Multilayer intermediation: Exploring the organization of cultural intermediaries in social media entertainment

Abstract

This article investigates the phenomenon of the platformization of cultural production within social media entertainment, describing the peculiar interaction between creators and publishing groups. It relies on the case of the Italian video-making company The Jackal and their distinctive economic, organizational, and creative connection with the publishing group CiaoPeople. Starting from Bourdieu’s definition of cultural intermediaries, the article interrogates the role of social media creators as new cultural intermediaries occupying spaces between creativity and economy, acting as co-producers, tastemakers, selectors, and managers of cultural goods and services. Through a longitudinal study, the article argues that social media entertainment enacts a “multilayer intermediation” between brands, creators, consumers, and digital platforms, where legacy media companies may provide creators with tools to resist the entrance of platforms into creative production.

Keywords

content creators cultural intermediaries cultural production platformization social media entertainment

Introduction

With the advent of video-based digital platforms and social media such as YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok, media and cultural studies have largely focused on new forms of consumption and cultural production defined as “social media entertainment” (SME) (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Poell et al., 2022). SME is a growing industry, valued at $183.1 billion in 2019 and estimated to reach $652.5 billion by 2027 (Allied Research Market, 2020). It can be seen as the meeting of the dynamics typical of the cultural industry (Hesmondhalgh, 2006, 2013) and new forms of value creation from digital interactions, defined as “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017). Here, technological specificities of platforms become an integral part of cultural production and consumption (Poell et al., 2022; Van Dijck, 2009; Van Dijck et al., 2018), affecting both organization and new entertainment industry (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Lobato, 2016) and forms of creativity and work (Abidin, 2016; Duffy and Meisner, 2023; Lee, 2022; Nieborg and Peoll, 2018).

In this ecosystem, “youtubers,” “digital influencers,” or to use a more encompassing term, “content creators” (or just “creators”) (Cunningham and Craig, 2019), are “next-gen” stars: not only creative producers, but also entrepreneurs, community organizers, and cultural icons. Creative video-makers, who started to operate on YouTube and then expanded onto other social media platforms, have evolved from amateur “prosumers” (Fuchs, 2013) posting homemade videos to “factories” producing and posting a high rate of professionally-generated content with commercial goals (Kim, 2012; Shifman, 2012).

Creators can be seen as cultural intermediaries, as per the famous definition by Bourdieu (1984), workers who mediate the tastes and consumption practices of the audience in tune with the needs of the system of production. Nevertheless, in the social media ecosystem the relationships between brands, creators, and consumers are not linear, and see the intertwining of many factors—which seem to complicate the concept of cultural intermediaries as applied to creators. In particular, production and consumption practices are mediated here both by creative languages native to social media—such as authenticity and engagement with the community (Abidin, 2016)—and by technological materialities of digital platforms, which manage content visibility through parameters embedded into algorithms which are not accessible to creators (Duffy and Meisner, 2023; Hallinan and Striphas, 2016). This creates what Poell et al. (2022) have defined as a platformization of cultural production, where both creativity and culture economy are affected by the imposition of platforms’ systems of governance, including data-driven visibility, and distribution of contents.

In this study we describe a peculiar phenomenon within the platformization of cultural production in the field of SME: the interaction between creators and publishing groups. We explore this phenomenon looking at The Jackal, an Italian video-making company which started as an amateur video content creator and is now a subsidiary company of the publishing group CiaoPeople. Over almost 20 years of video content, The Jackal reaches 1.12 million subscribers with over 340 million views on their YouTube channel since 2006. Furthermore, The Jackal is active on the most popular social platforms, including Facebook (2.2 million followers), Instagram (2 million followers), and TikTok (1 million followers and 16.4 million likes). Drawing on a longitudinal study, we explore how the relationship between the video-making company and the publishing group complicates the idea of cultural intermediation in the social media ecosystem, and we analyse the effect this has on the level of creativity and business organization.

Our study shows that the technological and cultural specificities of social media platforms transform cultural intermediation and make it more complex, bringing further levels of intermediation between brands, creators, consumers, and platforms into being. Regarding this, we highlight how the new productive and creative environment of SME enacts a multilayer intermediation, in which legacy media companies are not only subdued to platform logics, but may provide creators with tools to resist the entrance of platforms into creative production.

