Localised precarity in social media entertainment: YouTubing in Turkey

Introduction

YouTubing – the practices of producing, distributing and/or monetising video content on YouTube – has become a contemporary media career, with the platform's attempts to professionalise, formalise and regulate the field of content creation leading to the industrialisation of social media entertainment (SME) and precarious labour practices (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). An attempt to understand the precarious conditions of creator labour, referring to all forms of insecure, uncertain, vulnerable, unstable, unpredictable conditions of work and life (Gill and Pratt, 2008), requires consideration of a network of actors who interact with or depend on each other in multiple ways. This network includes creators who produce, distribute and/or monetise creative content via YouTube; the platform itself, with its policies and socio-technical affordances, which top-down governs the labour practices it mediates; advertisers who fund the creator economy; socioculturally situated audiences whose attention is sold to advertisers while they are enjoying creative content on the platform; multi-channel networks (MCNs) as cultural intermediaries which have helped YouTube to professionalise the field of SME; production houses (PHs) as new-generation, small-scale media companies professionally producing and distributing media content via a team of creators/media workers; and nation-states with their political economy of media, their laws regulating the internet, and their wider sociocultural environments that impose norms to police creative content. Through this framing, ‘the actors – human, corporate, [governmental], and technical – and the connections between them’ become observable (Baym, 2021: viii). Paying particular attention to the connections between creator labour, platform, and nation-state and to socioculturally situated creator–audience relations, this article situates YouTubing within the geographic specificities of media production, distribution, consumption, and regulation in Turkey. In doing so, it demonstrates the nuanced ways in which creator labour, mediated by a global platform like YouTube, intersects with local contexts, shaping creative content production and generating localised precarity in the experiences of Turkish creators.

To examine the precarious nature of platformed content creation, scholars of a growing interdisciplinary field of creator studies have mostly placed content creator labour within the context of platform architectures and the broader SME industries. In line with this, the existing research has examined creator precarity at platform level to understand how platforms’ creator governance strategies via their policies and algorithms create uncertainties, at market level to reveal how competing for audience attention in the context of rapid changes in entertainment trends as well as audience taste fosters precarity, and at industry level to note the competitiveness in the platform ecosystem as another source of precarity (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Duffy, 2020; Duffy et al., 2021; Glatt, 2022). When Turkish creators’ YouTubing is only examined in the context of the platform architectures and the wider SME industries, the research participants’ experiences show notable similarities to those of other creators around the world. Therefore, applying this framework – developed in Western contexts – to YouTubing in Turkey carries the risk of homogenising precarious working conditions for content creation, erasing diverse local factors affecting creator labour.

While YouTube is a global platform, and precarity is experienced globally, there are still localised dynamics that must be considered when attempting to understand creator labour. This is primarily because the ways multiple actors interact with or depend on each other in the processes of YouTubing are contingent upon geographic contexts. Taking this into account, research concentrating on regions other than the Anglo-American and English-speaking ones has demonstrated how creator labour is performed in the nexus of the market and cultural politics of state and society. Scholars have addressed the emergence of the state as a powerful actor governing the Chinese SME (Craig et al., 2021), the impact of linguistic and cultural factors in shaping creators’ content strategies to appeal to local or regional audiences in India (Mehta, 2020; Mohan and Punathambekar, 2019) and Thailand (Limkangvanmongkol and Abidin, 2019), as well as the significance of access to technology, which deepens inequalities in the creator economy in Kenya (Njathi, 2023). However, the ways in which these localised labour practices give rise to new precarity factors have received less attention. Building on their work, I examine localised YouTubing in Turkey to provide a comprehensive way of understanding creator precarity that is rooted in the local production cultures.

Furthermore, the existing literature has focused on self-professionalised or aspiring individual creators who are deprived of employment rights protected by law as they are not considered employees and, therefore, do not have access to social protection like health insurance, paid sick leave, minimum wage, and pensions (Poell et al., 2022). However, along with the professionalisation of YouTubing, PHs as new-generation media production companies – founded by internet entrepreneurs such as a US-based digital media company BuzzFeed, which operates across multiple platforms, or by individual YouTube creators who secured a big audience base like MrBeast – have also been included in the SME industries. Within the creator economy, PHs function as ‘complementors’ (Poell et al., 2022), but are different from MCNs (Lobato, 2016), talent management agencies, and other intermediaries (Stoldt et al., 2019) as their role is not to assist creators to professionalise their creative practice. Rather, they are YouTube partners who produce social media native content via a team of media workers, including creators, directors, video editors, and content editors and monetise those creative outputs like individual creators do via the YouTube Partner Programme (YPP) and external brand deals. Due to their corporate-like structure, mimicking a hierarchical and sometimes blurred division of labour in the processes of media production, they engage in consistent advertiser and/or family-friendly content creation. Therefore, they would be preferred more by advertisers for brand safety reasons, increasing competition in the field of SME for individual creators. While creators generate income through/for YouTube, the platform has assigned a precarious status to both independent creators and PHs. Incorporating the experiences of managers/founders of PHs and their formal salaried employees, who have access to some social protection that individual creators do not have, is an important aspect of this research, illuminating their shared experiences and concerns with individual creators regarding aspects of localised precarity that are beyond economic and algorithmic precarities addressed in the dominant literature.

