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What is Platformization?

Platformization is the increasing domination of the internet by a number of large companies whose products work as markets between users and other sellers. Nieborg and Poell have defined the concept as "the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content." In the early 2000s, the term 'platform' was gaining prominence in business and academic discussions about the internet. Poell and Nieborg describe how "In the early 2000s, US companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco provided management scholars with rich examples of how to attain “platform leadership” One of the most influential contributions to this scholarship conceptualized platforms (e.g., game consoles) as “two-sided markets”. However, critics including Poell, Nieborg, and Gillespie have suggested that the use of the term 'platform' intentionally obscured the business models and technological structures of these companies. Gillespie noted that “Figuratively, a platform is flat, open, sturdy. In its connotations, a platform offers the opportunity to act, connect, or speak in ways that are powerful and effective... a platform lifts that person above everything else”. Discussions of platforms as things began to shift towards platformization as a process in the 2010s. Helmond (2015) defined platformization as the “penetration of platform extensions into the web, and the process in which third parties make their data platform-ready”. This process includes the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which connect the data of third parties to the platform, and Software Development Kits (SDKs), which allow third parties to integrate their software with the platform. Business studies scholars have emphasized the 'network effects' that accrue to platform corporations, while other critics have described how the process of platform monopolization concentrates capital and wealth in the hands of a small number of business owners, while the platforms themselves thrive off labor exploitation. Trebor Sholz has said that “wage theft is a feature, not a bug” of crowdsourced labor platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Poell and Nieborg argue that "in the tradition of cultural studies", the process of platformization should be conceived of as "the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around platforms." Simple definitions of the complex idea of platformization also exist, such as, "Platformization is when you create a marketplace as your service, then charge people to use it." However, this definition only captures the process of platformization in terms of markets, while Poell and Nieborg argue that platformization "unfolds along three institutional dimensions: data infrastructures, markets, and governance".