trends that were set
in motion in the twentieth century. At the same time, platform-
dependent cultural intermediaries both reinforce and mitigate these
developments. In particular, talent agencies, advertisers, and analytics
companies assist cultural producers in optimizing their platform-based
operations. In doing so, these intermediaries provide an impetus for
cultural producers to integrate themselves even deeper into platform
data infrastructures.
To remain relevant, individual cultural workers and organizations are
expected to pursue visibility indices – likes, favorites, shares – in
earnest. These promotional practices seem to clash with the well-worn
ideal of cultural production as creative expression. In fact, political
economists and media industry scholars alike have long considered
commercial demands to be a constraint on the creative process. While
much of the critical attention on commercialized media environments
has focused on journalism, concerns over rampant promotionalism also
animate academic writings on music, movies, magazines, and more
(McAllister, 1996; Wasko et al., 2011). Practices that emerged in the
early twenty- irst century – native advertising, branded content, and
hyper-personalized advertising – have done little to dispel such
concerns (Einstein, 2016; Turow, 2011). Across platforms, data-driven
advertising has become fundamentally integrated with every aspect of
the production process. Many of these practices – from the seamless
incorporation of commercial messages into gaming live-streams, to the
ubiquity of native advertising in platform-based news distribution, to
in luencers’ promotionaldraped product reviews – raise concerns about
transparency and consumer trust (Serazio & Duffy, 2017). While
organizations seek to avoid undisclosed practices of commercial
content to protect end-users, a less tangible – but no less urgent –

concern is the impact of self-marketization on cultural producers
(Gandini, 2016; Hearn, 2010; Marwick, 2013).
Inequalities
Much of the enthusiasm that characterized the early writings on
platforms and cultural production has been tempered by accounts of
the attendant perils – many of which seem all too visible in hindsight.
The democratization narrative, in particular, has been corrected by
calling attention to the stark inequalities that structure platform
environments. In many cases, platform-dependent cultural production
re lects existing societal biases and inequities (Bishop, 2019). In
Chapter 5, we offered a framework of in/visibility to call attention to
systematic hierarchies in contexts of cultural work and labor. Across
platforms, “behind-the-screen” labor is rife: from social media
marketers and optimization specialists, to creator talent scouts, to
programmers and software developers. In some cases, these workers
enjoy a relatively high professional status despite their concealment to
various social factions.
Platform-dependent cultural workers – even those who are highly
visible from a socioeconomic perspective – tend to be politically
invisible; they lack legal and/or regulatory support. The absence of
such protections renders workers further atomized, hence precarious.
To be sure, the individual ethos of platformized cultural production has
not wholly thwarted efforts at worker solidarity-building. To the
contrary – from gamer collectives (de Peuter & Young, 2019), to
in luencer unions (Niebler, 2020), to slick tactics to mitigate the
precarity of algorithmic systems (O’Meara, 2019) – acts of challenging
platform power abound. In late 2020, there was buzz about a potential
union for content moderators (Morar & Martins dos Santos, 2020) –
those who ensure that platforms are a ‘clean and safe’ environment for
cultural consumption (Gillespie, 2018). Although these individuals play
a critical role in cultural distribution, their relative lack of status and
job stability – not to mention patterned exposure to “the worst of the
web” (Dwoskin et al., 2019) – renders them socially invisible. As
Roberts (2019) productively reminds us of platform-dependent work,
such invisibility is largely “by design.”

As such examples attest, platform visibility and inequality are
intricately entangled on a societal level. As discussed in Chapter 7,
platforms harbor the tremendous potential to distribute a wide variety
of creative expressions. In practice, however, digital distribution does
not equal visibility, as both resources and scale continue to shape how
cultural content circulates. Not only are larger media companies
afforded more privileged access to platform boundary resources than
individual cultural producers, the former also have more expertise and
the inancial means to effectively integrate these resources into their
operations. Lacking such substantive organizational support, citizen
journalists, everyday gamemakers, musicians, and creators all face
obstacles to reaching large audiences through platforms.
Moreover, the ability to participate in the digital public sphere remains
marked by systems of inequality and exclusion linked to gender, race,
class, sexuality, and ethnicity (Christian et al., 2020; Duguay et al., 2020;
Noble, 2018). Time and time again, popular platforms and apps,
including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, have been accused of
racism, sexism, and homophobia. These platform subsidiaries have
been found to structurally obfuscate, and in some cases actively
demonetize, content by cultural producers from historically
marginalized communities (Parham, 2020). Platform-dependent civic
participation is further suppressed by rampant hate speech and
harassment (Lawson, 2018; Sobieraj, 2018; Waisbord, 2020). Not only
do the risks of platform visibility threaten individual cultural
producers, but they preclude a free- lowing creative public sphere.
Hence, platformization opens up cultural production to a wider variety
of societal actors, but at the same time intensi ies the structural
inequalities, hierarchies, and risks involved in the process.
Logics and meaning-making

Underpinning these shifts in cultural production and public
participation are particular logics and structures of meaning-making
(Gillespie, 2014; van Dijck & Poell, 2013). In Chapter 6, we discussed
how, in platform-dependent cultural production, platform metrics
become centrally integrated in the operations of cultural producers – an
orientation we have called metric logic. Such quantitative indicators of

failure and success are not just provided by platforms, but also actively
pushed by advertisers, talent agencies, and data intermediaries.
Cultural producers, in their efforts to enhance the visibility of their
content and services, seem to embrace this logic – albeit ambivalently
(Morris, 2020; Nieborg & Poell, 2018). While this process of
data ication can be interpreted as a rationalization of cultural
production, in practice platform data and algorithms frequently
reproduce societal discrimination and existing inequalities.
What makes the study of platformization especially vexing is that the
intensive use of platform data in the cultural industries is often
combined with human, editorial forms of curation (Bonini & Gandini,
2019). Platform-dependent media companies – from news
organizations to game publishers and record labels – continue to rely
on editorial decisions, which are informed by, but not necessarily
determined by these metrics (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016; Petre, 2015).
Since legacy media companies, as we argued earlier, still play a central
role in the platform environment, these editorial decisions have a large
impact on what becomes prominently visible. In this regard, past forms
of mass media gatekeeping have not so much disappeared but are,
instead, increasingly embedded in an environment structured by
platforms. Consequently, rather than simply introducing a new logic,
different logics of curation become entangled in processes of
platformization.
This multilayered media landscape has been associated with the
emergence of epistemic democracy, which refers to the breakdown of a
shared understanding of democratic norms and values among mass
publics (Waisbord, 2018). Once more, we are not witnessing a new
trend here, but, rather, a transformation that has been ongoing for
decades. Platformization facilitates and accelerates this development,
multiplying the networks through which cultural content can enter the
public realm. Although platform access has been interpreted as a
democratization of public communication, loosening mass media
control over societal processes of meaning-making presents major
challenges. When truth is inherently disputed, it becomes dif icult to
ind common ground for democratic politics.

