Conference Agenda

This paper explores how creators in the Nigerian social media video industry navigate precarious labour stemming from the business models of digital platforms, specifically YouTube and Facebook. Following global developments, the economic growth and opportunities of digital platforms are creating career opportunities around the world. This has inspired Nigerian content creators who make short-form video content for millions of domestic and diaspora Africans. This paper examines the understudied precarious labour conditions of Nigerian creators in a saturated industry. Drawing from semi-structured interview with 15 workers and critical analysis of the trade press, we identify how domestic cultural norms shape the way Nigerian creators integrate spiritual beliefs in forming a sentiment of hope. This, in turn, provides inspiration to confront the precarity inherent to platform monetization. Our proposed analytical lens of “platformed hope,” identifies two faith-driven monetization strategies adopted by creators: (1) transactional para-sociality and (2) reversed labour remuneration. We contend that although hope and spirituality represent everyday practices in Nigeria, the creators’ strategies reflect practices of faith orchestrated by the unique economic, governmental, and infrastructural logics of platforms. Put differently, transactional para-sociality and reversed labour remuneration are strategic actions to attain monetization goals, but they also illustrate how Nigerian socio-cultural and economic dynamics – including the inclinations of hope and spirituality – shape platform-dependent cultural production as much as they define other aspects of life in Nigeria.

Keywords: Platform labour, Nigeria, precarity, platform monetization, hope labour

This study examines the networking and monetization strategies employed by Spanish-speaking financial influencers (finfluencers) on YouTube. Given the precarious labor market conditions facing young people, finfluencers promise easy and fast ways to “get rich”. These alternative pathways to financial success include cryptocurrencies, trading, online gambling, and internet-based business, like microtasking, dropshipping or online mentoring. Through a co-link analysis of video descriptions obtained through YouTube API v3 (n=1429), this research identifies key monetization methods, including course sales, affiliate marketing, crowdfunding, and direct product sales. Additionally, a co-comment network analysis and BERTopic modeling reveal dominant thematic trends within finfluencer content. Preliminary findings indicate a strong commercial orientation, with content often framed as “financial education” that includes links to affiliate marketing or course sales, a deliberate strategy to diversity their online presence in other platforms like TikTok, Instagram or Spotify, and topics related to trading, gaining money from home, Paypal and cryptocurrencies. This study contributes to the underlying business models of finfluencers in order to assess their potential impact on audiences and their role in shaping consumer behavior.

Live streaming is an activity performed by users on media platforms, characterized by the real-time broadcasting of content with simultaneous audience interaction. Twitch (owned by Amazon), the pioneer and largest live streaming platform, markets itself as a space that fosters “belonging by enabling streamers to build community” (Twitch, 2025). While framed as a leisure activity that encourages socialization, live streaming demands significant labor: streamers must plan and organize their work, maintaining constant dedication, investing their subjectivity as well as their capitals. As a result, categories such as socialization and monetization, pleasure and labor, user and worker blur and intertwine. Considering these contradictions, this research aimed to examine how the governance of live streaming platforms shapes the subjective experiences and sociability of Brazilian streamers, particularly in relation to the monetization of leisure and social bonds. Drawing on a digital ethnography on a live streaming platform and labor life stories interviews with brazilian streamers, we argue that Twitch mobilizes a double bind of self-monetization: it promises personal and financial fulfillment while instrumentalizing meaning, affects, and self-commodification under the guise of community-driven participation.

The acceleration of digital payments and lending in India in the name of “financial inclusion” has been facilitated by the Unique ID (Aadhar) system, Unified Payments Interface, and the India Stack infrastructure. I focus on the digital money and data transactions with respect to loan apps, and examine the intermediation process in the lending platform ecosystem. This involves deciphering how loan apps are serviced by fintech infrastructures allowing for automation of tasks such as risk score checking and identity verification. I map out the spaces of intermediation comprising platform lending to slow down the instantaneous transactions involving loan approvals and disbursals. This requires analyzing the relationship between the various third-party developers and the loan apps in terms of the financial software services provided through software development kits and application programming interfaces, while also exploring the political economic relationships between non-banking lenders and loan apps.

The “alternative data” collection and processing, entailing behavioral data captured from and flowing through phone and social media activity, that governs loan app decisions about eligibility, payment windows, ad interest rates remain under-discussed in the public domain. The loan app/lending platform catering to different stakeholders (lenders, borrowers, third-party developers) often paints itself as an intermediary merely facilitating or mediating transactions between various customers, thereby creating opacity about the activities of the wider fintech platform ecosystem. The paper uncovers the complex data-based interactions, recordings, communications, and decision-makings that happen across various human and non-human intermediaries in the process of materializing digital monetary transactions.