(Good) governance of platform monetisation
Taylor Annabell1, Daniel Angus2, Marcelo Alves3, Brooke Erin Duffy4, Blake Hallinan5, Thomas Poell6
1Utrecht University, Netherlands; 2Queensland University of Technology, Australia; 3Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; 4Cornell University, United States; 5The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; 6University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
How platforms govern, shape and regulate the speech and behaviour of users is entangled with their efforts to monetise interactions between users, content and third parties, which, as Poell et al. (2021) assert, is central to how platforms operate. This means that the governance of platforms (Gillespie, 2017; Gorwa, 2019) through terms of service, policies, standards, and interfaces ultimately serves to advance and optimise platform business models. Platforms also govern monetisation for content creators, advertisers, and businesses (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; van der Vlist & Helmond, 2021) in line with their dependency on advertising revenue (Joseph & Bishop, 2024). For instance, platform tiers and mechanisms of granting exclusive access through partner programmes, subscriptions and donations steer creators’ content production towards brand-friendly expression. At the same time, cultures and epistemologies of technology workers influence monetisation and governance (Seaver, 2022); the norms, values and assumptions embedded in software development and platform engineering inform the design and operationalisation of monetisation mechanisms.
In light of these observations, this roundtable considers both the governance of monetisation and monetisation as governance. The starting point of the discussion is the question of what good governance of platform monetisation could look like. The objective is to bring the debate on public values and the common good in platform society (van Dijck et al., 2018) to the specific issues of monetisation and platform governance. Inspired by speculative future-making and future imaginaries to resist the frame of inevitability (Markham, 2020), contributors are invited not only to reflect on the current landscape but also to explore possibilities and imagine different governance arrangements. How might monetisation practices and business models be governed in fair, equal, and accountable ways? What role can public policy and regulation play in shaping such governance arrangements? How can creators and users challenge the governance of monetisation?
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