Future directions
The exploration of the normative dimensions of platformization
generates a range of questions for further research. Starting with
cultural labor, we need to enhance our understanding of the affective
conditions associated with platform-dependent work and emloyment.
How do cultural workers experience the pressure generated by the
individualization of responsibility and risk, as well as by the constant
demand for platform visibility? What strategies do these workers
develop to enhance their social conditions, status, and compensation in
the platform environment? And how do they promote their “political
visibility” to secure protection within legal and regulatory systems?
From a policymaking perspective, we need to consider how the
socioeconomic inequalities woven into platform labor can be
addressed, asking: what kinds of policies and legislation are required in
order to arrive at more equitable platform labor relations in the
cultural industries?
Further insight is also needed to discern the types of content and forms
of creative expression that are rewarded and – conversely – penalized
on platforms. What role do platform data and metrics play in shaping
creative practices across different industry segments, who deploys
these metrics, and to what ends? It is especially urgent to re lect on the
ethics of data ication and metri ication, not just regarding the privacy of
end-users, but also in terms of the implications this has for creative
autonomy. Directly related, how can we assess the ethics of branded
content and other forms of promotion, particularly in instances where
it seems dif icult to distinguish paid messages from organic or
“authentic” forms of cultural expression? These questions are relevant
not just for cultural producers and for their products, but also for the
content that circulates to the public at large.
This brings us to cultural production as a democratic practice. It is clear
that platform-based cultural production in many ways falls short of key
democratic ideals of equality of access, diversity, protection, and
truthfulness. Such gaps necessitate a greater understanding of how
cultural production in a platform environment can be assessed in terms
of these ideals. As these values have primarily been operationalized in
relation to mass media, they cannot merely be directly transferred to

platform-based cultural production. How should we conceive of access,
diversity, safety, and truthfulness on platforms? Who is responsible for
ensuring that platform-dependent cultural production corresponds
with these ideals? How do platform inequalities relate to broader
societal forms of bias, discrimination, and exclusion? Lastly, how can we
best challenge these structures of inequity?

Variations
Platformization is neither a uniform nor a unilateral process; rather, it
is highly dependent on the context within which it emerges and takes
shape. The power relations and productive practices that con igure
platform-based cultural production are unique to particular contexts
and cultural moments. We can discern substantial variations across
three interrelated levels: (1) industry segments, (2) stages of cultural
production, and (3) geographic regions.
Industry segments
As we have argued throughout the book, industry segments vary
considerably in terms of history, practices, business model alignment
and infrastructural integration. Whereas some cultural industry
segments – games and social media, for instance – have been integrated
with platforms from the outset, those that span longer timeframes –
such as news and music – tend to have more institutional muscle
memory that facilitates their ability to operate independently. Such
autonomy can be a result of the strategic choices of individual cultural
producers, but it also owes much to the “nature” of speci ic cultural
formats – for instance, games as software are necessarily tied to
platforms.
Exploring these relations, we have noted a key distinction between
platform-dependent and platform-independent modes of cultural
production. In the context of the industry segments examined in depth
throughout the book – social media, games, and news – we identi ied
both platform-dependent and platform-independent institutional
relations and cultural practices. The creator economy is, perhaps not
surprisingly, a sector where cultural producers are heavily dependent
on social media platforms. But while individual creators have tended to
devote their energies to a particular platform – live-streamers on
Twitch, fashion and style in luencers on Instagram, and entertainers on
TikTok and YouTube – the precarity of the platform ecology is
challenging this single-platform model (Cunningham & Craig, 2019).
Increasingly, social media creators burnish cross-platform brands

(Scolere, 2019) alongside distribution and monetization strategies
unique to each platform. At the same time that the cross-platform
nature of social media creation expands the labor requirements, it also
furnishes creators with a greater level of independence.
Such independence is, for the most part, inconceivable for game studios
and publishers. Game development tools, such as the popular Unity
game engine, have radically lowered the bar for teams of all sizes to
create virtual worlds. Yet, the grip of platforms on game distribution,
particularly digital distribution, remains strong. Just a few platforms
dominate each of the game industry’s subsections – from mobile apps
to PC games and from social games to console games. Thus far, even
though a new generation of indie developers may have become less
dependent on legacy game publishers, their collective dependence on a
handful of platform companies continues unabated.
In comparison with social media and games, the news business has
historically been fully platform-independent, meaning that the creation,
distribution, marketing, and monetization of news content has not been
tied to a speci ic channel or platform. Of course, this is not to say that
the news business has been free from external pressures and
constraints. News organizations were – and remain – subject to market
demands, advertiser expectations, and political in luences. Conversely,
platforms present a new challenge to the independence of news
organizations, especially in terms of control over news distribution and
monetization. While this challenge is widely felt, there is substantial
variation across this segment in how news organizations position
themselves in relation to platforms. Following platform-native
publishing strategies, newly founded, born-digital publishers are
usually highly dependent on platforms, having integrated and aligned
their distribution, marketing, and monetization practices with those of
Facebook and Google. Platform metrics tend to be central to the
operations of these publishers. Then again, legacy newspapers have a
much more fraught relationship with platforms. Virtually every
newspaper attempts to attract audiences via search engines and social
media, but many are reluctant to fully integrate their distribution and
monetization infrastructures with them (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018; van
Dijck et al., 2018).

These differences among news organizations make clear that the
relationship between platforms and cultural producers is profoundly
variable, not just across but also within industry segments. Similar
disparities can be observed within the music industry, with part of the
industry trying to remain independent from major commercial
platforms, such as Spotify and Apple Music. Such efforts build on a long
historical tradition of alternative “record labels, distributors, and shops,
and with a special focus on achieving greater degrees of collective
autonomy and control for groupings of musicians, audiences, and
others” (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2019: 2). In the platform environment,
this tradition has taken shape in alternative music platforms, such as
SoundCloud and Bandcamp, which provide musicians with more
independence and autonomy. In the light of such variation, we have
attempted to steer clear of sweeping, deterministic claims about
trajectories of platformization. Instead, we have explored how
particular types of cultural producers organize their practices at
particular moments and key historical junctures.
Stages of cultural production

While the processes of cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and
monetization are fundamentally entangled in practice, it is analytically
useful to separate these stages to understand how platform-
dependence can vary substantially depending on when and where we
look in the production process. In each stage, cultural producers have
more or fewer options to operate independently from platforms.
In the creation stage, we observed that major platform companies have
tried to assert themselves as spaces for developing content and
services. They have made production software available for a nominal
fee, or integrated software suites or toolsets straight into the platform
itself. The latter category allows cultural producers to forgo extensive
training or acquire additional software. We should note, however, that
there is strong divergence between cultural producers over how much
they depend on platform tools in the creation phase. News is still
largely produced without such tools, while social media creators and
game developers heavily depend on them.

