How partners mediate platform power: Mapping business and data partnerships in the social media ecosystem

Abstract

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.

The Extended Reach of Game Engine Companies: How Companies Like Epic Games and Unity Technologies Provide Platforms for Extended Reality Applications and the Metaverse

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API Governance: The Case of Facebook’s Evolution

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Social Media in the Audience Economy: Business-to-Business Partnerships and Co-Dependence

“…This paper considers the significance of business partnerships in the establishment of co-dependence relationships in the social media ecosystem to understand how partners mediate and shape platform power. Partners contribute to the ongoing process of 'platformisation' -the technological extension and economic growth of digital platforms, transforming markets, industries, and societal domains (Helmond, 2015;Helmond et al, 2019;Poell et al, 2019; van der Vlist and Helmond, 2021) -through their collective development of business-to-business platform infrastructures that extend the social media ecosystem. Partners are powerful industry players with 'their own interests, business models, and bottom lines' while remaining relatively invisible to consumers (Braun, 2013: 127) but remain underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power.…”