Introduction

Over the past decade, media makers such as news organizations and game developers have explored a new mode of production, distribution, and monetization. Typically, developers and publishers start the content production cycle by identifying trending social media topics or popular genres, as well as by calculating production costs and advertising revenue potential. After content has been produced, users are ‘aggregated’ via a wide range of social platforms. These social media circulation efforts, in turn, generate relevant data on user engagement and retention, which are subsequently employed to calculate whether it is profitable to further optimize content and invest in paid-for promotion, or halt the engagement-optimizationretention- acquisition cycle (Van Dijck, Poell, & De Waal, 2018).

These emerging practices render cultural production and cultural commodities ‘contingent’. In previous work on digital platforms, contingency is understood in two distinct, but closely interrelated ways (Morris, 2015). First, it is argued that cultural production is progressively ‘contingent on’, that is, dependent on a select group of powerful digital platforms. In the West, these are Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM), which allow content developers to systematically track and profile the activities and preferences of billions of users. This increasingly close relation between cultural producers and platforms is a form of platform dependence, affecting all forms of media making. Another way in which media products and services accessible via digital platforms are contingent is that they become contingent commodities: malleable, modular in design, and informed by datafied user feedback, open to constant revision and recirculation.

Platformization can be defined as the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystems, fundamentally affecting the operations of media industries and production practices. Critically exploring these shifts is particularly important because the ‘platform’ metaphor, as Gillespie (2010) argues, obfuscates as much as it reveals.