We can be unequivocal about platform-dependence in the distribution
phase, as platforms exist by virtue of aggregating audiences; they
provide access to large and heterogenous groups of end-users, which
can be dif icult to reach via other channels. Moreover, platforms are
attractive because of their low distribution costs. Most platforms do not
charge cultural producers distribution fees, which is a major break
from past practices. In legacy markets, such as music, journalism, and
console-based gaming, the costs for physical distribution (i.e.,
transportation, manufacturing, coordination) were – and still are –
signi icant. At the same time, integrating with distribution
infrastructures means relinquishing some level of control. Perhaps not
surprisingly, such reallocations spark concerns in industries that have
historically been platform-independent. In the news industry, major
news organization oscillate between joining platform-native content
hosting programs and pursuing independent distribution strategies.
Finally, similar trends and tensions regarding platform-dependence can
be observed in the marketing and monetization phases. By
standardizing and organizing pricing and transactions, platforms
purportedly relieve cultural producers of the burden of arranging for
these activities themselves. In practice, however, monetization
strategies vary. Advertising revenue remains a ixture of platform-
dependent cultural production, but a great many alternatives exist,
from subscriptions to donations to microtransactions (see, e.g., Johnson
& Woodcock, 2019; Taylor 2018). Prominent examples of strong
integration with the marketing and monetization capabilities of
platforms can be found in the mobile game app industry, which, as a
multibillion-dollar industry, went through a drastic shift in business
models. Most cultural producers are, however, not fully platform-
dependent when it comes to monetization. Musicians, for instance, can
still garner income through selling merchandise or giving live concerts
outside the boundaries of a platform (Hesmondhalgh, 2020). For
producers, inding the “right” balance between platform-dependent and
platform-independent forms of income is a complicated, unrelenting
exercise.
Regional variation

While the reach of dominant platform companies may be nearly global,
they are embedded within national institutional frameworks and evolve
through culturally geographic-speci ic patterns and lows. Thus, even
when platforms seek to intervene in or “disrupt” existing norms and
relations, they cannot escape them. For too long, US platforms have
been taken as the yardstick against which everything else was
measured; Silicon Valley has thus been synonymous with “the tech
industry.” To be fair, despite our best efforts, this book has not fully
escaped this pattern either; our examples draw heavily on US-based
companies, and the norms we describe – from entrepreneurship to
precarity – are largely Western (Matthews & Onyemaobi, 2020).
Nevertheless, as the platformization of cultural production touches
cultural and political life across the globe, it behooves us to move
beyond the US-centric perspective – both conceptually and empirically.
This means that when studying how cultural production is recon igured
in processes of platformization, the speci ic national, regional, and
supranational contexts need to be foregrounded (Abidin, 2019; de Kloet
et al., 2019; Steinberg, 2019).
In our attempt to go beyond US examples, we have devoted special
attention to Chinese platform instances: WeChat, Kuaishou, Douyin/
TikTok, and DouYu. Not only does the research on China highlight
processes of platformization that differ markedly from region to region,
but it also reveals how this process can centrally involve the state. In
the Chinese system, state and market should be considered as a single
entity, which means that platforms also fall within the domain of the
state. Unlike their counterparts in the US, the Chinese state treats
platform companies as media organizations, which therefore have to
abide by the strict regulations for content distribution set out by the
central government (Hong & Jian, 2019; Lin & de Kloet, 2019; Wang &
Lobato, 2019). As discussed in Chapters 4 and 7, this state–market
nexus has far-reaching implications for platform curation and
moderation, as well as for the scope of platform-based democratic
practices.
To develop a truly global perspective, we should treat China-based
platform companies and practices of cultural production not as exotic,
but as distinctive. Indeed, they follow an idiosyncratic path, just as US-

based platforms and industries do. To this end, we should remain aware
of the speci icity of the US trajectory. In doing so, we can, for example,
recognize that the general absence of a welfare state sets the context in
which platform labor takes shape. In this context, the precarity of
cultural labor becomes an urgent issue of scholarly concern. Similarly,
studies on platform-based disinformation campaigns in the US reveal
the importance of a hyper-partisan media ecosystem, as well as a
decrease in trust in news organizations. Although labor precarity and
problems of disinformation can be observed everywhere, the particular
US institutional framework and media environment are equally
idiosyncratic and should be treated as such.
Future directions
While our inquiry shows that observations on speci ic instances of
platformization cannot be generalized, it does demonstrate that the
analysis of the many variations in processes of platformization can be
systematized. Building on our approach, one can ask the following sets
of questions to situate research inquiries and interpret indings related
to the platformization of cultural production.
The irst step is to consider the particular industry segment under
examination. Has this segment historically been platform-dependent or
platform-independent? In the case of the former, one can ask whether
dependence follows from the “nature” of the content – as in the case of
games – or primarily from a reliance on platforms in terms of
distribution, marketing, and monetization, as in the case of social
media. When examining historically independent industry segments, it
is productive to consider how platform-dependence has evolved over
time. Are there particular developments that have prompted cultural
producers to integrate with platforms? For example, declining revenues
in the news and music industries galvanized cultural producers in these
segments to turn to platforms for content distribution and
monetization. By gaining insight into how speci ic industry segments
relate to platforms and how this changes over time, we can develop a
more precise understanding of the strategic options available to
cultural producers today.

The second set of questions concerns the stage of cultural production.
Is the research primarily focused on the creation, the distribution, the
marketing, or the monetization phase? Depending on the industry
segment under examination, each phase comes with different forms of
platform-dependence and related challenges. How does reliance on
platforms in content creation challenge the creative autonomy of
cultural producers? What are the consequences of growing platform-
dependence in distribution? How does this affect the ability of cultural
producers to control the visibility of particular content and services?
And what are the implications for economic sustainability when
platforms become central to the marketing and monetization of cultural
content? These questions indicate that platform-dependence can take
many forms.
Finally, we need to question how the relations between platforms and
cultural producers take shape across geographic regions. How are
platforms framed within wider sociocultural, political, and legal
perspectives in the examined region and what are the consequences for
the responsibility of platforms for cultural content and labor? What
kind of protection and support are cultural workers afforded under a
speci ic political and legal regime? How are political and cultural
divisions in this media system re lected in platform-based cultural
production? Finally, can we make national typologies in how states and
media systems structure the relations between platforms and cultural
producers?
To conclude, we hope that our approach and conceptual apparatus will
be useful for researchers around the globe keen to explore the evolving
relations between platforms and cultural producers. To gain further
insight into these relations, as well as on the variations between them,
we call for more in-depth research not only on speci ic platform
subsidiaries and instances, but also on platform-dependent cultural
producers. Although such research does not have to be explicitly
comparative, it is vital to remain attentive to the particularity of each
examined case. As we have seen, no case study can be representative of
the cultural industries at large, or even of a speci ic segment. Our
conceptual framework and initial exploration should enable individual
scholars to re lect on the speci icity of their case study. Collectively, it

should facilitate an active dialogue between researchers from different
disciplines, ields of study, and geographic regions. Such a conversation
will generate new understandings of how platforms and cultural
producers become entangled and what the consequences are for the
distribution of power in the cultural industries, the sustainability of
cultural production, and the diversity and vitality of culture at large.

Note
1. Thanks Dave!

