Thomas Poell - Platforms and Cultural Production

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 specific 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 specific modes of cultural production, including the historical trajectories of particular industry segments in particular cultural contexts (Miège, 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 influencers 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 flexibility to develop further case studies and comparisons.

Having defined 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 specifically, to what extent – and in what ways – are creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization reconfigured when cultural producers integrate platforms in their operations?