How Partners Mediate Platform Power:
Mapping Business and Data Partnerships in the Social Media Ecosystem
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📂Platformisation and the Data Ecosystem 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 article 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 partners 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 determined which relationships are involved, which are exclusive or shared, and identified key ecosystem partners. Further, we found 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 draw attention to the powerful industry players and intermediaries that remain largely invisible.
🏷social media platforms 🏷platformisation 🏷partnerships 🏷partner integrations 🏷platform power 🏷data intermediaries
ℹNote: A blog post about this article is published on bigdatasoc.blogspot.com, the blog of Big Data & Society.
📋 ✍Cite
| 📋Cite (APA) | van der Vlist, F. N. & Helmond, A. (2021). How Partners Mediate Platform Power: Mapping Business and Data Partnerships in the Social Media Ecosystem. Big Data & Society, 8(1), 1–16. SAGE Publications. DOI: 10.1177/20539517211025061. |
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| 🔗Link (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025061 |
| Kind | Journal Article; Original Research Article |
|---|---|
| Author | F. N. van der Vlist; A. Helmond |
| Designer | F. N. van der Vlist |
| Publication Date | 2021, June 14 [first published online]; 2021, January–June [issue published] |
| Journal | Big Data & Society (BD&S) |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1–16 (16) |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (London, United Kingdom) |
| Identifier | 10.1177/20539517211025061 [self]; 2053-9517 [part of]; 262513311 [funded by]; 275-45-009 [funded by] |
| License | CC BY 4.0 |
| Data Availability | The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/ekum8. |
🖇Attached ⋮
| 🖇Attached | Name | 🕓Date Modified ↧ | Kind | Access | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ↩ | [Parent Directory] | ||||
| ↪ | bigdatasoc.blogspot.com |
Mapping Business and Data Partnerships in the Social Media Ecosystem | 2021-06-16 | 📝Blog Post | 🌍Public |
| 📌 | social-media-and-platform-historiography.html ├ DOI: 10.18146/tmg.434 |
Social Media and Platform Historiography | 2019-11-06 | 📄 🔍Research Article | 🔓Open Access |
| 📌 | facebooks-evolution.html ├ DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667 |
Facebook’s Evolution | 2019-05-01 | 📄 🔍Research Article | 🔓Open Access |
| ↪ | osf.io/ekum8/ ├ DOI: 10.17605/osf.io/ekum8 |
Business and Data Partnerships of the 20 Most-Used Social Media Platforms | 2018-12-07 | 🗄Research Data | 🔓Open Access |
| ↪ | osf.io/47zyc/ ├ DOI: 10.17605/osf.io/47zyc |
Historical Facebook Platform ‘Boundary Resources’, 2006–2018 | 2018-12-07 | 🗄Research Data | 🔓Open Access |
| the-political-economy-of-social-data.html ├ DOI: 10.1145/3097286.3097324 |
The Political Economy of Social Data | 2017-07-28 | 📄 🔍Conference Proceeding | 🔒Closed | |
| ↪ | blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk | Big Data Advertising Infrastructures | 2016-09 | 📄 🔍Conference Proceeding | 🌍Public |