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NMS0010.1177/14614448231165289new media & societyKohnen et al.

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From Comic-Con to Amazon:

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© The Author(s) 2023

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https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231165289
DOI: 10.1177/14614448231165289
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Melanie ES Kohnen
Lewis & Clark College, USA

Felan Parker
University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, Canada

Benjamin Woo
Carleton University, Canada

Abstract
San Diego Comic-Con is North America’s premiere fan convention and a key site for
mediating between media industries and fandom. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic
forced Comic-Con to abruptly move its programming onto an array of digital platforms
in an apparent “platformization” of the con. Informed by research on fan conventions,
media industries, and the platformization of cultural production, this analysis of the
online convention argues that Comic-Con was primed for platformization because it is
already platform-like. Conventions organize markets, infrastructures, and governance
to bring together attendees, media industries, and other “complementors.” Moreover,
platform logics were already shaping the convention pre-pandemic in the form of
experiential marketing and brand activations designed to capture attendee data. Rather
than a radical break, the Comic-Con@Home online convention and in particular
Amazon’s Virtual-Con activation are part of a longer process of reconfiguring the
relationships between fan conventions, cultural producers, and platforms.

Keywords
Comic-Con, cultural production, digital platforms, fan conventions, fandom, media
industries, platformization

Corresponding author:
Felan Parker, St. Michael’s College, 81 St. Mary’s Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1J4, Canada.
Email: felan.parker@utoronto.ca
2 new media & society 00(0)

Introduction
Fan conventions are sites of both community-building and commerce, growing out of a
century-long legacy of fans’ self-organization and institution building. In the United
States, the first comic conventions were held in the 1960s so fan-collectors could meet
one another, seek hard-to-find comics from dealers, and interact with creators. Despite
their name, American-style comic cons have always embraced multiple media fandoms
and industries (Hanna, 2020), and the best-known of these events—San Diego Comic-
Con (SDCC or Comic-Con)—has especially benefited from its geographic proximity to
Hollywood. From a modest 300 attendees in 1970, SDCC has grown to an estimated
130,000 attendees annually, filling the San Diego Convention Center and surrounding
Gaslamp Quarter for 4 days of panels, people-watching, screenings, signings, exhibits,
interactive activations, and shopping (Figure 1). Major film, television, and other enter-
tainment media companies seeking to build buzz for new releases and in-development
projects constitute a major part of this spectacle (Gilbert, 2018; Hanna, 2020; Salkowitz,
2012), but it can never be fully reduced to promotion. It is not only a space for fandom but
arguably constitutes its own fan culture (Jenkins, 2012; Kohnen, 2020; Salkowitz, 2021).
Like everything else predicated on face-to-face interaction, however, fan conventions
were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic (Woo et al., 2022). When SDCC’s organiz-
ing not-for-profit Comic-Con International (CCI) canceled the 2020 show and announced
Comic-Con@Home in its place, attendees and fans were understandably unsure about
what a “virtual” convention would look like. Spokesman David Glanzer promised CCI
would deliver the familiar “at-show experience,” just “on the Internet” (Kornelis, 2020).
To do this, Comic-Con@Home distributed the convention across a range of digital plat-
forms, to mixed reviews (Woo et al., 2020a). Taking Comic-Con@Home as a point of
departure, this article examines fan conventions through the lens of platforms and plat-
formization. On the one hand, the emergency pivot to an online convention is a case of
what we could call, following Naomi Klein (2008), disaster platformization. Confronted
with the “shock” of the pandemic, under-resourced convention organizers turned to
extant digital platforms to connect exhibitors, vendors, guests, and attendees; in the pro-
cess, for-profit platform companies inserted themselves as new intermediaries into exist-
ing industry–con–audience networks and accelerated processes of digitization already
underway. On the other hand, we argue SDCC could be spread across digital platforms
in this way because comic cons already acted like platforms.
Our analysis emerges from past research we have individually conducted on conven-
tions, media industries, and fandom, and an in-progress program of collaborative ethno-
graphic research on Comic-Con. The project formally began in spring of 2020, with
fieldwork originally planned for a 2021 convention that never happened. However,
Comic-Con@Home prompted significant interest among our team. We worked with our
collaborators to document the experience through fieldnotes, screenshots, video record-
ings, scraping social media hashtags, and rapid “walkthroughs” (Light et al., 2018) of
various sites and platforms. The team maintained contact throughout and debriefed in
online meetings following the convention. A recurring theme in these conversations was
the expanding role and visibility of platforms and platform companies: Marvel/Disney
and DC/Warner Bros. were largely out; YouTube and Amazon were in. But it is too simple
Kohnen et al. 3

Figure 1. Comic-Con crowds and marketing extend into the nearby Gaslamp Quarter.
Source: Photo courtesy of the authors.

to say that conventions were suddenly platformized in 2020. Drawing on literature on

