Читать книгу Platforms and Cultural Production - Thomas Poell - Страница 17

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 fields 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 efficiency 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 define as aggregators of institutional connections, including economic transactions, that mediate between end-users and content and service providers. Let us unpack this definition 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, nonprofits, 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 firms 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 specific 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, Lucasfilm, 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.