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Index

A
access
boundary resources, 65, 66, 162, 183, 191
conditions of, 160
cultural producer–platform relationships, 46, 73, 81
end-users, 46, 73
equality of, 160, 162–5, 178
infrastructure, 138
platform markets, 59
activist creators, 168
Adorno, Theodor, 137, 139
advertisers, 48–9, 147–8
advertising
branded content, 147–50
data ication, 48–9, 190
Facebook, 48–9, 55
Google, 38, 48, 55
in luencer marketing, 149–50
intermediaries, 10
music industry, 205n6
native, 149
news industry, 15, 148–50, 205n6
product integration and placement, 148
YouTube, 1–4, 8, 14, 119–20
affordances, 88–9, 138

Albury, Kath, 132
algorithmic curation, 91–5, 99, 104
algorithmic gaming, 102–4
algorithmic gossip, 101
algorithmic imaginaries, 101
algorithmic logic, 143–4
algorithmic precarity, 127
algorithmic visibility, 94–5, 104, 116
Alibaba, 46, 60
Alinejad, Donya, 157
Alphabet Incorporated, 41
see also Google LLC; YouTube
Amazon, 36–7, 55, 59, 72, 202n7
Amazon Web Services (AWS), 53, 57–8, 72, 203nn5–6
Anderson, Chris, 140–1, 167
Apple
Apple Arcade, 203n8
Developer Enterprise Program, 77–8, 87
infrastructural agreements, 57
intellectual property, 37, 202n7
iOS ecosystem, 66–7
iPhones pre-app store, 78–9
podcasting control attempts, 71–2
revenue streams, 36–7
Xcode, 66–7
see also Apple’s app store; Apple’s governance methods

Apple’s app store
business model options, 47
circumvention of, 77–8
curation, 93
developer payments, 46, 202n9
governance, 79, 84–5, 88, 97
infrastructural integration, 55
power of, 73
pricing, 38–9, 47
transaction fees, 202n8
Apple’s governance methods
application programming interfaces (APIs), 79
app store, 79, 84–5, 88, 97
boundary resources, 78–9
content, 79–80
evasions, 77–8
inconsistencies, 80
software development kits (SDKs), 66, 79
application programming interfaces (APIs)
Apple, 79
developer knowledge requirements, 67
Facebook, 27, 41, 64–5
Google, 64
governance, 86–7
as infrastructure, 61–5, 203n7
Instagram, 86

app sideloading, 77–8
app stores
game cloning, 97
Google, 38–9, 55, 73
infrastructural integration, 55–6
see also Apple’s app store
audience measurement, 143
see also metric logic; metrics
authenticity, 149, 151–3
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos, 134–5, 141

B
Bagdikian, Ben, 137
Baker, Sarah, 124
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 151
Baym, Nancy, 123, 144–5, 152
Bechmann, Anja, 65
Benkler, Yochai, 33, 68, 175, 205n2
Bet-David, Patrick, 157
BigoLive (live streaming), 169
Bishop, Sophie, 101, 129
Black Lives Matter, 99, 152, 155, 173
Black Twitter, 135
Blair, Helen, 111
blockbuster economics, 32–3, 114
Bonini, Tiziano, 93
boundary resources
overview, 78, 85, 184
access to, 162, 183, 191
corporate control through, 85–6
creativity impact, 138
game industry, 68
governance, 78–9, 85–7
as infrastructure, 65–7
see also application programming interfaces (APIs); software
development kits (SDKs)

boyd, danah, 90
Brock, André , Jr., 135
Brown, Tabitha, 155–6, 158
Bruns, Axel, 159
Bucher, Taina, 91
Bulut, Ergin, 125
Burgess, Jean, 83, 94, 134
business models
Apple app store, 47
de inition, 202n5
freemium apps, 26, 39, 47, 74–5, 88
platform companies, 36–8, 47, 183, 202nn6–7
business studies, 5, 7, 11, 182, 201n3
Bustamante, Enrique, 33
ByteDance, 98–9
see also Douyin; TikTok

C
Calhoun, Ada, 89
Caplan, Robyn, 87, 90, 96, 162
Carey, Emma, 142–3
Carlson, Matt, 149
Castelle, Suzanne de, 128
Chamberlain, Emma, 109–10
Chartbeat (analytics company), 11, 146, 164, 204n5
Chen, Angela, 119
Chen, Gina Masullo, 172
Chen, Xu, 176
Chin, Jeffrey, 146

China
Alibaba, 46, 60
ByteDance, 98–9
domestic platform companies, 60
international platform blocking, 84
journalism, 171, 176–7
Kuaishou (video-sharing app), 128, 152
live-streaming services, 110, 119, 121–2
platformization, 197–8
propaganda, 175–6
social media governance, 98, 176
talent agencies, 121–2
Tencent, 55, 60, 202n6
vs. the United States, 197–8
video-sharing apps, 98, 128, 147, 176
Chomsky, Noam, 159
Christian, Aymar Jean, 128
Christin, Angè le, 146
Cinelytic, 146
clickbait, 103–4

complementors
overview, 11
boundary resource use, 66
data access, 48
geographical diversity, 46
governance impacts, 86–7
motivations for becoming, 44
network effect impacts, 38
platform evolution’s impact, 40–1
platform relationships, 35–6, 38, 65
revenue sources, 47–8
transaction costs, 46
winner-take-all dynamics, 32, 42–5, 167, 184
see also cultural producers; intermediaries
concentration vs. digitalization, 31–4
conspiracy theorists, 157
see also disinformation
Constantinides, Panos, 183
content aggregation, 71, 203n10
content diversity, 165, 167–70
convergence culture, 204n1
Coromina, Oscar, 94
corporate concentration, 32, 42–3, 50, 137–8
Cotter, Kelley, 104, 127
COVID-19 pandemic, 155–8

Craig, David, 71, 120, 126, 149, 151, 167–8
creative platforms, 133–4
creativity
affordances shaping, 138
commerce tensions, 136–7
corporate concentration, 137–8
cultural diversity, 137
data ication, 138
legacy vs. platform companies, 134
metrics and metri ication, 135–6, 143–7, 189
nichi ication, 139–43
ontological debates over, 138–9
platformization’s impacts on, 154
platforms enabling, 133, 139, 153–4
public service media, 136
taste communities, 134–5, 141
tensions in, 139
vernacular, 134–5, 141
cultural industries, 9, 31–4, 46, 114
see also cultural producers
cultural intermediaries, 10–11, 189
cultural markets, 140, 167, 204n4

cultural producer–platform relationships
access control, 81
conformity, 47
cross-industry differences and similarities, 181
end-user access, 46, 73
formation in existing markets, 180–1
historical perspectives on, 189
inequalities, 16–17
innovation functions, 65–6
organization of, 165
platform lifecycles, 40
precarity, 185
prior scholarship on, 17
variability, 13, 15, 30, 195
volatility, 126–7
see also platform dependency; platform independence