platforms and cultural production, this mixed-methods paper contextualizes these devel-
opments as one episode in a longer, more complicated story of the evolving relationships
between conventions, fans, media industries, and platforms.
First, we apply a formal analysis to conventions to argue that they are a kind of plat-
form. Thomas Poell et al. (2022: 6) remind us that not every digital enterprise is a plat-
form; conversely, although most platform research focuses on digital media, not every
platform is digital (Steinberg, 2019: 108). Cons can also be described as multisided mar-
kets that mediate between cultural producers and end-users through the provision of
infrastructure and governance frameworks. To note this resemblance is not to say cons
are the “original platforms.” Rather, concepts developed to analyze digital platforms can
augment the growing body of fan and media industries research on conventions, how
they work, and the consequences of platformization in this particular sector (Bolling and
Smith, 2014; Edmunds, 2021; Gilbert, 2017, 2018; Hanna, 2020; Jenkins, 2012; Kohnen,
2014; Stanfill, 2019). Next, we turn to participant observation to document how platform
logics of data collection and self-mediation are embedded in the in-person con, notably
through “brand activations” mounted by film and television studios that combine expe-
riential marketing strategies with escape rooms or immersive theater. Activations exem-
plify what Nicholas Carah and Sven Brodmerkel (2020: 9) call algorithmic brand
culture—a cultural moment “characterised by the interplay between the open-ended and
creative capacities of participants and the calculative capacities of [digital] media plat-
forms”—and demonstrate that platformization was already reshaping SDCC before the
pandemic. Finally, we return to our online ethnography of Comic-Con@Home’s use of
online platforms with a particular focus on Amazon’s Virtual-Con, a self-contained
online activation conspicuously organized around Amazon-owned IP and platform sub-
sidiaries. Amazon’s “platform ecosphere” in miniature (Tiwary, 2020), Virtual-Con was
a marquee sponsor of Comic-Con@Home but also sat outside the SDCC program,
4 new media & society 00(0)

pointing toward a potential reconfiguration of the relationship between cons and cultural
producers, and between Hollywood’s legacy entertainment industries and Silicon
Valley’s tech industries (Cunningham and Craig, 2019).
For fan conventions, the pandemic was disruptive in every sense of the word, but
understanding the trajectories into and out of that moment is what interests us here.
Poell et al. (2022: 179) argue platformization is not a radical break but long-term trans-
formation intensified and accelerated by the pandemic. It is precisely this mix of con-
tinuity and change that we see when we look at SDCC. SDCC’s seemingly abrupt
move to digital platforms in 2020 should be viewed in the context of cons’ longer
entanglement with platforms and, we contend, demonstrates that relationships between
legacy media institutions and the platform economy are not simple, linear, or unidirec-
tional. To have any SDCC experience during the pandemic, CCI, attendees, and cul-
tural producers were thrown into the open arms and closed infrastructures of digital
platforms, shifting focus away from Comic-Con itself and ceding power and visibility
to media and tech companies. At the same time, platform companies and cultural pro-
ducers learned they could promote their products, content, and services directly to
online audiences, in some cases sidestepping Comic-Con entirely and gathering valu-
able user data in the process. Positioned at the intersection of myriad forces and inter-
ests, SDCC is a rich site for examining the complex and multiple process of
platformization (Chia et al., 2020), but, in reframing both Comic-Con specifically and
comic cons in general as platforms, we can see that they are not merely sites where
others act but are themselves dynamic actors that structure how producers, intermedi-
aries, and audiences interact.

Rethinking cons and/as platforms

Social media platforms are often conceptualized as technologies that connect their
users. But, as Erin Hanna (2020: 36) observes, “before platforms like Facebook, Twitter,
and Tumblr existed there were letter columns, fanzines, fan clubs, and conventions,”
institutions and practices that anticipated key aspects of digitally enabled participatory
cultures. In this spirit, we begin by looking backwards to reconsider Comic-Con—and
conventions as such (Woo et al., 2020b)—in light of recent work in platform studies.
Poell et al. (2022: 5) define platforms as “data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate,
monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content service providers.” At
first glance, this definition (like many others) would seem to exclude obviously ana-
logue conventions. At best, conventions are acted upon by platform companies. Poell
et al. take the digital nature of the platforms as a given in order to focus on distinguish-
ing platforms from other digital businesses and services that are sometimes (mis)labeled
as such. After warning that “digitalization does not equal platformization,” they outline
an “institutional perspective” on platforms as configurations of multisided markets,
infrastructural resources, and governance strategies that insinuate themselves between
cultural producers and content service providers (or “complementors”) and end-users
(pp. 5–7). This markets–infrastructure–governance model provides an analytic for
exploring precisely how digital platforms become indispensable intermediaries in par-
ticular industrial and geographical contexts, but neither the model itself nor
Kohnen et al. 5

Figure 2. View of the exhibit floor.

Source: Photo courtesy of the authors.

the functions it seeks to explain—namely, facilitation, aggregation, monetization, and

regulation—are necessarily digital. Marc Steinberg’s (2019) recent genealogy of the
platform concept in Japan is useful for teasing apart the technological and non-techno-
logical features of platforms.
From inside the maelstrom of platform capitalism, Steinberg’s (2019: 108, 120) claim
that “not all platforms are digital” and that the concept itself is “a-technological” may
seem counterintuitive. Yet, as he demonstrates, platform didn’t become associated with
computing until the mid-1980s (p. 76), and even this relatively short history has been
truncated by dominant definitions in platform studies. Responding to the overwhelming
academic focus on digital platforms, Steinberg argues that “the conditions for platform
theory are technologically dependent, even if multisided markets are not themselves nec-
essarily technological” (p. 104, emphasis added). In other words, the ascendancy of vari-
ous kinds of digital platform businesses from the 1990s onward enabled scholars to
articulate the platform concept, but that concept is not itself tethered to any particular
technology. What makes credit card companies, online auction services, and ride-hailing
apps platforms is not their digital infrastructure but the fact that they function as a trusted
“apparatus of mediation” (p. 109).
Following Woo et al. (2020b: 21), we understand cons as events that bring people
together, principally in physical spaces but with growing digital footprints, in order to
circulate goods, information, discourses, and affect. Platform theory helps us make these
intermediary functions visible and analyze them with more precision. Taking Poell
et al.’s (2022) model as an account of transactional or mediation platforms (Steinberg,
2019: 72) sharpens “platform” into a sensitizing concept (Blumer, 1954) that is both
more specific, because it is based on what platforms do, and broader, because it is not
limited to particular (digital) industries or product categories, than definitions focused
exclusively on their programmability.
6 new media & society 00(0)

