Platforms and Cultural Production

Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, Brooke Erin Duffy

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509540525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at breakneck speed.

Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe.

Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming – and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.

1
Introduction

“Big brands fund terror,” read the frontpage of the British daily newspaper The Times on February 9, 2017; below the arresting headline was a screengrab of an online ad that – unbeknownst to the client – appeared in a YouTube video openly endorsing jihadists (Mostrous, 2017). According to The Times investigation, YouTube’s automated system of placing ads had paired promotions for consumer products and charitable organizations with videos championing radical and terrorist groups, including the Islamic State and Combat 18, a pro-Nazi faction. Several weeks later, the Guardian followed up with a report on the six-figure sums that “hate preachers” had generated from YouTube’s unwitting arsenal of ad sponsors – among them household brands like L’Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Nissan, and even the Guardian itself (Neate, 2017). Indeed, the report chronicled a kaleidoscopic range of extremist content funded through the platform: anti-Western propaganda from a Salafi Muslim preacher, videos by former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard David Duke, and anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by a fundamentalist pastor.

Asked to respond to the high-profile social media scandal, Ronan Harris, a representative for YouTube’s parent company Google, offered: “We believe strongly in the freedom of speech and expression on the web – even when that means we don’t agree with the views expressed” (Neate, 2017). While Harris went on to clarify that Google’s policies prohibit “videos with hate speech, gory or offensive content” from appearing adjacent to ads, he conceded that “we don’t always get it right.” Dissatisfied with Google’s rhetorical deflection, the Guardian – along with the BBC and the UK government – subsequently pulled all advertising from the video-sharing platform.

This move was among the catalysts for the so-called 2017 “Adpocalypse” – a term invoked by YouTube creators to describe the concerted efforts of brands to boycott YouTube advertising. In total, as many as 250 brands from the US and the UK threatened to halt their digital advertising campaigns. Confronted with such collective pushback, Google quickly changed YouTube’s policies to be more “advertiser-friendly” (Kumar, 2019). Among the changes in YouTube’s governance framework was an option for advertisers to exclude broad categories of content from appearing alongside their ads. These categories ranged from the descriptive – “live-streaming video” – to the eminently subjective “sensitive social issues,” defined as “discrimination and identity relations, scandals and investigations, reproductive rights, firearms and weapons, and more” (YouTube, 2020a).

While these changes appeased advertisers – at least temporarily – they introduced considerable angst and uncertainty into the professional lives of cultural producers, in particular those creators vying with one another to earn income from the oft-elusive YouTube Partner Program. Many creators abruptly found their content “demonetized,” meaning they would receive limited or no ad revenue in exchange for audience attention (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). Creators who provided mere commentary on “sensitive” social issues were especially susceptible to financial retribution. The same applied to creators whose content contained “strong profanity used multiple times … even if bleeped or for comedy, documentary, news, or educational purposes” (YouTube, 2020b).

In addition to demonetizing content deemed contentious, YouTube substantially raised the threshold for participation in the Partner Program: only channels with at least 1,000 subscribers that had ratcheted up more than 4,000 public watch hours in the preceding year were allowed to participate (YouTube, 2020c). This policy update made it especially difficult for newcomers to generate income, while barring creators with smaller followings altogether. The exclusionary nature of YouTube’s advertising program was exacerbated by a new rule which stated that demonetized clips were only eligible to be reevaluated by a human reviewer if they had a minimum of 1,000 views within a week (YouTube, 2020c). For context, given the mind-blowing amount of material on YouTube – 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute¹ – content categorization and labeling take place through automated, rather than human, systems of content moderation (Covington et al., 2016; see also, Kumar, 2019; Roberts, 2019).

Some of YouTube’s most visible creators publicly vocalized their indignation over the revised guidelines (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). For instance, Philip DeFranco, Ethan Klein, and Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, who run popular commentary channels catering to more than 115 million subscribers, all claimed to have lost a major part of their advertising earnings (Weiss, 2017a). Adding to their frustration was YouTube’s failure to share information about the demonetization process. As Ethan and Hila Klein of the popular sketch comedy channel h3h3Productions maintained in an interview: “There’s no report like, ‘This video that you made got demonetized because you did this, this, or this’” (Weiss, 2017b).

To be sure, the impact of YouTube’s changed advertising policies and Partner Program guidelines went beyond these vocal superstars. The stricter criteria for joining the Partner Program meant that creators with relatively small audiences were demonetized en masse. Moreover, the automated filtering of anything that the system deemed “advertiser-unfriendly content” put entire categories of videos at risk. All video clips of the popular game series Assassin’s Creed, for instance, were instantly demonetized because they contained the term “assassin” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 112). Similarly, The Great War channel, which provides educational videos about the First World War, saw many of its videos flagged for review (Burgess & Green, 2018: 150). An especially fraught dimension is the issue of viewpoint bias, wherein YouTube’s automated filtering unfairly targets creators who produce “culturally progressive content”; in the case of LGBTQ creators, this means that “any representation of their identity could be deemed sexually suggestive and ad-unsafe” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 113; see also Duguay, 2019). Similarly, in June 2020, a group of Black creators accused YouTube of racist practices, claiming that the platform uses its automated filtering mechanisms to “restrict, censor and denigrate” Black creators (Solsman & Nieva, 2020; see also Parham, 2020).