cultural producers
overviews, 9, 180
advertisers, 48–9
amateur-professional boundary, 12
bargaining power, 186
bene iting from openness, 183
corporate concentration, 31–2
COVID-19’s impacts on, 156
end-user data, 73–4
vs. end-users, 180
governance navigation, 100–4
infrastructural integration, 58, 62, 67, 75
infrastructure’s impact on, 60–1, 75
optimization strategies, 104
platform growth, 11
platform instance integration, 62
platformization roles, 8
platform precarity, 126
search engine optimization, 103
self-branding, 122–4
self-marketing demands, 184–5, 190
visibility, 117
vulnerability, 171
winners and losers, 32
see also creativity; game industry; Instagram in luencers and
creators; labor; music industry; news industry; social media creators;
TikTok creators; YouTube creators

cultural production
cost decreases, 45
democratization discourses, 16, 193
industrial vs. vernacular, 9
for mass audiences, 140
moderation impacts, 97
platform affordance impacts, 88–9
platform-dependent vs. platform-independent, 194
platform in luence over, 105
stages of, 196–7, 199
Cunningham, Stuart, 71, 120, 126, 149, 151, 167–8
curation
overviews, 84–5
algorithmic vs. editorial, 91–5
cultural producer impacts, 105
goals, 95
and regulation, 87
see also governance

D
data fans, 145
data ication
advertising, 48–9, 190
creativity, 138
infrastructure, 63–5, 73
metric logic, 143–4, 147, 191–2
news industry, 90–1, 102, 136
platform markets, 48
data intermediaries, 41, 48, 73, 104, 121, 145, 147
data mining, 26, 202n1
democracy
epistemic, 174, 177, 192
and platformization, 7–8, 16, 43, 128, 130
practices, 158
democratic ideals
diversity, 161, 165–70
equal access, 160, 162–5, 178
the internet vs. mass media, 159–60
platform companies’ provisions of, 177–8
protection of cultural producers, 161, 170–3
truthfulness, 161, 174–7
democratization discourses, 16, 159–60, 177, 184
Deuze, Mark, 122, 204n2
digitalization vs. concentration, 31–4

van Dijck, José , 157
direct network effects, 37, 43, 49
disinformation
overview, 174, 205n2
Chinese, 175–7
enabling factors, 174–5
network propaganda, 174–5, 205n2
US politics, 175, 198
distribution
complementors, 56
costs, 45–6, 196
game industry, 163
news industry, 52
diversity
content, 165, 167–70
and creative content, 137
game industry, 130, 204n5
marketplace of ideas framework, 165
platform multiplicity enabling, 153–4
platforms preventing, 168
source, 165–6, 169–70
van Doorn, Niels, 116
Douyin (video-sharing app), 98, 147, 176
DouYu (streaming service), 110, 119, 121–2

E
economies of scale, 32, 37
economies of scope, 32
ecosystems
overviews, 41, 61
Apple iOS, 66
digital game development, 55
economic vs. infrastructural perspectives, 61
embeddedness, 58
evolution of, 13
gateways, 60–1
stakeholders, 8
editorializing, 91–5, 192
see also moderation
end-users
access to, 46, 73
vs. cultural producers, 180
data, 26, 48, 73–5, 202n1
early vs. late adopters, 40
in platform markets, 35, 183
segmentation of, 142
entrepreneurialism, 122–4, 189
epistemic democracy, 174, 177, 192

equality
access, 160, 162–5, 178
labor, 115–17, 127–31
see also inequality

F

Facebook
advertising, 48–9, 55
Apple’s Developer Enterprise Program misuse, 77
application programming interfaces (APIs), 27, 41, 64–5
audience pro iles, 75
branded content, 148
clickbait, 103
competitive advantages, 43
complementors, 36, 47
corporate positioning of users, 16
COVID-19 information policies, 156–7
cultural producer dependence, 11
data collection practices, 26, 202n1
data intermediaries, 41
Developer Accounts, 86
Development Platform, 25, 40
as ecosystem, 62
evolution, 40
external app governance, 86
growth, 25–6, 39
intellectual property, 12, 202n5, 203n10
internet access investments, 59
linguistic availability, 46
moderation, 89, 97–8
network effects, 42
news, 28, 72, 95, 164

pricing, 38
revenue sources, 202n2
Signal, 90
social games, 14, 25–6, 202n1
Social Graph, 27, 41, 64
subsidiaries, 41
video content, 95
visibility, 116
WhatsApp, 41
and Zynga, 14, 24–7, 64, 202n2
see also Facebook Messenger; Instagram
Facebook Messenger, 62–3
fake news, 174
Fiore, Mark, 80
freemium business model, 26, 39, 47, 74–5, 88

G
game industry
access inequality, 163
advertising, 48–9
as blockbuster-driven, 32–3
distribution, 163
freemium business model, 26, 39, 47, 74–5, 88
harassment against women, 172
hobbyist development (preindustry), 68–70
independent developers, 113, 163, 178
industrialization, 68–9
infrastructural integration, 68–70, 73–5, 101
infrastructure, 54–5
labor, 113, 120, 124–5, 128, 130, 204n5
metrics use, 136
modding, 135
nichi ication, 141–2
platform dependency, 14, 27, 194–5
platform governance, 100–1
platform regulation impacts, 88
platform selection, 27
software development kits (SDKs), 69
two-sided markets, 35, 38, 68–9
see also app stores; Zynga
Gandini, Alessandro, 93

Gawer, Annabelle, 40
gender
content diversity, 167
cultural production access, 21, 165, 178
cultural worker discrimination, 161
digital public sphere access, 191
game industry inequality, 114
governance impacts, 187
harassment based on, 171–2
labor inequalities, 7
news industry inequality, 127
stereotypical roles on social media, 129
taste communities, 135, 141, 143
women’s work, 115–17, 129
YouTube’s diversity, 46
generativity, 58–9
Ghebreyesus, Tedros Adhanom, 156
Gillespie, Tarleton, 16, 82–3, 89, 92, 96, 143–4, 162
Glatt, Zoë , 162

Google LLC
advertising, 38, 48, 55
Apple’s Developer Enterprise Program abuse, 77
application programming interfaces (APIs), 64
app store, 38–9, 55, 73
competitive advantages, 43
COVID-19 information policies, 157
internet access investments, 59
podcasting control attempts, 72
subsidiaries, 41
see also YouTube
Google Search, 91

governance
overviews, 81, 185
boundary resources, 78–9, 85
control-openness balancing, 80–2, 85
copyright, 82–4
cultural producer responses, 100–5
cultural production impacts, 105, 185
discriminatory, 129–30
host-editor classi ications, 81–3
national differences, 83–4
network effect impacts, 167
of platforms, 81–4, 203n1
regulation, 84–91
safe harbor laws (section 230), 82, 203n1
sexual content, 168–9
strictness, 85
YouTube, 2, 6, 162
see also Apple’s governance methods; curation; moderation
Green, Joshua, 83, 94
Gross, Larry, 159
Guardian, 51–3, 57, 72, 203n3
Guo, Lei, 125
Gupta, Apar, 169