Convention markets: networking audiences and industry

Acting as matchmakers between industry and audiences, SDCC and other fan conven-
tions organize multisided markets for space, time, and attention. A multisided market is
one where “platforms enable interactions between end-users, and try to get the two (or
multiple) sides ‘on board’ by appropriately charging each side” (Rochet and Tirole, 2004:
2). On one side, conventions rent space from a venue and parcel it up for exhibitors and
guests in the form of tables and booths on the exhibit floor or time on the programming
schedule to sell things, promote things, or both. At small conventions, exhibitors might
include dealers in comic books and collectibles, brick-and-mortar retail stores, and local
creatives or artisans. At SDCC, they also include major entertainment companies, who
set up elaborate booths, host star-studded panels, and run off-site activations (Figure 2).
Warner Bros., for example, spent over $25 million annually on its promotional efforts at
Comic-Con prior to the pandemic (Kit, 2022). On the other side are attendees, who typi-
cally pay at least a nominal fee for entrance. Woo et al.’s (2020b: 16) survey of 62 con-
vention organizers found that about two-thirds charged admission fees. Large-scale
events universally charge admission whether or not they are for-profit, and the costs are
not trivial: a full pass to SDCC, for instance, costs $304, and badges for the planned July
2020 Comic-Con sold out within 1 hour in November 2019 (City News Service, 2019).
Events may also supplement or replace this revenue stream with sponsorships, dona-
tions, or grants, potentially constituting additional sides. Importantly, multisided plat-
form markets generate positive externalities: “when more end-users join a platform, it
becomes more valuable for complementors, and vice versa” (Poell et al., 2022: 49–50).
SDCC exemplifies the cross-side network effects generated by fan conventions. High
attendance attracts bigger exhibitors, guests, and sponsors (complementors), while buzz
about who’s exhibiting, screening new footage, selling exclusive merchandise, signing
autographs, or staging activations attracts more attendees (end-users). Moreover, this
virtuous circle generates attention from subcultural and mainstream entertainment jour-
nalists, reinforcing Comic-Con’s perceived importance.

Convention infrastructures: integrating physical and digital layers

As a convention of SDCC’s scale makes clear, these events simply could not exist with-
out a host of physical, organizational, and digital infrastructure. Physical infrastructure
includes renting venues, tables, chairs, and dividers; supplying electricity; printing
badges and signs; setting up stanchions to direct traffic; and so on. After SDCC 2022,
attendees lamented that organizers had cut costs by foregoing the usual carpeting in the
exhibit hall; sore feet from hours on concrete floors are an embodied example of how
infrastructure becomes perceptible in its absence. Organizational infrastructure includes
contacts, contracts, procedures, and practices that sediment organizers’ operational expe-
rience and their relationships with stakeholders and suppliers. Finally, events now make
use of digital technologies to manage internal workflows, maintain data like mailing and
registration lists, and conduct marketing. SDCC, for instance, uses several enterprise
software platforms to manage the event space and schedule (Eventeny), badge purchases
(Configio), and hotel reservations (onPeak), and it maintains a promotional presence on
multiple social media platforms. However, this focus on the infrastructure that makes a
Kohnen et al. 7

Figure 3. Attendees are reminded not to live stream presentations at SDCC 2022.
Source: Photo courtesy of the authors.

con possible should not obscure the fact that SDCC and other cons are themselves infra-
structure for audiences, creators, and media industries.
Cons concentrate cultural producers, intermediaries, and audiences in one place and
time. This convergence is the precondition for both producers’ commercial/promotional
activities and fan practices. In North America, SDCC provides unparalleled opportunities
for producers to reach viewers, readers, and customers; for creators to network with
potential collaborators and clients; for journalists and influencers from around the world
to generate content; and for audiences to signal interest in products through in-person and
digital engagement. The utility and convenience of tools provided by platforms are a key
part of how cultural producers become platform dependent through “infrastructural inte-
gration” (Poell et al., 2022: 53). This conceptualization is useful for understanding how
conventions structure their complementors’ actions: the “convention circuit” and “con-
vention season” have become deeply integrated with creative professionals’ working
lives; commissions and con-exclusive prints or merchandise are important supplementary
revenue streams for illustrators; and professional cosplayers rely on cons as spaces for
content creation and audience development. At the other end of the spectrum, although
major media corporations can exert pressure on Comic-Con to accommodate their infra-
structural needs or may move off-site to build their own, as discussed below, they can also
be impacted by SDCC making changes to the exhibit floor, the programming schedule, or
the processes by which audiences access and are regulated in these spaces.

Convention governance: managing the flow of people, goods, and affect

The final element of Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy’s institutional platform model is govern-
ance, including the strategies of regulation, curation, and moderation. It is in this sense,
8 new media & society 00(0)