This article situates creator labour, performed independently or in the context of PHs, in the wider political, economic, cultural, and linguistic contexts of Turkey, which requires a brief exploration of YouTube's place as well as other factors affecting media production in the country's current mediascape. YouTube has successfully penetrated the Turkish mediascape, especially after the launch of the platform's localised version in 2012, despite repeated blocking of access to the platform by the Turkish state (Bozdag, 2016). According to the latest report of the Turkish Statistical Institute (2023), the internet usage rate was 87.1% in 2023 for individuals in the 16–74 age group (this rate was 47.2% in 2012) and the second most used social media platform by individuals is YouTube with 69.0%. There are various reasons for the platform's success, including but not limited to the country's high youth population, who adopt new technologies more quickly than older generations (Isman and Güzelsoy, 2019), access to news commentary produced by independent journalists (Zinderen, 2021), and the platform's use as ‘a broadcast re-distributor’, facilitating access to television content (Ildır, 2024). The introduction of the YPP with the platform's localised version has also given rise to independent creators, those working in the context of PHs, TV celebrities, and journalists generating income from YouTubing. Accordingly, YouTube's creator ecosystem contributed more than 2 billion Turkish lira to Turkey's GDP in 2021 and supported employment equivalent to more than 45,000 full-time jobs in Turkey (Oxford Economics, 2023).

Media production in Turkey, however, has always been contested, due to the industry's close connection to the state of the economy, which itself is contingent upon its crisis-prone nature, ‘extra-economic coercion’ practices brought by the increasingly authoritarian politics of Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since 2002, and the resulting increased informality and precarity (Kaderoğlu Bulut, 2020). Content regulation by politicised state organisations like the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), which top-down implement the AKP's media and cultural policies, has further exacerbated the challenges faced by media workers in Turkey (Algan and Kaptan, 2023). Within this context, ‘the Turkish state is a key driver of precarization’ in the media industries through its legal interventions supported by its authoritarian neoliberal politics (Bulut, 2022: 152). YouTubing in Turkey cannot be examined in isolation from the larger context in which the media industries operate, because the intertwining of state regulations, cultural policies, and economic factors significantly impacts the landscape, not only for media workers in the film and television industries but also for creators and PHs in the SME industries.

Consequently, the article takes various geographic specificities into consideration, such as the wider local media landscapes shaped by economic and political factors; the country's political climate, that affects levels of access and participation; the effect of language on the global distribution of media outputs; and creator–audience relations situated in sociocultural contexts. Incorporating these geographic factors that are under-represented in the dominant literature into the research produces new insights into how practices of a global content creator labour are performed in different localities like Turkey. The findings reveal that the preciousness of platformed content creation is shaped not only by economic but also political, cultural, and linguistic practices that are, in turn, dependent on the geographic specificities of media regulation, production, distribution, and reception.

Localised precarity

YouTube has given rise to a new era in media globalisation by allowing production, distribution, and reception of SME content on a global scale. Nonetheless, there are various ‘local YouTube scenes’ that have emerged with localised versions of the platform as well as with the effect of MCNs (Burgess and Green, 2018). Localised YouTubing cannot be understood by merely looking at the availability of locally relevant content, the display of local ads in local languages targeting local audiences, the production of location-based data, and accessibility to platform resources in different languages. Studying local YouTube production cultures in relation to precarity requires more than on-platform exploration of localisation. This type of inquiry necessitates situating media work in local production landscapes and paying attention to the relationship between local and global actors, similar to an approach developed in production studies since the global dispersion of film and television productions (Mayer, 2009). Such an approach allows ‘the ways particular cultural and political histories and economic policies shape working conditions, cultural values, and personal/professional networks in local production cultures’ (Curtin and Sanson, 2016: 13) to be revealed. Building on this work, I argue that the same approach is also essential to understand diverse local experiences of YouTube creators. Localised YouTubing, therefore, refers to the ways in which creator labour is situated in the local context of a particular nation-state where political, economic, cultural, linguistic, and technological factors shape or constrain platformed content creation. In other words, localisation of YouTubing has more to do with where creators are based, affecting the processes of production, content decisions, and reception that are, in turn, linked to the wider local context.