H
Hao, Lei, 110
harassment and hate, 171–3, 178, 191
Harris, Ronan, 1
Havens, Timothy, 10
Al-Heeti, Abrar, 133
Helmond, Anne, 5, 56, 64, 201n2
Herman, Edward, 159
Hesmondhalgh, David, 9, 124, 158, 165, 182
Heyward, Andrew, 152–3
Hill, Erin, 115–16
Hindman, Matthew, 59
Holton, Avery, 123
Horkheimer, Max, 137, 139

I
identity politics, 142–3, 152, 170
independent game developers, 113, 163, 178
individualization of labor, 122
industry segment variations, 194–6
inequality
cultural producer-platform relationships, 16–17, 43
game industry, 163
labor, 115–17, 127–31
music industry, 165
network effects, 42, 50
news industry, 127–8, 163–4
platformization, 50, 114, 129, 191–2
platform markets, 42–4, 138
productive power, 190–1
racism, 99, 129–30
social media cultural producers, 129
visibility and invisibility, 115–18, 190–1
see also diversity; equality; gender; marginalized communities;
sexism
in luencers, see social media creators
information crisis, see disinformation
information economics, 12, 34
infrastructural capture, 72

infrastructural integration
overview, 52–3, 57
app stores, 55–6
book publishing, 70
by complementors, 68–75
creation, 68–71
cultural producers, 58, 62, 67, 75
curation, 59
digital games industry, 54–5
distribution, 71–3
game industry, 68–70, 73–5, 101
long-term implications, 186
marketing and monetization, 73–5
music publishing, 70
news industry, 72
platform instances, 62
podcasting, 71–2
social media, 70
infrastructural objects, 60

infrastructure
overview, 53
access, 138
application programming interfaces (APIs), 61–5, 203n7
asymmetric relationships, 65
blending into platforms, 56
boundary resources, 65–7
complementor–platform company relationships, 65
cultural producer impacts, 60–1, 75
data ication, 63–5, 73
ecosystems, 61–2
embeddedness, 57–8
gateways, 60–1, 66
geopolitics, 54
internet connectivity, 59
interoperability, 57
open internet, 76
openness, 184
ownership, 58–9
platform ambitions of control, 76
platform instance co-evolution, 63
platformization, 59, 76
programmability, 63–5
regional differences, 60
relational nature, 56–7
software development kids (SDKs), 61–2, 64–5

standards, 65, 203n7
TikTok, 54
visibility, 57, 60, 186
innovation, 66–7
Instagram
application programming interface changes, 86
complementor revenue, 47
curation, 91, 104, 127
as subsidiary, 41
user-generated data, 12
Instagram in luencers and creators
authenticity discourses, 151
engagement pods, 104, 121, 145
governance responses, 101, 104
metrics uses, 144, 147
institutional actors, 35
institutional power
control, 185–6
dynamism, 182–3
openness, 183–5

intellectual property policies
Apple, 37, 202n7
economics, 36–7, 202n6
Facebook, 12, 202n5, 203n10
media companies vs. platform companies, 36–7, 166, 203n10
YouTube, 83, 202n6, 203n10
intermediaries
advertising, 10
cultural, 10–11, 189
data, 41, 48, 73, 104, 121, 145, 147
media companies acquiring, 41
and platform evolution, 40–1
visibility, 117
see also talent agencies
internet, the
generativity, 58
infrastructure, 59, 76
vs. mass media, 159–60
nichi ication, 140, 142
intraoperability, 65
invisibility, see visibility and invisibility

J
Jacobides, Michael, 65
Jarrett, Kylie, 169
Jenkins, Henry, 159, 204n1
Jobs, Steve, 80
Jones, Leslie, 172–3
journalism, see news industry

K
Kaye, Bondy, 176
King, Gary, 175–6
Kjellberg, Felix “PewDiePie,” 3, 4 3
Klein, Ethan and Hila, 3
de Kloet, Jeroen, 98, 128, 152
Kuaishou (video-sharing app), 128, 152

L
labor
aspirational, 111
barriers to entry, 111, 113
digital labor debate, 114–15
entrepreneurialism, 122–4, 189
equality and inequality, 115–17, 127–31
e-sports players, 110
free, 12
individuality and collectivity, 119–24, 130–1
multiskilling, 125
platform dependency, 131, 158, 189
platform precarity, 126, 204n4
and power, 130, 190
precarity, 111–15, 124–7, 131, 158, 198, 204n2
relational, 123
security and insecurity, 124–7, 130–1
social media creators, 109–10
streamers, 110
visibility and invisibility, 115–19, 130–1
see also news industry labor
Larsen, Lucas Tao Kilmer, 110
Lawson, Caitlin, 172–3
Ledbetter, Andrew, 123

Lewis, Rebecca, 175
Liao, Rita, 121
Light, Ben, 169
Lin, Jian, 98, 128, 152
Line, 46, 55
Lobato, Ramon, 98
long tail economy, 140, 167, 204n4
Lorenz, Taylor, 133

M
Maddox, Jessica, 141
Manjoo, Farhad, 141
marginalized communities
discrimination against, 161, 168–70
discrimination lawsuits against YouTube, 168
labor visibility, 117
and the mass media, 159
racism, 99, 129–30
vulnerability to online hate, 171–3
see also diversity; equality; gender; inequality; race
markets
concentration, 43
cultural, 140, 167, 204n4
data ication of digital, 48
two-sided, 35, 38, 68–9
see also platform markets
Marwick, Alice, 160, 175
Massanari, Adrienne, 172
mass audiences, 139–40, 140
mass media, 159–60, 166
Matamoros-Ferná ndez, Ariadna, 94
Mathisen, Birgit, 125
Matthews, Julian, 204n2
Mayer, Vicki, 117

McChesney, Robert, 166
McRobbie, Angela, 153, 162
O’Meara, Victoria, 104, 121
media companies
as cultural producers, 9
distribution costs, 45–6, 196
as editors, 82
intellectual property, 37
intermediary acquisitions, 41
labor, 118
labor precarity, 112
market segmentation, 139–40
vs. platform companies, 6
platform company competition, 29–31
media fragmentation, 143
media outlet ownership, 166
Meisner, Colten, 123
meritocracy myths, 160, 163
metric logic, 143–4, 147, 191–2
metrics, 135–6, 144–7
metri ication of creativity, 143–7, 189
Mikovits, Judy, 157–8
misinformation, see disinformation
mobile game apps, 73–5, 197

moderation
overviews, 84–5, 96
algorithmic, 96, 99
Chinese social media, 98–9
of cultural industries, 97–100
cultural producer impacts, 105
dif iculties with, 178
invisible labor, 117
need for, 97
protecting cultural producers, 170
regional differences, 169
see also governance
moderator labor organizing, 190–1
Molyneux, Logan, 123
monoculture, 154
multichannel networks, 41
multihoming, 204n4
multisided markets, see platform markets

music industry
access inequality, 165
advertising, 205n6
authenticity, 152
as blockbuster-driven, 32–3
changes in, 30
data fans, 145
marketing, 123
metri ication, 144–5
monetization, 197
platform dependency variations, 195–6
see also Spotify