rather than the infrastructural meaning (cf. Helmond, 2015), that a con is “programma-
ble”: the selection of guests, exhibitors, and panels; the design of signage and documen-
tation; the layout of the exhibit hall; and the management of line-ups (enforced by
volunteer staff and private security) all structure what exhibitors can do and what attend-
ees experience at the event. Programming guides, maps, souvenir programs, websites,
official social media, and unofficial guides make certain aspects of the con more visible
than others and steer attendees along literal and figurative pathways (Kohnen, 2020).
Badges and wristbands designate different classes of attendees and the spaces they are
allowed to access and what rules apply to them (or not).
This is not to say that there are no explicit governance frameworks. In a separate pro-
ject, Woo and his students have been collecting publicly available policy documents
from fan conventions’ web sites. In addition to piggybacking on venues’ existing codes
of conduct, these documents usually combine regulative rules (rules that “regulate ante-
cedently existing behaviors,” for example, don’t bring weapons on-site, don’t take some-
one’s photo without permission, do use deodorant) and constitutive ones (rules that
“constitute new forms of behavior and thus regulate the very behavior that they consti-
tute,” for example, here’s how you get an autograph with a guest, here’s how you queue
to get into Hall H, this is how you get a refund), though with varying levels of specificity,
detail, and enforcement (Searle, 2018: 52). As recently as 1991, Comic-Con’s organizers
could claim they wanted “to make it possible for you to have fun, not to impose rules on
you” (qtd. Hanna, 2020: 73). As of July 2022, the “Convention Policies” page on Comic-
Con’s website has grown to over 2300 words in length. The longest sections relate to
convention badges and to costumes, while the code of conduct is relatively parsimoni-
ous, appealing to “common sense” standards. Several policies (e.g. no running, no sitting
in the aisles, and no luggage trolleys on the exhibit floor) seem designed to reduce con-
gestion and crowding and ensure attendees’ safety. Others try to prevent people other
than SDCC’s exhibitors and sponsors from taking advantage of the promotional oppor-
tunities afforded by the con (i.e. no handouts, no market research, and no retail sales
outside of a purchased booth) and to ensure entertainment companies continue to proffer
exclusive previews and celebrity appearances as part of the programming schedule by
forbidding attendees to livestream or record panels (Figure 3). Together, these last two
sets of rules govern boundaries around the con’s multisided market and between comple-
mentors and users in order to preserve the value of the platform for everyone involved
and safeguard the convention’s role as platform convenor. In this sense, governance is
constitutive of SDCC’s platform (Gillespie, 2018). This overview of Comic-Con’s mul-
tisided markets, infrastructural functions, and governance strategies demonstrates how
the platform concept can be usefully applied to non-digital events like fan conventions.
Like digital platforms, Comic-Con’s markets, infrastructures, and governance have
evolved significantly in its 50-year history, in tandem with changes in the media indus-
tries and society at large. Although, as we will detail, the rise of digital platforms has had
profound consequences for Comic-Con, we want to highlight cons’ own platform fea-
tures. Rather than seeing platformization as a singular event imposed on cons from the
outside, then, we can trace a series of encounters between different kinds of platforms
with different goals, needs, and power dynamics, unfolding over time, with these encoun-
ters influencing Comic-Con’s mediation, digitization, and datafication.
Kohnen et al. 9

Figure 4. SDCC’s brand activations generate and extract user data. RFID wristband
registration sign at NBC’s Superstore activation, 2019 (left). Sign at FX’s 2018 activation
encouraging social media self-mediation (right).
Source: Photo courtesy of the authors.

Hybrid platformization at SDCC

Film and TV studios are key complementors of SDCC’s multisided market and have long
used the con as a promotional platform by hosting panels and operating booths on the
show floor. These booths have increasingly integrated digital components such as sign-
up forms, QR codes, RFID wristbands, and requested (or sometimes required) social
media posts (Figure 4). As email addresses function as “fixed identifiers” that allow
marketers to track consumers through online and offline purchases, the seemingly incon-
spicuous name-and-email sign-up provides valuable information to companies (Walter,
2021). Since 2010, film and TV studios have also relied on activations, including branded
experiences that can take the form of escape rooms, themed restaurants, and immersive
theater, to gain attendees’ attention. Located close to the convention center in downtown
San Diego, activations promise an interactive deep dive into familiar storyworlds and
exclusive branded give-aways, driven by a belief in experiential marketing and the expe-
rience economy, both of which prioritize in-person, affective, memorable experiences as
a strategy for creating brand loyalty (Batat, 2019; Pine and Gilmore, 2011) and extend
digital corporate surveillance into physical spaces (Carah and Angus, 2018; Cheney-
Lipold 2017). Activations are an important component of how media companies partici-
pate in Comic-Con’s multisided market, and they rely on physical and digital
infrastructures, for example, open spaces around the convention center and RFID
10 new media & society 00(0)

wristbands or QR codes, for their operation. Governance takes the form of rules for lines,
codes of conduct, and sometimes the requirement of an SDCC badge.
While activations incorporate key facets of platformized cultural production accord-
ing to Poell et al.’s (2022) model, they also exemplify another crucial aspect of the con-
temporary digital platform economy, namely the central place of extracting and trading
personal information. First-party data collection is a main goal of integrating various
digital platforms and services into in-person activations (Kelly, 2021). As third-party
data collection becomes more legally contested or banned outright, the ability to collect
first-party data becomes increasingly important to film and TV companies who depend
on insights into the composition of their audience (Walter, 2021). By combining the
legacy aspects of SDCC’s platform, particularly the encounter of cultural producers and
audiences, with digital tracking technologies, activations demonstrate how deeply
entwined physical and digital spaces have become at the con and beyond. In other words,
activations take on their own platform qualities: they are an enclosed space that attendees
can enter without payment if they are willing to part with personal information as price
of admission. In return for their attention and data, attendees can participate in an exclu-
sive experience tailored to their pop culture interests and gain subcultural capital by
sharing the experience with others on social media.
Needless to say, these transactions raise broader questions about informed consent,
privacy, and commodification, given the uneven power dynamics between major media
corporations and ordinary users (Andrejevic and Burdon, 2015; van Dijck, 2014). For
example, at the 2019 booth for the TNT series Snowpiercer, attendees received a promo-
tional pin if they followed the program’s official Instagram account. Increases in social
followers, shares, and impressions are key performance indicators for activation produc-
ers (Swant, 2019). Another increasing trend at SDCC in the late 2010s was coaxing
attendees into a company’s digital ecosystem, especially their video streaming services.
DC/Warner Bros.’ 2019 Pennyworth activation asked attendees to download the Epix
streaming app to gain access to a secret room (Carson, 2019), and part of the swag
included a code for a free 6-month subscription to Epix Now (Nolan, 2019). This strat-
egy results in not only the possibility of continued subscription beyond the initial
6 months, but more crucially direct access to attendees’ data and unique device IDs,
sanctioned by the app’s end-user license agreement. Similarly, some activations rewarded
attendees who were already members of subscription services like DC Universe or
Hasbro Pulse with higher quality items than the swag given to non-members (Parks and
Cons, 2019). In another increasingly common form of digital tracking, NBC’s 2019 acti-
vations required attendees to put on RFID wristbands before entering. Various stations
throughout the activation required a swipe of the wristband, encoded with attendees’
personal information, in exchange for a photo op or a piece of swag, enabling granular
tracking and analytics.
Stickers on the ground surrounding the 2018 activation for NBC sitcom The Good
Place encouraged attendees to “stop and share” their experience on social media, now a
near-ubiquitous feature of activations. This encouragement of “self-mediation” via social
media (Khamis, 2020: 9) produces an archive ripe for algorithmic processing. On the
front end of social media, attendees are tracked when they share images, videos, and
industry-created hashtags; these impressions allow marketers to calculate the reach of
Kohnen et al. 11