Cultural intermediaries, social media entertainment and the platformization of cultural production

The concept of “cultural intermediaries” was introduced by Bourdieu (1984) and was associated with his analysis on the “new petite bourgeoisie” as that knowledge and middle class of workers continually engaged in “occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services [. . .] and in cultural production and organization which have expanded considerably in recent years” (Bourdieu, 1984: 359). The symbolic production of cultural intermediaries bases its meaning on the fact that these intermediaries use techniques of advertising imagery, marketing, and advertising entertainment, in order to persuade their followers, and hence potential consumers, through the construction of markets (Negus, 2002; Warren and Dinnie, 2018).

Bourdieu’s intent was to focus attention on these actors’ function in shaping and influencing the perceptions and the preferences of consumers in order to mobilize their choices. His “list” of cultural intermediaries involved all those most indefinable and professionally unstructured professions in the fields of cultural and artistic production, such as the big public and private companies in radio, television, marketing, advertising. Drawing on this view, authors have emphasized that the role of cultural intermediaries should not be confined to the mediation between production and consumption, economy, and culture (adding a monetary value to the second). According to Perry et al. (2015), the work of cultural intermediaries is also involved in generating art, community engagement, multiple creative practices from different fields, and in transferring knowledge via new platforms.

Interestingly, despite the recent and conspicuous body of work on the theme, the nature of the functions that cultural intermediaries perform remains fragmented and sometimes discordant. For what regards SME, literature highlights the centrality of advertising (Arriagada, 2021; Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Kim, 2012; Lobato, 2016) as part of cultural intermediation. Nevertheless, the transformation of advertising in forms of branded content and the language of “authenticity” that characterizes them (Abidin, 2016; Van Driel and Dumitrica, 2021) has been read mostly in negative terms, as an effect of the platformization of cultural production (Poell et al., 2022). As Nieborg and Poell (2018: 4276) highlight, the platformization of cultural production is characterized by “the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystem, fundamentally affecting the operations of the cultural industries.” In this framework, cultural producers and intermediaries are being all turned into platform complementors, as “these actors ‘complement’ the products and services provided by the platform” (Poell et al., 2022: 11). As a result, platform-dependent cultural producers change their practices in order to deal with the algorithmic management of content (Kellogg et al., 2018; Stark and Pais, 2020), either adapting or negotiating with platforms’ rules and regulations.

Through our empirical study, in the following sections we show a case of cultural intermediation where the interaction between SME creators and a more established actor of cultural industry such as a publishing group complicate and partially contrast the dynamics of platformization of the cultural production.

A longitudinal study of The Jackal

As social media entertainment is an emerging and constantly evolving business field (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Deuze and Prenger, 2019), we have conducted a longitudinal study of The Jackal video-making company, the most followed Italian creators, highlighting the evolution of their activity from their start-up in 2011 to their partnership with CiaoPeople publishing group and the current management reconfiguration.

Research method and data collection

Semi-structured in-depth interviews with people from CiaoPeople and the The Jackal were the main source of data for this study. All interviews were conducted visiting the company location and the publishing group headquarters several times. We have conducted preliminary single interviews with each of the five young video-makers, and then with all of them together. After that, two more in-depth interviews with the Digital Project Manager and the COO of the CiaoPeople publishing group were carried out.

The fieldwork was carried out between May 2018 and March 2022 (with a slowdown due to the pandemic emergency). Furthermore, we had the opportunity to observe how videos come into being in terms of content, idea brainstorming, and division of roles and activities, and how the artistic functions mix with the different skills and attitudes within the group. Following Cunningham and Craig (2019), we analyzed our data cross referencing representation strategies, community engagement strategies, and business organization strategies. We identified four core aspects in: (1) Management of self-identity; (2) Management of the community; (3) Management of advertisers; (4) Management of flows of attention.

From amateur to professional video-making company: 2011–2013

The Jackal video-making company is made by a group of childhood friends born in the suburbs of Naples. It was founded as a company in 2011, although they had been present as a group on YouTube since 2006, and had made videos at an amateur level since childhood. Thanks to the spread of the internet, and subsequently of social networks, they then started to upload their content on YouTube, making their work available for major companies and cultural institutions.

The original core is composed by three friends: Simone, Ciro, and Francesco, who then met alfredo during high school and subsequently Fabio. Simone, Ciro, Francesco, and Alfredo are respectively the CEO, the Casting Director, the Director and the Video Editor.

Passing from a group of amateurs to a professional video-making company, The Jackal aimed for economic sustainability without losing the originality of their creative language. They have approached branded content with this spirit, making viral videos which include ironic references to certain brands.