N
Napoli, Philip, 165, 167
native advertising, 149
Navar-Gill, Annemarie, 146
Nechushtai, Efrat, 89
Negroponte, Nicholas, 140, 142
Negus, Keith, 137, 145
neoliberalism, 189
Net lix, 6, 91, 140–1
network effects
complementor impacts, 38
and content diversity, 167
direct, 37, 43, 49
economies of scale, 37
enabling growth, 39
enabling platform dependency, 4, 43
Facebook, 42
governance frameworks affecting, 167
indirect, 37–8, 49
inequality, 42, 50
platform–complementor relationships, 38
platform markets, 49–50, 141
positive, 43
and pricing, 39
YouTube, 4, 43–4

network externalities, see network effects
new media technologies, 147–8
news industry
access inequality, 163–4
advertising, 15, 148–50, 205n6
algorithmic visibility, 95
authenticity and self-promotion, 152–3
citizen journalism, 164, 175–6, 178
clickbait, 103
creativity, 204n2
data ication, 90–1, 102, 136
and disinformation, 174–7
distribution, 52
Facebook, 28, 72, 90, 95, 164
freelancers, 45
governance adaptation, 101–2
Guardian, 51–3, 57, 72, 203n3
infrastructural integration, 52–3, 72
journalist vulnerability, 171–2
metrics uses, 136, 145–6
moderation, 97–8
platform dependency variations, 14–15, 28, 89–90, 148, 195
platformization, 51–2, 163
platform selection, 27–8
see also news industry labor

news industry labor
entrepreneurial journalism, 112–13
freelance, 121, 125
inequality, 127–8
multiskilling, 125
organizations, 120
precarity, 112
social media policies, 123–4
nichi ication of creativity, 139–43
Nintendo, 68–9
Noam, Eli, 166

O
Ohlheiser, Abby, 157
Okello, Lydia, 129
OnlyFans, 168–9
Onyemaobi, K., 204n2
OpenTV, 128
Owens, Simon, 150

P
Paasonen, Susanna, 169
Pan, Jennifer, 175–6
Parklu, 134
participatory branding, 123
participatory culture, 16
personal brands, 122–4
Petre, Caitlin, 146
Plandemic conspiracy video, 157
Plantin, Jean-Christophe, 56

platform companies
competition between, 42–3
competition with media companies, 29–31
conservatism, 161, 169–70
as content hosts and not editors, 82
cultural worker employment, 119
democratic ideals, 177–8
dominant, 179
fact-checking initiatives, 177
hybrid, 36
intermediary acquisitions, 41
intermediary self-positioning, 188
media company classi ication, 36, 98, 202n6
neutrality rhetoric, 85, 92, 105, 119, 168, 172, 178–9
revenues, 31
Russian, 60
strategic boundary opening, 35–6
toolkits for innovation, 34
vs. transaction platforms, 35–6
see also Facebook; Google; platform economics; platform markets;
TikTok; Twitch; YouTube

platform dependency
overview, 13
advertising, 48–9
authenticity–promotion tensions, 153
balancing with independence, 47–8
changes over time, 198–9
costs of, 73
as creativity constraint, 148
cultural production stages, 196–7
examples, 8, 14
game industry, 14, 27, 194–5
individualization of risk, 131
industry segment variation, 194–6
inequality, 43
labor, 131, 158, 189
media fragmentation acceleration, 143
monetization, 196–7
network effects enabling, 4, 43
platform markets, 49–50
political invisibility, 190
power imbalances, 114, 131
precarity, 185, 189
regulatory mechanism displacement, 150
social media creators, 13–14, 28, 194

platform economics
overview, 34
business models, 36–8, 47, 183, 202nn6–7
intellectual property, 36–7, 202n6
role of governance, 56
role of infrastructure, 56
strategic boundary opening, 34–5
see also platform markets
platform ecosystems, see ecosystems
platform governance, see governance
platform imaginaries, 16
platform independence
overview, 13
advantages, 70
balancing with dependence, 47–8
cultural production stages, 196–7
disadvantages, 94
examples, 14–15
game app production, 55
and governance, 100, 105
industry segment variation, 194–6
labor visibility, 131
news industry, 148, 195
platform multiplicity engendering, 153–4
public media companies, 136
platform infrastructure see infrastructure

platform instances, 61–4
platform markets (multisided markets)
overviews, 6, 35
access control, 59
as analytic tool, 182
barriers to entry, 12
creation challenges, 38
cultural producer dependency, 49–50
data ication, 48
dynamism, 182–3
evolution velocity, 39
inequalities, 42–4, 138
monopoly tendencies, 183
network effects, 49–50, 141
openness, 183
political economy of, 184–5
pricing, 38–9
revenue potential, 45
side switching, 11–12
transparency, 73
volatility, 50
as winner-take-all, 42–5

platformization
overviews, 4–5, 201n2
advertiser views of, 148
creativity impacts, 7–8, 150, 154
cultural consumption, 11–12
cultural producer roles, 8
curatorial power, 92
democratic politics challenges, 7–8
democratization discourses, 16, 43, 128, 130
disinformation spreading roles, 175
inequalities, 50, 114, 129, 191–2
labor changes, 7
political economic stakes, 59
power, 50, 92, 130
programmability, 64
variation in, 13, 17, 194–8
platform subsidiaries
overviews, 41, 61
complementor uses, 47
cultural producer business model alignment, 183
generativity, 59
marginalized communities, 191
revenue distribution data, 165
value of, 180
see also ecosystems; Facebook Messenger; Instagram; platform
instances; TikTok; YouTube

platforms
overview, 5
accessibility, 111–12
as components-based data infrastructures, 60–7
cost decreases, 45
creating opportunities for producers, 114
creative, 133–4
cultural studies of, 188
disruptive aspects, 160
evolution, 27, 39–41, 114–15, 126
free labor dependence, 12
governance, 6–7
growth requirements, 27
as infrastructures, 7
vs. media companies, 6
multiplicity bene iting creators, 153–4
normative framework construction, 170
openness, 6, 183–5
precarity, 126, 204n4
reinforcing existing hierarchies, 113
resource reallocation, 164
sharing undermining scarcity, 12
transaction cost reduction, 46
transportation, 36
user data, 12–13

see also platform companies; platformization; platform subsidiaries;
social media
podcasting, 71–2
Pooley, Jefferson, 151
power
centralization and concentration, 185
cultural producers, 186
cultural production stage variations, 196–7
industry segment variations, 194–6
institutional, 182–7
intermediaries reinforcing imbalances, 189
and labor, 130, 190
platform dependency, 114, 131
platformization, 50, 92, 130
productive, 115, 187–92
regional variations, 197–9
sources of, 57
see also marginalized communities; relational power
precarity
algorithmic, 127
cultural producer-platform relationships, 185
labor, 111–15, 124–7, 131, 158, 198, 204n2
platform, 126, 204n4
platform dependency, 185, 189
Prenger, Mirjam, 122

productive power
overview, 187–8
individualization and commercialization, 188–90
inequalities, 190–1
logics and meaning-making, 191–2
vs. relational, 115
programmability, 64–5
propaganda, 174–6, 205n2
protection of cultural producers, 161, 170–3
publicity, 118
public service media, 136