With their revenues dwindling before their eyes, some beleaguered YouTubers shifted their time and attention to other platforms. Ethan and Hila Klein, for instance, announced they would redirect their programming to the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform Twitch, which offers creators more dynamic mechanisms of monetizing their content (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). Others started to use Patreon, which allows fans to support creators directly through subscriptions (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). But even though some creators managed to generate revenue across multiple platforms, the creator community can scarcely afford to ignore YouTube completely. In terms of reach and revenue, Twitch and other competing video-sharing and live-streaming platforms remain in YouTube’s hulking shadow.

The reason to retell the story of the Adpocalypse is because of both its specificity – that is, it illustrates the evolution of a new industry segment, ostensibly emerging at the interface of Hollywood and Silicon Valley (Cunningham & Craig, 2019) – and its broader import. The case thus testifies to a wider movement wherein cultural producers become dependent on platforms and, consequently, struggle to defend their position and interests. Like many other platforms, YouTube is subject to powerful network effects, meaning that an increase in viewers, advertisers, and creators makes the platform more valuable to each of the other groups, which in turn further inflates the number of viewers, advertisers, and creators. Because of its entrenched position, when YouTube exerts power by unilaterally deciding to reward and/or punish particular types of videos, it directly impacts thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of cultural workers. At the same time, the combination of YouTube’s business model and the implementation of its governance framework are one of a kind. Not all platforms rely on advertising revenue, nor do their systems of moderation adhere to uniform content standards.

In this book, we examine how the relations between platforms and cultural producers emerge and take shape throughout key phases of the production process: namely cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization. Indeed, platform-wrought shifts in cultural production raise many questions, among them: how are the activities of cultural producers – from individual content creators and game app developers to news organizations and record labels – reconfigured when they integrate platforms into their operations? How does alignment and integration with platforms impact the economic sustainability of particular forms of cultural production? What types of content and services can and cannot be created, distributed, and monetized through platforms? What kinds of cultural content are made more or less visible by platforms? How does this affect the horizon of cultural expression – and for whom? And, finally, what are the consequences for the democratic character of cultural production and the distribution of power in the cultural realm?

Addressing these questions, we will show how the interactions between platforms and cultural producers unfold in ways that differ markedly across cultural industry segments and geographic regions. Platformization is not a single process of transformation, but, rather, constitutive of a wide variety of shifts shaped by the interactions between particular platforms and specific cultural producers. This book provides the conceptual tools to both examine these interactions and reflect on their implications. In so doing, we aim to develop a common language for scholars from different disciplines to compare and connect their research on specific instances of platform-based cultural production.

Platforms and Platformization

The interaction between platforms and cultural producers generates a process that Anne Helmond (2015) has described as platformization. In the context of cultural production, platformization can be understood as the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the organization of cultural practices of labor, creativity, and democracy around these platforms (Nieborg & Poell, 2018).² This section and the next will discuss how platforms and cultural producers are involved in the shifts in institutional relations and cultural practices at the heart of platformization. We start by focusing on platforms before directing attention to cultural producers and cultural production. The final section of this chapter lays out the central argument of the book and previews its organization.

Given the book’s conceptual focus on the cultural industries, it seems important to first delineate what is and what is not a platform in the context of cultural production. Building on business studies, critical political economy, and software studies, we define platforms as data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content and service providers (Poell et al., 2019).³ Following this conceptualization of platforms, we therefore understand platformization from an institutional perspective as the evolution of platform markets, infrastructures, and governance frameworks.

How platforms operate as institutions can be clearly observed in the case of YouTube, which allows for “frictionless entry,” or “the ability of users to quickly and easily join … and begin participating in the value creation that the platform facilitates” (Parker et al., 2016: 25). In this way, YouTube constitutes a market – one that aggregates and monetizes interactions among content creators, advertisers, and end-users (i.e., viewers). These interactions are, in turn, afforded by YouTube’s data infrastructure, which allows creators to seamlessly upload their content to be hosted on Google’s servers, while simultaneously enabling advertisers to target particular audience segments. This level of openness is distinctly different from the gatekeeping strategies employed by legacy media companies, which, in the words of Clay Shirky (2008: 98), revolve around “filter-then-publish,” as opposed to the platform strategy of “publish-then-filter.” The notion of filtering brings us to the crucial dimension of platform governance. To reduce friction that may emerge from unclear rules and regulations, YouTube has set out a governance framework. In its attempt to control and standardize platform-based interactions, YouTube provides codified rules (e.g., terms of service and creator guidelines) and developer documentation, as well as stipulations over who can access its tools and data infrastructure. YouTube, in other words, meets all the criteria of a platform.

There are also companies in the cultural sector that display characteristics of platforms and have been referred to as such by scholars and journalists; we argue, however, that they should be categorized differently. It is worth bearing in mind that digitization does not equal platformization. While the New York Times, Netflix, and The Walt Disney Company collect endless reams of data and use sophisticated algorithms to curate content, they are not platform companies (Lobato, 2019; Lotz, 2017). Instead,...