SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE AUDIENCE ECONOMY: BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS AND CO-DEPENDENCE
2021
Social media platforms’ digital advertising revenues depend
considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the
business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on
platformisation and platform power. This paper considers the significance of partnerships in
the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the
infrastructure they build, mediate and shape platform power and governance. We argue that
partners contribute to ‘platformisation’ through their collective development of
business-to-business platform infrastructures. Specifically, we examine how they have
integrated social media platforms with what we call the audience economy – an exceptionally
complex global and interconnected marketplace of intermediaries involved in the creation,
commodification, analysis, and circulation of data audiences for purposes including but not
limited to digital advertising and marketing. We determine which relationships exist, which
are exclusive or shared, and identify key ecosystem partners. Further, we find that partners
build and integrate extensive infrastructures for data-sourcing and media distribution,
surfacing infrastructural and strategic sources and locations, or ‘nodes’, of power in this
ecosystem. The empirical findings thus highlight the significance of partnerships and
partner integrations and call attention to the powerful industry players and intermediaries
that remain largely invisible to us as audiences.
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