Abstract
Originating as supplementary firms that operate in and around YouTube’s advertising infrastructure, Multichannel Networks (MCNs) have become a renewed form of cultural intermediaries shaping platform-based cultural production (Lobato 2016; Craig and Cunningham 2019). The emergence of MCNs represents “an opportunity to revisit some elements of the theory base around intermediaries and update it for the platform economy” (Lobato 2016, 350). To hold with this appeal, this research investigates MCNs’ operations in the context of China’s e-commerce livestreaming industry and rethinks its position within the complicated social commerce landscape based on a three-month participatory observation (from December 2021 to March 2022) taken place in an MCN organization (pseudonymised as W company) in Guangzhou, China. For providing a more grounded analysis, 15 in-depth interviews with media professionals working in MCNs (within and outside W company) or working in the e-commerce livestreaming sector as content creator, advertiser, or manufacturer were also included. I employ the concepts of “trade stories” (Caldwell, 2008) and “industry lore” (Havens, 2014) to describe MCNs professionals’ meaning-making practices when navigating a complex network of actors including platforms, livestreamers, brands and retailers. Whilst MCNs are important “platform complementors” (Poell, Nieborg and Duffy 2022, 11) fulfilling an intermediary role in compliance with platforms’ commercial logics, practitioners also struggle to keep up with the changing business models. The deeply integrated components between cultural production and marketing activities in MCNs’ work are supported and determined by the digital platforms they operate around, making the MCNs’ intermediary roles limited, contingent, and oftentimes failing.
Published Version
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