R
race
Black Lives Matter, 99, 152, 155, 173
Black Twitter, 135
content diversity, 167
game industry inequality, 114
governance impacts, 99, 187
labor inequalities, 7
news industry inequality, 127–8
taste communities, 135
YouTube’s diversity, 46
racism, 99, 129–30
regional differences, 60, 169, 197–9
see also China
regulation, 84–91
see also governance
relational labor, 123

relational power
overview, 17–18
dynamism, 182–3
infrastructure, 56–7, 76
platform instances, 61–2
vs. productive, 115
representational identity politics, 142–3
Rheingold, Howard, 159
Rieder, Bernhard, 94
Roberts, Margaret, 175–6
Roberts, Sarah T., 116
Ruberg, Bonnie, 89
Russian platform companies, 60

S
Sadowski, Jathan, 73
Salamon, Errol, 121
Savic, Milovan, 132
Schatzel, Kris, 173
search engine optimization (SEO), 103, 118
Sender, Katherine, 142
sexism
game industry, 114
harassment and hate, 171–2
news industry, 127
stereotypical roles on social media, 129
Shirky, Clay, 6, 159, 162
sideloading apps, 77–8
side switching, 11–12
Skardzius, Karen, 128
Snapchat, 70, 88–9
Sobieraj, Sarah, 171

social games, 14, 25–26, 202n1
see also Zynga
social media
complementor revenue sources, 47
content moderation, 59, 89
curation, 95–6
democracy myths, 162
diversity, 128
gender roles, 129
moderation, 98–9
racism, 99
regulation, 88–9
Twitter, 87, 116, 135, 157
see also disinformation; Facebook; Instagram; social media creators

social media creators
as career aspiration, 109
and conspiracy theorists, 157
costs, 45
governance, 88
income-generation strategies, 28
inequality, 129
labor, 109–10
metrics uses, 135–6, 144
platform dependency, 13–14, 28, 194
platform selection, 29
visibility, 101, 173
see also Instagram in luencers and creators; TikTok creators;
YouTube creators
social media development, 129
social media editors, 118, 129
social networks, see social media

software development kits (SDKs)
overviews, 86–7
access, 66
Apple’s, 66, 79
game industry, 69
as gateways, 61
governance, 86–7
as infrastructure, 61–2, 64–5
and platform instances, 62, 65
power of, 64
TikTok’s, 54
software studies, 5, 7, 201n3
source diversity, 165–6, 169–70
Southerton, Clare, 170
Spotify
complementor revenue, 48
curation, 91, 93–4
distribution fees, 45
end-user data, 74
governance negotiation, 102
metrics, 147
podcasting control attempts, 72
Srnicek, Nick, 35, 48
star system, 45
Steensen, Steen, 177

Sterne, Jonathan, 188
Streamlabs, 133
subsidiaries, see platform subsidiaries
Sullivan, John, 71
Sunstein, Cass, 142

T
Tackley, Graham, 52–3
talent agencies
content creator scrutiny, 121–2
labor support, 121
and metrics, 147
social media creators, 11, 14, 110
visibility, 117
taste communities, 134–5, 141
Taylor, Daine, 142
technology companies, 160, 205n1
telecommunications companies, 59, 82
Tencent, 55, 60, 202n6

TikTok
affordances, 88, 133
audience, 132
Black Lives Matter content, 99
Chinese blocking of, 84, 98–9, 203n2
creativity discourses, 132–4
curation, 91
demographics, 155
discrimination, 168
infrastructure, 54
marginalized communities on, 155–6
moderation, 98
representational identity politics, 142–3
user-generated data, 12
TikTok creators
Brown, Tabitha, 155–6, 158
end-user data needs, 74
knowledge of infrastructure, 54
platform dependence, 14
platform precarity, 126
toolkits for innovation, 34
transaction (lean) platforms, 35–6, 44–5
truthfulness, 161, 174–7
tuning, 67

Turner, Fred, 160
Turow, Joseph, 142
Twitch, 14, 29, 48, 101
content moderation, 89
distribution fees, 45
streamers, 14, 29, 48, 101
vs. YouTube, 3–4
Twitter, 87, 116, 135, 157

U
Unity, 69–70
Usher, Nikki, 112, 164

V
vernacular creativity, 134–5, 141
Vine, 126
visibility and invisibility
algorithmic, 94–5, 104, 116
divisiveness, 112
editorial decisions, 192
inequalities, 115–18, 190–1
infrastructure, 57, 60, 186
intermediaries, 117
labor, 115–19, 190–1
political, 118–19, 190
social, 116–18
social media, 101, 116, 173
unexpected, 127
Vlist, Fernando van der, 56
Volz, Yong, 125

W
Waisbord, Silvio, 172, 174
Walt Disney Company, 39
Wang, Wilfred, 98
WeChat end-users, 46
WhatsApp, 41
Willis, Mikki, 157–8
winner-take-all dynamics, 32, 42–5, 167, 184
Winseck, Dwayne, 59
Witschge, Tamara, 204n2
women, 115–17, 129, 172
see also gender

X
Xiang, Yu, 110

Y
YouTube
access equality, 162–3
advertising, 1–4, 8, 14, 119–20
algorithmic discrimination, 168
content categorization, 2, 134–5
Content ID, 83
COVID-19 pandemic, 157
experts, 145
free speech policies, 1
governance, 2, 6, 94–5, 162
intellectual property, 83, 202n6, 203n10
network effects, 4, 43–4
nichi ication, 141
Partner Program, 2–3, 87, 162–3
ranking algorithms, 94
self-positioning, 16
as subsidiary, 41
vs. Twitch, 3–4
user self-certi ication, 87

YouTube creators
activism, 167–8
and the Adpocalypse, 2–4, 8, 14, 119–20
algorithmic knowledge, 101
Brownlee, Marques (MKBHD), 135
business practices, 29
Chamberlain, Emma, 109–10
“creators” label, 133
discrimination lawsuits against YouTube, 168
geographical diversity, 46
Kjellberg, Felix “PewDiePie,” 3, 43
platform dependence, 11, 13–14
platform employee status, 119
unionization efforts, 120
visibility, 116

Z
Zeng, Jing, 176
Zhang, Qian, 145
Zhang, Xiaoxing, 110
Zuckerberg, Mark, 16
Zynga
Facebook platform use, 14, 24–7, 64, 202n2
Facebook relationship, 27, 36, 42
stock valuation, 27

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CONTENTS

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Different industries and regions

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Zynga’s rise and fall

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Concentration versus digitalization

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Network effects and pricing

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Platforms and Cultural Production - Poell, Nieborg & Duffy

Platforms and Cultural Production - Poell, Nieborg & Duffy

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