My concern with the local context does not simply suggest that local production cultures provide ‘raw data’ that should be interpreted through the lens of Western theory (Willems, 2014: 16). I therefore make a genuine attempt at de-westernisation so as to cultivate a new theoretical approach grounded in the subjective experiences of creators in a non-Western context that are absent or overlooked in research conducted in Anglo-American contexts. For this, I coined the term ‘localised precarity’, referring to a broader set of insecurities and uncertainties that are rooted in the complex relationships between platforms, creator labour, and local contexts. Building on Kraidy and Murphy's (2008: 346) conceptualisation of the local, which does not exist ‘in suspended opposition with the global’, I argue that localised precarity underscores the need for a more nuanced approach to analysing power relations between state–platform–creator–audience actors within the local context and beyond global platform architectures. In this sense, with its focus on localised precarity rather than abstracting YouTubing from local contexts of media regulation, production, distribution, and reception, this research contributes to Western notions of creator precarity, which are largely used to analyse economic and technological uncertainties arising from the organisation of creator labour within the platform architectures and the wider SME industries (Duffy et al., 2021).

Theorising localised precarity starts with acknowledging the nation-state as an important local actor in platformed content creation, as in other forms of media production, through its law-making capacity that governs production practices and shapes the political economy of media (Bulut, 2022). This allows for a complicating of the locus of creator precarity, as well as platform precarity, because platforms ‘are subject to the whims of the state’, leading to ‘unintended consequences for platform labourers’ (Steinberg et al., 2024: 5). The existential threats to platforms posed by the states (i.e. platform bans), for instance, are not only signs of platform nationalism but also of precarity for creators who depend on those platforms for income (Craig et al., 2021). Furthermore, enforcing national content regulations for platforms, whose policies tend to overlook local sensitivities and values that are vital to media production and reception, emerges as another source of localised precarity (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). In addition to nation-states’ persistent intention to regulate platforms and cultural production, creator labour is also governed by audiences who are culturally and politically situated subjects. This becomes especially evident in the practices of creators who produce content in non-mainstream languages and thereby depend on local audiences. This not only makes language a factor in precarity that limits global reach (Ganti, 2016) but also highlights the significance of understanding how creators’ adapt their content strategies to the cultural politics of the society in which their audiences are located (Mehta, 2020). Accordingly, this approach to localised precarity provides a broader framework, drawing attention to the complexity of the relationship between platforms, creator labour, and local contexts, which influence the stability of creators' already unstable work.

Method

The article presents findings from a larger research project that examined creator labour in Turkey and employed mixed methods, such as interviews with creators to capture their own realities in their working lives, observations in PHs to trace the dynamics of production cultures, and the walkthrough method to identify platform affordances and regulatory frameworks. While the observational study provided insights into the processes of media production and co-creator relations, and the walkthrough method helped me to put subjective interpretations of creators into the context of the platform affordances and regulatory frameworks, and to consider how these factors shape or constrain creator labour, the findings presented in this article are primarily based on the interview data which captures creators’ localised precarity experiences.

I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Turkish creators between December 2019 and June 2020. The interviews were conducted in-person (N: 6) until the research was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and online (N: 3) after the introduction public health measures in mid-March 2020. I designed the interviews as semi-structured, which better utilises ‘the knowledge producing potentials of dialogues’ and allows the research subject to become visible ‘as a knowledge-producing participant’ during the interviews (Brinkmann, 2018: 579). The interviews, lasting between 40 minutes and 2 hours, covered multiple dimensions, including creators’ motivations for YouTubing; career objectives and concerns; skills used in the processes of media production, distribution and promotion; relations with co-creators, audiences, brands and MCNs; and localised experiences as YouTube creators in Turkey. The recruitment of research subjects was based on voluntary participation. Following the institutional ethical review process (Reference number: SRESC-2019-2376320), all subjects were fully informed about the processes of data collection, usage, storage, anonymisation and disposal, and signed a consent form. I gave a pseudonym to each participant and PH due to ethical considerations.