Thanks to the popularity reached with the first videos, many companies engaged them to create marketing videos for the Internet, aiding their launch as a professional video-making company. In this phase, the group manages its own self-identity developing a unique creative language which suits the rules of creativity on social media as well as the revenue possibilities offered by these. As the main way to make money through social media is advertising (Cunningham and Craig, 2019), they related their creative language to branded content and the management of advertisers, attracting companies who wanted to link their brand with the company’s attitude.

Explaining their creative process, they said that the key was to find the rules of creative expression on social media, which are different from those of other media. This has to do with both the content and the format: in order to get visibility on YouTube they had to understand the right length of videos promoted by the algorithm, which is different from that promoted by Facebook. They also had to find the right balance between storytelling and advertising, creating videos where the commercial ad is not the priority and where the story is captivating in its own right.

As Fabio told us:

We started proposing our stories both for entertainment and commercial purposes. Indeed, companies believed in our capacities and they entrusted their brand to us. Furthermore, we use sarcasm to give alternative messages of well-known products, with the aim of standing out from the huge quantity of ads present on the internet, including those hidden within entertaining videos.

Crucial for the company’s professionalization on social media was their capacity to manage the community of followers. The Jackal was established as a group of amateur video-makers before YouTube existed. Even before the development of the participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), they pursued a privileged relationship with their audience. Indeed, as Simone said during the interview:

When we weren’t able to upload our videos onto the internet, we used to share our content with other students at the Architecture Faculty. We used to announce the production of a new video using USB drives. Our work was known thanks to word of mouth, and this popularity has motivated us in producing new videos.

With one of their first professional productions, “Lost in Google,” they asked their followers to comment on the video (using the YouTube comment function) figuring out how they would like the series to continue. Doing this, they produced the first episode, and the following episodes were written reflecting the desires of the fan base.

Producing parodies of cult movies and commercials, they have generated a new creative space in which they, always present as actors, developed specific traits over time. In their first productions, all the founders played a role in order to reduce costs. This enabled the audience to recognize their talents.

The contract with a publishing group: 2014–2018

The acquisition of the video making company by the publishing group CiaoPeople constitutes an important moment in The Jackal’s professional evolution. In this phase, the publishing group manages the administrative aspects of the video makers and facilitates the management of advertisers who want to be sponsored. On its website, the publishing group offers the production of branded campaigns through the work of The Jackal.

What is unusual in the relationship between The Jackal and CiaoPeople is that in the beginning CiaoPeople was just a customer, and The Jackal treated them as one of the brands they introduced in their videos as branded content. After the acquisition, The Jackal became part of the CiaoPeople’s network and was in charge of the creative side of the group. Despite this, the link between the two is very rarely made visible by the video-makers. The CiaoPeople name and logo, in fact, don’t appear in The Jackal’s videos or on their social media pages. On the CiaoPeople website, on the other hand, The Jackal’s name and logo appear on the Home page, as if The Jackal was itself a brand through which the group can gain recognition from the brand companies that engage their services. These visibility strategies contribute to reinforce the company’s image, as in this phase the management of self-identity is shared with the publishing group.

The collaboration with the publishing group also has consequences for the management of the community, as The Jackal now cultivate their fan base through engagement campaigns launched from and fed through other channels of the publishing group, such as the magazine FanPage. This collaboration has an influence on both the company and the publishing group, as the “authenticity” (Abidin, 2016) of creators also makes the news more captivating for audiences who look to social media for alternative languages and sources of information. This is a crucial aspect in the creation and cultivation of a community of followers, directly connected to the revenue creators can generate from advertisers and platforms and related to the size of the audience the publishing group can reach.

As the COO of CiaoPeople told us during the interview:

Creative production of content has been part of our identity since the beginning. Fanpage juxtaposed journalism with inspirational topics. We had always imagined creative content that could deliver the message via this method, thanks to a combination of images, writing, music, and so on. This mix of ingredients derives from the competences of web video creators, and we have grown a lot since The Jackal entered our group.

Unlike most Italian newspapers, CiaoPeople’s Fanpage is not funded by an institution or political party, and so revenue for CiaoPeople is related to its ability to reach a mass audience. As explained by the Digital Project Manager, CiaoPeople has exploited two factors to do this: the creative work of video makers and the distribution through digital platforms. This recipe has allowed them to reach a wide audience, since this kind of content is privileged by platforms’ algorithms for its higher emotional leverage and involvement compared to standard journalism.