brand messages. On the back end, this user-generated archive has the potential to train
algorithms with the goal of micro-targeted advertising (Carah and Angus, 2018). The
media industries perceive SDCC attendees as some of their most loyal fans, and their
data can serve as a blueprint for future promotional campaigns (Kohnen, 2021). As data-
driven advertising is a primary engine of the platform economy, activations function as a
microcosm of that larger industry and its muddy ethical implications. Consequently, tar-
geted data collection is one way in which activations were functioning as part of Comic-
Con’s platformized ecosystem even before the pandemic.
On a broader level, the entanglement of in-person experience, mediation of said expe-
rience via social media, and algorithmic processing is not specific to activations or
SDCC, but rather a defining characteristic of algorithmic brand culture. Digital platforms
play a key role in algorithmic brand culture by soliciting our attention and mediating our
experience, but even more importantly, by folding consumers into “fine-tuning the mar-
keting infrastructure we become embedded within” (Carah and Brodmerkel, 2020: 8).
Thus, as Carah and Brodmerkel (2020: 9) argue, “a critical theory of platforms depends
on a critical theory of algorithmic brand culture,” and fan conventions are a particularly
vivid instance for this theorization.
Off-site SDCC activations also point to larger cultural shifts as precursors to the stand-
alone fan conventions that major media companies embraced in 2020 and beyond. After
all, activations are not officially run by or part of Comic-Con even though they take place
during and physically adjacent to SDCC and take advantage of its platform, massive,
highly sought-after audience, and proximity to the industry hubs of “SoCal” Hollywood
and “NoCal” Silicon Valley (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). In the online environment,
however, it becomes harder to tell the difference between an activation at a convention
and a rival event. The COVID-era proliferation of in-house branded virtual events run in
parallel or totally separately from SDCC shows how the pandemic noticeably shifted the
balance of power between cons, media industries, and platform companies.

Platformizing Comic-Con@Home 2020 and Amazon

Virtual-Con
About a month after stay-at-home measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were
implemented around the world, SDCC 2020 was officially canceled on 17 April 2020,
followed several weeks later by the announcement of Comic-Con@Home on 8 May. A
short YouTube video with animated text and triumphant music promised “Free parking;
Comfy chairs; Personalized snacks; No lines; Pets welcome; Badges for all; And a front
row seat to . . . COMIC-CON@HOME” (CCI, 2020). Ahead of the event, CCI shared
graphic design assets so participants could print their own Comic-Con badges and signage
and recipes for approximating convention center fare. On day 1, CCI released welcome
videos featuring local dignitaries, organizers, and volunteers. These gestures sought to
downplay the disruption of the COVID pandemic and Comic-Con’s digital re-mediation,
and even celebrate the amenities of an at-home con, efforts that did not necessarily align
with what Comic-Con@Home’s virtual attendees actually experienced.
12 new media & society 00(0)