The research participants, identified through snowball sampling, were active creators, generating a liveable full-time income from YouTubing. They were diverse, consisting of independent creators who are self-professionalised, those who engage in paid employment in PHs as part of a production team and have recognisable job titles as media workers, as well as managers/founders of such PHs. This diversity is also evident in their channels’ subscriber range, content genres and the size of the PHs for which they create content (see Tables 1A and 1B in the Appendix). Given this diversity, they all experience precarity, especially concerning the ways the platform mediates their labour practices and geographic specificities shaping their creative media practices.

After completing the data collection, I first engaged in open coding to decontextualise data by breaking it into simpler categories and then practised focused coding to recontextualise the data by tracing thematic similarities among previously identified categories (Saldaña, 2013). One major theme, which emerged in the nexus of precarity and economic, political, linguistic, and sociocultural factors, formed the basis of this article, facilitating the conceptualisation of localised precarity grounded in the experiences of Turkish creators.

Localisation of precarious YouTubing in Turkey

The article presents three main findings that demonstrate how creator precarity comes from geographic specificities shaped by various economic, political, cultural, and linguistic factors of the national context of creation. While these issues, demonstrating unique challenges faced by Turkish creators in navigating a landscape of uncertainties, emerged organically in my discussion with the research participants, the impact of technological factors (i.e. access to the internet, technical equipment, and digital tools) remained unmarked in their narratives. The reason for this might be that all participants were based in Istanbul, where there is digital infrastructure for high-speed internet, and the majority of them were working in the context of a PH, where they can access technical equipment and digital tools. Therefore, the findings address Turkish creators’ experiences of localised precarity related economic instability, political climate, linguistic barriers, and cultural expectations.

First, by examining the relationship between advertising and the state of the economy, the research demonstrates that the unstable nature of the Turkish economy affects local ad rates on YouTube and the availability of external sponsorship deals. This ultimately increases the income-related insecurity of creators and their need to find alternative income sources. Second, restrictive internet regulations of the country, which continue to include the possibility of a YouTube ban, and of YouTube broadcasting being overseen by a national regulatory body, contribute to the Turkish creators’ precarity as they shape their concerns about the future of their careers and their content decisions. Third, Turkish creators, who rely on local audiences due to language constraints, practise self-censorship to avoid touching upon the sociocultural, political, and religious sensitivities of Turkish society. This, on the one hand, restricts creators’ relative autonomy in digital media production, and, on the other, increases the value of their content and helps creators to manage the risk of potential audience flight and fragmentation.

Conclusion

Creator precarity has been widely examined in the context of platform affordances and regulatory frameworks, and the wider SME industries. This type of inquiry, developed largely in Western contexts, reveals how an observable power asymmetry between the platform, which governs labour practices via top-down policies and ever changing non-human actors like algorithms, and creators, who compete for audience attention and visibility in the competitive social media ecosystem, leads to economic and algorithmic precarities. However, Western notions of creator precarity tend to ignore various local factors that impact platformed creator labour, as their focus is largely on economic and technological aspects of YouTubing, and therefore carry the risk of erasing diverse localised experiences of creators.

My research on YouTubing in Turkey foregrounds the necessity of considering local contexts when attempting to understand creator labour mediated by a global platform, instead of framing it as a space-neutral activity. This is because the findings reveal that Turkish creators face unique challenges related to economic instability, political climate, linguistic barriers, and cultural expectations in their local context. Accordingly, the article identifies additional sources of precarity by examining how YouTube's monetisation tools depend on the state of the advertising industry in national economies, how YouTubing is mediated not only by the platform's regulations but also broader local internet governance regimes, and how creators’ content decisions change when they connect with the idea of audiences whose media consumption is shaped by their sociocultural, religious, and political sensitivities. These findings, therefore, necessitate acknowledging other factors in precarity that come from creators’ local production contexts and are overlooked in Western literature.

Focusing on the interconnected web of economic, political, cultural, and linguistic factors through the lens of localised precarity provides a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges involved in YouTubing, highlighting the complex relationship between creator labour, platform, and local context. The conceptualisation of localised precarity offered in this article provides a new lens for understanding creator precarity without falling into the trap of economic reductionism and platform determinism. Rather, it foregrounds the analytical value of considering creator labour within a network of actors whose relations are situated in local production contexts and platform architectures. However, platform–state relations are not only visible in authoritarian contexts and the absence of narratives about political, cultural, and linguistic factors in Western literature does not mean there is an absence of an impact of these factors on creator labour. While the ecological perspective adopted in this research has revealed various challenges faced by Turkish creators stemming from their local production cultures, the conceptualisation of localised precarity might also illuminate other YouTubing cultures.