The CiaoPeople publishing group frames The Jackal’s creative work within an organizational structure tailored for digital platforms, social media and brands. At the same time, the publishing group itself innovates its organization and business model in the presence of creative and technological factors. This logic is related to the management of flows of attention, which occurs in economies of attention such as those of social media (Bilton, 2019). Redirecting audiences from one channel to another means gaining further possibilities to monetize time spent on the page, for example gathering behavioral data, analyzing preferences and tastes, profiling and optimizing advertising (Bilton, 2019).

Multiplatform activity: 2019–ongoing

The third phase of evolution of The Jackal’s business model sees their presence on several platforms, including social media like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and streaming platforms such as Netflix, as well as several appearances on national TV. In this phase, the role of CiaoPeople publishing group is intertwined with the outstanding fame of the group. The joined work allows them to multiply and aggregate revenue streams from several channels, not relying solely on social media and branded content. The publishing group also works to facilitate the relation with the platforms and other broadcasts, increase the quality of videos and reduce intellectual property infringements. Moreover, it is involved in the management of self-identity as it helps the creators to optimize their videos for social media algorithms, improving visibility. This allows for the creation of a new management model in which several layers are interconnected. As the COO of CiaoPeople explains:

It’s very difficult for an Italian company to have its voice recognized by the big tech corporations that own digital platforms. We have had some accounts in the platforms’ national offices for a few years now, but this doesn’t necessarily entail having privileged channels or better agreements in terms of visibility or revenues, since platforms privilege big investors and corporations.

Negotiation with digital platforms also affects the management of advertisers, since it is aimed at having not only direct sponsorships in form of branded content but also better sponsorships for pre-roll or post-roll banners associated with the company’s videos to optimize revenues.

Increasing engagement with multiple platforms also influences the management of the community and the management of flows of attention. As explained by the COO of CiaoPeople, one of the risks they faced in building relationships with social media platforms was losing control over distribution and therefore the connection with their audience: social media, in fact, collect audience data, and besides monetizing this data they can also influence audience behavior through changing their algorithms and interfaces.

CiaoPeople found a way to bypass this risk thanks to their close connection with The Jackal. The video makers’ creative identity used in branded content, in fact, allowed the publishing group to multiply their activity and revenue channels, thus reducing their dependency on social media. While publishers have always relied on advertising using a two-sided platform model, in the digital context publishers attract advertisers through other means, such as their partnership with video creators. This produces a shift from a two-sided to a multi-sided platform (Trabucchi and Buganza, 2020) whereby the organization has to balance revenue streams from several sources such as advertisers, creators, audience, social media and traditional media.

Thanks to the popularity and community engagement of the creators, the publishing group has the possibility to redirect the audience to other channels in its network—such as the digital newspaper FanPage or the infotainment channels Geopop or Cookist—and enhance web traffic and revenues from sponsors and advertisers. At this level, the management of the community, fostered by aggregating followers on multiple platforms, is a resource for both the creators and the publishing group which now completely share a creative and business strategy.

As the COO of CiaoPeople explains:

We rely on The Jackal ’s community of followers and try to understand the kind of formats which are privileged by each platforms’ algorithms, although they often change and we only know about it afterwards. In any case, revenues from the platforms are less than one third of our income, while about half of our income derives from the sponsors on our website. So our aim is to move traffic from the platforms to the website. Branded content constitutes the remaining third of our incomes.

In this scenario, The Jackal and CiaoPeople share the cultural intermediation strategy and as a result they innovate their business model: instead of solely relying on revenue streams deriving from platforms and advertisers, they can benefit from multiple streams aggregated through the collaboration of the creators and the publishing group.

We also observed that in 2020, due to the lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, The Jackal somewhat paused their brand collaborations during the most restrictive period of the lockdown. This was in line with the general slowdown in economic activities. However, they maintained engagement with their audience. From March 2020 to June 2020, they released four non-branded videos, filmed from home, focusing on the lockdown theme. These videos nurtured their connection with the community. Branded videos resumed as usual at the end of June.

Discussion: multilayer intermediation

In this study we have shown the evolution of the video-making company The Jackal, having started as an independent amateur group and subsequently joining the publishing group CiaoPeople to continue their work in the context of SME. Referring to the theoretical framework of cultural intermediation (Bourdieu, 1984), we have seen that in the context of SME both The Jackal and CiaoPeople are cultural intermediaries, as both mediate between advertisers, audience and digital platforms. This consideration is relevant to understand cultural intermediaries’ evolution in SME.