Fan conventions, as we have argued, operate in platform-like ways for industry exhib-
itors, attendees, and other actors, and in recent years, digital platformization has become
more and more apparent in and around the con. Comic-Con@Home in some ways turned
this inside out, distributing core components of Comic-Con across various digital plat-
forms and content portals: pre-recorded panels were hosted on YouTube; the annual
Masquerade costume contest and art show moved to Tumblr; a room of gaming tables
became a Discord server (with some games hosted on other video conferencing plat-
forms); screenings turned into online watch parties that required the Scener browser
extension and subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, and other streaming services; and the
convention’s massive exhibit hall—one of the spaces most closely identified with SDCC
as a site of visuality, spectacle, and commerce (Hanna, 2020: 127)—was replaced with
an image map of the planned booth layout that linked out to exhibitors’ own online
storefronts.
Rather than a centralized and organizing hub, SDCC itself became little more than a
logo across these disparate components. There was relatively little opportunity for direct
interaction among fans or with creators, and several significant exhibitors declined to
participate, including Marvel Studios and DC Entertainment. The resulting experience
was uneven. Fans on social media seemed appreciative of the effort given the extenuat-
ing circumstances, some small-scale exhibitors anecdotally reported better than average
sales (Kremenek, 2020; toddland, 2020), and fan/community-led panels received signifi-
cantly more viewers on YouTube than they would have in-person (thanks in part to the
ability to watch them asynchronously). However, the dominant narrative in the film and
television trade press was one of failure (Woo et al., 2020a). While the metrics on even
the most popular SDCC 2020 videos and virtual events pale in comparison to the top
content on YouTube and other platforms, presumably the flurry of con-related engage-
ment was at least somewhat beneficial to platform companies as well. This is just one
instance of the larger phenomenon of disaster platformization whereby the crisis of the
pandemic allowed digital platform companies to insert themselves into virtually all
aspects of society and culture (Klein, 2020).
The platformization of Comic-Con@Home also took other, more acute forms, how-
ever. This is most vividly illustrated by Amazon Virtual-Con, a separate-but-official
“content hub” integrating and cross-promoting subsidiaries Amazon.com, Audible,
ComiXology, IMDb, Prime Video, and Twitch (Amazon Studios, 2020). According to a
particularly enthusiastic Deadline article, Virtual-Con was “a destination for fans to
access and engage with Amazon’s full range of Comic-Con activations” and “gather as a
community to share in the experience” (Ramos, 2020). More prosaically, it was a web-
page on the Amazon.com online store with flashy comic-book inspired graphics and
links to video, audio, and interactive content, divided into four categories reflecting
SDCC’s main areas of cross-media, cross-fandom focus (Figure 5). Unsurprisingly, all
four sections strongly emphasized platforms, services, brands, and content under the
umbrella of Amazon’s corporate ownership: “SHOWS” focused on panels, interviews,
and roundtables about Amazon Prime original series like The Boys and Upload, as well
as IMDb TV coverage of the con and sponsored content on IGN.com; “GAMING”
linked to the official @Twitch channel on Twitch.tv, where con-related programming
was livestreamed throughout the event; “COMICS” included panels, demonstrations,
Kohnen et al. 13

Figure 5. An official sponsor of Comic-Con@Home, Amazon Virtual-Con pulled people away

into a separate site entirely focused on Amazon’s platform instances and IP.
Source: Landing page screenshot courtesy of the authors.

and other content related to popular titles from a variety of publishers presented by
ComiXology and Audible, some of which were also source material for shows on Prime;
and “COSPLAY” featured video tutorials and demonstrations with popular cosplayers
and costume designers, the majority related to Prime series including Carnival Row and
Good Omens. Third-party marketing firm Digital Media Management was contracted to
coordinate with the featured cosplay influencers to cross-promote their Virtual-Con vid-
eos on Instagram to “drive traffic to the virtual event” (Digital Media Management,
2020). Consistent with the broader Comic-Con@Home approach, each item listed on the
main Virtual-Con page included a big yellow button entreating “attendees” to “listen
now,” “learn more,” “visit channel,” or, more bluntly, “shop now,” leading to other plat-
forms, mostly Amazon-affiliated but in some cases competitors like YouTube or Apple
Podcasts.
In addition to its broad focus on fannish/geeky media genres, Virtual-Con also adopted
the rhetoric of exclusivity so commonly associated with Comic-Con (Hanna, 2020).
Several interactive activities were prominently featured on the Virtual-Con hub. An elab-
orately designed web-based escape room promoted Hanna, including exclusive clips
from the show as well as video recorded especially for the activation, while The Boys
“Supes Swag” tool allowed a limited number of users to design and order customized
t-shirts and other merch for free (Kohnen, 2022). Unlike much of the Virtual-Con pro-
gramming, which is still online and accessible, the interactive activations were only
available during Comic-Con@Home, further vaunting their exclusivity. As our collabo-
rators Suzanne Scott and Erin Hanna observed, the “Supes Swag” promotion in particu-
lar was only intermittently available, with scarce information about how it worked
(perhaps designed to keep people checking back in regularly), reminiscent of exclusive
14 new media & society 00(0)

Figure 6. The Boys T-shirt design options during Amazon Virtual Con 2020.
Source: Screenshot courtesy of the authors.

in-person con swag (Figure 6). Some fans explicitly compared it to “circling the booth”
waiting for restocks at the physical con.
Much like the hybrid in-person/online instances of platformized algorithmic brand
culture discussed above, various forms of user data collection characterized Virtual-
Con. Much of the programming required users to have an account on platforms such as
Twitch to participate in livestream chat or ComiXology to read freebie comics and
previews, going beyond sponsored content to actively encourage “lock-in” to Amazon
platforms and services. Interactive activities required users to sign up for mailing lists,
and other forms of user data collection in exchange for access, shifting established
hybrid practices from in-person activations fully online. Social media engagement was
likewise encouraged, adding a layer of self-mediation to the experience and creating
additional opportunities for brand engagement and data gathering. The official Twitter
hashtag #amazonvirtualcon was used fairly extensively, primarily by users in select cit-
ies participating in an official prize pack giveaway of snacks, lanyards, and other
branded swag. Although it is difficult to determine how successful Virtual-Con was
from Amazon’s perspective, particularly since they did not reprise the event at Comic-
Con@Home 2021, based on publicly visible engagement numbers it appears to have
been popular.
Collectively, this menu of Amazon-branded content, its interconnected presentation
on the hub page and across several platforms, and its promotional rhetoric of geeky cel-
ebration and exclusivity worked to position Virtual-Con as a self-contained con experi-
ence without ever having to leave the Amazon platform ecosystem. As Daniel Joseph
(2017: 134–135) argues, although online virtual environments do not have the same limi-
tations as physical spaces, there is still a high premium on visibility on digital platforms
and storefronts. As Amazon was an official sponsor of Comic-Con@Home, links to the
Virtual-Con had prominent placement on the main SDCC website and social media, and
it received extensive press coverage (e.g. Al-Heeti, 2020; Darwish, 2020; Glasse, 2020;
Ramos, 2020), further reinforcing the sense that it could almost stand in for the con itself,
Kohnen et al. 15

