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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 define 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 defining 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) definition of cultural industries, we focus on the “industrial production and circulation of texts.” Traditionally, these industries include, among others, broadcasting, film, 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 fluid and difficult 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, film 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; Miège, 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 figure 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 find 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 specific 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 difficult 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 & Ibáñez, 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 briefly 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 conflated 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 specific 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 artificial 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 find 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 significant 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 commodified 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 & Mejías, 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.