While previous studies (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Duffy and Meisner, 2023; Lobato, 2016; Zhang and Tong, 2024) noted that SME creators rely on other intermediaries such as more established media companies (e.g. publishing groups) for their professionalization, our longitudinal study allows for an understanding of the phases that characterize cultural intermediaries’ evolution, considering the intertwining between creative and management aspects. We have seen that the video company passes from self-management to a management approach shared with the publishing group. In this passage, we see that the roles are not separated and specialized, as one would expect, but are rather hybridized. In order to optimize revenues from different sources, CiaoPeople is involved in the management of self-identity, the community and advertisers, assuming the function of cultural intermediaries and reconfiguring this in the context of SME: developing creative content by “fine-tuning” The Jackal’s work according to taste, advertising offer and digital platforms’ algorithmic content management. Rather than splitting the cultural intermediation and the cultural production work, this configuration reveals how The Jackal’s creative work is not simply “managed” by CiaoPeople, but the two actors share both the creative and business strategy, in a scenario where the two aspects are not separable and in which managing is also a form of symbolic production (Johnson et al., 2014).

As cultural intermediaries, The Jackal and CiaoPeople work together to create value for products and ideas toward a community, using branded content which is beyond mere advertising and is rather a means to promote cultural change (Perry et al., 2015). This reveals a strategy that links the visibility provided by distribution on digital platforms with more established business models of sponsorship, using the creativity and community engagement of social media creators as catalysts.

In this scenario, the management of flows of attention is particularly relevant, and is a specific trait of cultural intermediaries in SME. In the framework of the platformization of cultural production, attention has been increasingly focused on the monetization of audience insights based on data analytics (Bilton, 2019). Nevertheless, our study shows that, despite tendencies of dependency from platform advertising (Joseph and Bishop, 2024), media companies experience this aspect with a certain tension. First of all because those data are always controlled by social media platforms with the risk of threatening the independence of the companies, which would compromise one of the main functions of cultural intermediaries—the promotion of new ideas and cultural change. It would also compromise revenues, as it would give total control over the context in which content is consumed, contact with audiences, and quality of data, to the platforms (Poell et al., 2022). As digital platforms collect and monetize audience behavior data, not only do cultural intermediaries in SME sell their authenticity and credibility, but they also sell flows of attention deriving from their community of followers. Those flows can be directed in several ways, and we have seen the emergence of competition between digital platforms and other intermediaries. In our study, in fact, the publishing group aims specifically to redirect flows of attention to their channels, in order to gain control over the platforms and optimize its revenues, as well as to maintain a certain degree of independence. This goes hand in hand with a need to limit the power of digital platforms in the distribution of content and control over audience behavior to gain control over the flows of attention.

Therefore, our case shows that, in the complex ecosystem of SME, traditional aspects of cultural intermediation are not disrupted, but reconfigured according to multiple layers of interaction. We call this configuration as multilayer intermediation, since it relies on cultural intermediation, but reconfigured according to the multiple layers of interaction that characterize SME: creators, publishing groups, advertisers, audiences and digital platforms. According to this model, cultural, creative, social, economic and technological aspects are intertwined, allowing cultural intermediaries to activate multiple revenue streams and multi-directional mechanisms of value creation, both optimizing technological affordances and counteracting the power of platforms.

Therefore, while Poell et al. (2022) alert about the entanglement between legacy media companies and platforms as the former are now embedded in a platform environment and are informed by platform data metrics (Ye, 2022), our study shows that in the multilayer intermediation legacy media companies do also the opposite: they provide creators with tools to resist the entrance of platforms into creative production.

In this context, multilayer intermediation doesn’t mine the creativity of cultural producers, nor the “authenticity” of the creator-community relationship: rather, it seems to be its enabling condition. This is evident also in The Jackal’s visibility strategies. Their motto is “We are storytellers,” which expresses well their desire to focus their identity on artistic expression rather than on advertising. At the same time, CiaoPeople tends to stay behind the scenes, unknown to most of The Jackal’s followers, in order not to threaten the sense of a direct relationship between creators and the community.

At the light of these considerations, we consider multilayer intermediation as a fruitful concept through which better understanding the evolving dynamics of platformization of cultural production at the light of the growing collaboration between SME creators and more established organizations of cultural industry.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Davide Bizjak

Domenico Napolitano

Mariavittoria Cicellin

Luigi Maria Sicca

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