especially when many of the official SDCC panels required digging deeper into the web-
site and often had rough, amateurish Zoom-meeting aesthetics compared to the slick
professional production values of Amazon’s offerings.
Echoing the gated, increasingly elaborate Amazon off-site activations at SDCC and
the staging of on-site Exhibition Hall pavilions that spatialize corporate licensing rela-
tionships (Hanna, 2020: 148–150), Virtual-Con maintained a symbolic connection to
Comic-Con but constituted itself as a fully-realized branded experience of fandom and
consumption that seemingly seamlessly integrated Amazon’s subsidiaries. This reflects
Amazon’s broader corporate strategies, particularly around Amazon Prime Video. Ishita
Tiwary’s (2020: 88) research shows that unlike competing streaming platforms, Amazon
aggressively seeks to integrate users “within a portfolio of digital goods and services.”
Similarly, Karen Petruska (2018: 355) argues that Amazon’s content production and dis-
tribution arms serve to “attract customers to the Amazon website to initiate, extend, and
solidify a relationship between that customer and all of Amazon’s retail and service
lines.” Amazon Prime Video Chief Marketing Officer Ukonwa Ojo was unambiguous
about the company’s goals with activations, which she describes as “taking our custom-
ers beyond the show experience to really experience the full family of Amazon the parent
brand” (Boorstin, 2022). The integrity of sub-brands, platforms, licensees, and partners
like Twitch, IMDb, ComiXology, individual Prime shows and channels, and IGN are
maintained (Wayne, 2018), but the design and programming of Virtual-Con clearly
asserts the “larger umbrella” of its corporate brand as an overarching “platform eco-
sphere” built upon its underlying Amazon Web Services infrastructure, which structures
much of the web (Tiwary, 2020: 88).
SDCC was the prime motivator for Virtual-Con, but SDCC itself and the geographic
specificity of San Diego was largely absent for visitors to the Virtual-Con hub, its tradi-
tionally platform-like role partially subsumed by the powerful Amazon promotional
engine. A preview on Inverse went so far as to frame Amazon as “thankfully” “stepping
up” to “save” Comic-Con@Home, which otherwise “seems like a bust” due to the smaller-
than-usual major media company presence, contributing to the broader media narrative of
failure noted above and giving Amazon’s dominance an air of inevitability (Kleinman,
2020). In this sense, Virtual-Con is a small but notable instance of “platform capture” in
which platforms enclose practices and strategies originating outside of the platform itself
to their own benefit (Partin, 2020; Stanfill, 2019). As if by sleight of hand, Amazon
replaced the markets, infrastructures, and governance Comic-Con had established over
decades of evolution with its own, while still benefiting from SDCC’s brand recognition.

Conclusion
SDCC is often described in excessive terms: as a kaleidoscopic spectacle, a tidal wave of
humanity, impossible to communicate if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. It is indeed
a massive, complexly layered event that offers different things to its many different users
and publics. An a-technological, institutional conception of platforms is a vital tool for
making sense of what a con like SDCC does and how it works—both before and after the
rise of digital platform companies. Importantly, it helps us see connection, continuity,
and entrenchment of power in the midst of disruption and change brought on by the rise
16 new media & society 00(0)

Figure 7. Marvel’s daily livestreams were one of the few attempts to make SDCC 2022 a
hybrid event.
Source: Photo courtesy of the authors.

of digital platforms, and to recognize conventions and their organizers as subjects as well
as objects of platformization. Live events are an edge case that illuminates the broader
phenomena of platformization and algorithmic brand culture. This exercise of viewing
cons through a platform studies lens helps us see these processes in a new light, rather
than reifying a false legacy/new media binary.
We suggest that Comic-Con was “primed” for certain kinds of platformization because
it was already functioning like a platform in several important respects. In forcing SDCC
online—and, specifically, onto private, for-profit digital platforms—the pandemic
moment highlighted the features of cons that most resonate with platform logics. CCI
essentially had no choice but to rely on these platforms in 2020 and 2021, given the time
frame and resources available for their pivot to digital. In the process of this disaster
platformization, however, they selected aspects of Comic-Con that were compatible with
the affordances (and business models) of YouTube, Tumblr, Scener, Discord, and so on,
while downplaying others, such as ephemeral moments of community among fans,
which are already circumscribed by branded activations and were all but invisible during
Comic-Con@Home. The spectacle of sociality and co-presence is a key draw at in-per-
son conventions but didn’t really translate online as “participants” in an ephemeral hap-
pening became “audiences” of pre-recorded video and “users” of digital platforms.
Although the online convention was potentially accessible to a much wider audience
than the in-person event at San Diego, which is necessarily limited by capacity con-
straints at the convention center and local hotels as well as travel costs (Hanna, 2022),
Comic-Con@Home provided few opportunities for its theoretically global attendees to
interact with one another or with cultural producers. Moreover, in making SDCC more
dependent on digital platform companies, organizers also carried along the various stake-
holders—media conglomerates, licensors, creatives, dealers and vendors, professional
cosplayers, and fans, collectors and other attendees—who already depended to varying
degrees on SDCC as a mediation platform.
Kohnen et al. 17

