Thomas Poell - Platforms and Cultural Production

1 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 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 profits in 2011” (Willson & Leaver, 2015: 150). In the years after, this specific source of revenue – payment fees – would dwindle relative to advertising revenue, which became Facebook’s main revenue driver.

3 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 4. See van Dijck & Nieborg (2009) or the work of Nicholas John (2016) for critical reviews of such discursive interventions.

5 5. A business model is “the set of activities a firm undertakes to create and capture value, including identifying products or services, revenue sources, customer base, and details of financing” (Rietveld & Schilling, 2020: 28).

6 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 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 profitable parts of their business more attractive to end-users.

8 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 9. https://itunespartner.apple.com/en/books/faq/Payments%20and%20Financial%20ReportGetting%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 10. See: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/business-models/.

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