Background

The rise of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok has fundamentally transformed the cultural industries. These platforms not only facilitate the promotion and distribution of traditional media products but paved the way for new creators, genres, formats, and novel monetization methods. Despite the differences, there are commonalities between traditional cultural industries and the new platform-based cultural production—one being a high degree of uncertainty. There are many aspiring artists and creators, but only a few make a living from creative production. What's more, success on social media platforms is difficult to predict due to opaque, constantly changing algorithms that recommend content to users.

Project Content

Economic sociology has shown that participants in commercial markets cope with uncertainties by imitating legitimate models, forming trusted relationships, following widely accepted practices, or collaborating with those who control key resources. These strategies are well-documented in many contemporary economies, particularly in the cultural industries. However, it remains unclear whether they are also utilized in the realm of social media. In this project, we aim to answer this question by using both quantitative and qualitative data. We investigate whether the strategies for coping with uncertainty, known from traditional creative industries, are also prevalent in social media entertainment.

Goals

In the CUTE project, we aim to answer the following research questions:

• Do people in traditional and social media-based creative industries adopt similar approaches in dealing with uncertainty?
• To what extent do coping strategies differ between channels, and what roles do agencies, Multi-Channel-Networks, and the YouTube Creator Academy play in spreading these strategies?
• Are there restrictions or even penalties for blending and changing formats, genres, and platforms, and are women disproportionately affected by these practices?
• Who benefits more from collaborations: established players or newcomers, or do both gain equally?

Methods

The research employs several key methods to investigate social media entertainment (SME) and the strategies used by content creators. We begin by reviewing online materials, with a particular focus on trade journals and industry associations. Additionally, we conduct approximately 30 semi-standardized interviews with experts and creators. These methods provide valuable insights into the personal coping strategies of media content creators, their perceptions of algorithm operations, their chances of building an audience, and their views on their prospects for success. A significant part of the project focuses on the statistical analysis of quantitative data, primarily from YouTube. The platform's extensive data availability and open policies make it an ideal source for such analysis. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the SME landscape, we also manually collect data on creators and their content

Innovation

By applying economic sociology to the study of social media entertainment (SME) and leveraging quantitative data, we are breaking new grounds. To date, SME has primarily been examined by critical media industry scholars using ethnographic methods. In the current project, we aim to expand the methodological repertoire by incorporating quantitative analyses. This promises to offer new insights and enrich the scientific discourse as well as the public debate.

Funding