For some, these constraints also came with new opportunities. Rianka Singh (2021:
712) describes platforms as “spaces and places to amplify one’s voice, to have a speaking
part in a narrative, and to display power.” Savvy cultural producers who would typically
have small tables or booths at the con could leverage social media to attract more atten-
tion and direct more traffic to their online storefronts, while avoiding the travel and ship-
ping costs ordinarily associated with exhibiting at a con. Similarly, the transformation of
the convention’s programming into pre-recorded YouTube videos removed all sorts of
logistical problems for attendees, who no longer had to worry about getting (and staying
in) a seat for particularly popular panels or about choosing between parallel sessions;
while media franchises like The Walking Dead still garnered the most eyeballs, the online
format shifted the balance somewhat, enabling fan-led and niche panels to reach many
more viewers than in a normal year.
More significantly, the sector-wide pivot to digital events demonstrated to independ-
ent and corporate cultural producers alike that they could communicate directly with
fans without going through a con. Although Amazon didn’t reprise Virtual-Con for
Comic-Con@Home 2021, offering instead a single Prime Video and IMDb TV–branded
panel and a handful of Prime Gaming events, we see Virtual-Con as an early proof-of-
concept for brand- or franchise-driven virtual events like DC FanDome, Netflix’s
Tudum, and Skybound Xpo, where SDCC complementors arguably turned themselves
into competitors. Although none of these events quite replicate SDCC and other cons’
full intermediary role, the promise of engaging with audiences—and collecting their
data—on companies’ own terms must be compelling. These developments are consist-
ent with wider patterns of platformization and algorithmic brand culture, in which major
media companies (both legacy and Silicon Valley) continue to dominate the cultural
industries despite the supposed democratization and nichification of cultural production
(Poell et al., 2022: 21). At the same time, the continued centrality of the San Diego
Convention Center itself, represented not only in the Comic-Con@Home virtual exhibit
hall but also in third-party merchandise and a spontaneous “shrine” set up on site by
local fans in 2020, suggests that the site-specific nature of cons will not be easily
superseded.
The pandemic is not yet behind us, but conventions are back in the United States,
Canada, and beyond, and the long-term impacts of this episode of disaster platformiza-
tion remain uncertain. SDCC held a small-scale in-person event in November 2021 and
returned to its regular dates in July 2022. The exhibit hall and Gaslamp Quarter once
again featured elaborate displays and immersive activations, and Hall H and Ballroom 20
once again hosted announcements and sneak peeks from film, television, and streaming
video companies (with long lines to get in). Except for Marvel’s daily livestream from
their booth on the show floor and a few panels that were conducted with virtual partici-
pants (Figure 7), Comic-Con largely returned to a model of exclusive access, to the
chagrin of overbooked attendees and fans who could not attend in-person (Damore,
2022; Hanna, 2020, 2022; Melden, 2022). Although this is at least partly a concession to
ensure media companies’ participation in the con, it also recentered Comic-Con as a
platform mediating relationships between cultural producers and fans easily accessible
to Hollywood and Silicon Valley alike. Yet the framing of the returning con as
“in-person” and “face-to-face” belies the continued interweaving of physical space with
18 new media & society 00(0)

the digital. In algorithmic brand culture, the continuum between in-person experiences in
specific spaces and social media is not incidental, but definitive: it is precisely the media-
tion of affect produced by platforms that generates valuable data for platforms and mar-
keters. Consumer surveillance in the service of promotion remains a driving force for
media industries.
Following Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy’s work on the platformization of cultural pro-
duction, we are left with the question, are cons becoming or already platform dependent?
Comic-Con@Home underscored not only how much SDCC depends on a blend of mate-
rial and virtual frameworks, which increasingly includes digital platforms, but also that
other actors depend on SDCC as a platform unto itself. These networks of platform
dependence are key to understanding contemporary media industries and fan cultures:
much like the cultural producers discussed by Poell et al., media companies, creatives,
vendors, fan organizations, and individual attendees rely to varying degrees on their
always-contingent access to the platform SDCC affords. SDCC’s multisided markets for
time, space, and attention; physical, organizational, and digital infrastructures; and strat-
egies governing how different entities access and make use of its spaces are what make
it the Comic-Con and not simply a comic con.

Acknowledgements
All three authors contributed equally to researching and writing this article and are listed alphabeti-
cally. The authors wish to acknowledge the insights and camaraderie of their collaborators on the
Swarming Comic-Con project, Anne Gilbert, Erin Hanna, Shawna Kidman, Suzanne Scott, and
Matthew J. Smith. Many thanks are also due to David Nieborg and the two anonymous New Media
& Society reviewers for their valuable feedback, and all those who shared comments and questions
at the Canadian Communication Association and Global Perspectives on Platforms & Cultural
Production conferences where in-progress versions of this paper were presented.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The Swarming Comic-Con project is supported in part by funding from
the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [grant number 435-2020-0115].

ORCID iDs
Felan Parker https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2097-4956
Benjamin Woo https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3153-6428

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Author biographies
Melanie E.S. Kohnen (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis &
Clark College. Her research examines contemporary media industries, audiences, and digital plat-
forms, connecting the micro-level of media events, like the site-specific experiential marketing at
San Diego Comic-Con, to macro-levels of cultural forces, like the platform economy and the
algorithmic processing of human experience. Her work has recently been published in the
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Popular Communication, and Television and New Media
as well as several anthologies.
Felan Parker (he/him) is Associate Professor, Teaching Stream in Book & Media Studies at St.
Michael’s College, University of Toronto specializing in media industries, game studies, and digi-
tal media. His research explores the production, distribution, and reception of “indie” digital games
and the role of conventions, expos, and festivals in media industries as co-investigator on the
Swarming Comic-Con project. He also co-edited with Jessica Aldred Beyond the Sea: Navigating
Bioshock.
Benjamin Woo (he/him) is Associate Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Carleton
University. He is principal investigator of the Swarming Comic-Con project and director of the
Research on Comics, Con Events, and Transmedia Laboratory. His books include Getting a Life:
The Social Worlds of Geek Culture and The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and
Their Publics, co-edited with Jeremy Stoll.