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Access status: Open Access ,
Plataformização
(UNISINOS - Universidade do Vale do Rio Dos Sinos, 2020-04-04) Poell, Thomas; Nieborg, David; Dijck, José Van
This article contextualizes, defines, and operationalizes the concept of platformization. Drawing on insights from different academic perspectives on platforms – software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies – we develop a comprehensive approach to this process. Platformization is defined as the penetration of digital platforms into different economic sectors and spheres of life through infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental structures. It also involves the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginaries around these platforms. Using app stores as an example , we show how this definition can be applied in empirical research.
Access status: Open Access ,
Platformisation
(Internet Policy Review, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, 2019-11-29) Poell, Thomas; Nieborg, David; van Dijck, José
This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept of platformisation. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms—software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies—it develops a comprehensive approach to this process. Platformisation is defined as the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms. Using app stores as an example, we show how this definition can be employed in research.
Access status: Open Access ,
Analyzing institutional platform power: Evolving relations of dependence in the mobile digital advertising ecosystem
(SAGE Publications, 2025-04-02) Nieborg, David B; Poell, Thomas
This article calls for systematic analysis of the accumulation and exercise of institutional platform power in the digital economy. We examine how the relatively open mobile advertising ecosystem is nevertheless dominated by a handful of platform conglomerates, most prominently Google, Facebook, and Apple. Although extant scholarship acknowledges the concentration of corporate power in digital advertising, as well as its cultural, societal, and environmental harms, a comprehensive approach to platform power is missing. Providing a framework to develop such insights, we analyze how shifts in the advertising ecosystem are driven by four interrelated institutional platform strategies: infrastructuralization, platformization, conglomeration, and financialization. The 2021 introduction and subsequent rollout of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework serves as an example to demonstrate that even though institutional relationships of dependence are constantly evolving, control over infrastructural nodes tends to entrench the already dominant position of leading platform conglomerates.
Access status: Open Access ,
The political economy of Facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: Facebook Messenger as a platform instance
(SAGE Publications, 2018-12-17) Nieborg, David B; Helmond, Anne
Facebook’s usage has reached a point that the platform’s infrastructural ambitions are to be taken very seriously. To understand the company’s evolution in the age of mobile media, we critically engage with the political economy of platformization. This article puts forward a conceptual framework and methodological apparatus to study Facebook’s economic growth and expanding platform boundaries in the mobile ecosystem through an analysis of the Facebook Messenger app. Through financial and institutional analysis, we examine Messenger’s business dimension and draw on platform studies and information systems research to survey its technical dimension. By retracing how Facebook, through Messenger, operationalizes platform power, this article attempts to bridge the gap between these various disciplines by demonstrating how platforms emerge and how their apps may evolve into platforms of their own, thereby gaining infrastructural properties. It is argued that Messenger functions as a ‘platform instance’ that facilitates transactions with a wide range of institutions within the boundaries of the app and far beyond.
Access status: Open Access ,
Mainstreaming and Game Journalism
(The MIT Press, 2023) Nieborg, David B.; Foxman, Maxwell