“Rewarding Good Creators”: Corporate Social Media Discourse on Monetization Schemes for Content Creators
“Rewarding Good Creators”: Corporate Social Media Discourse on Monetization Schemes for Content Creators
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“奖励优秀创作者”：企业社交媒体关于内容创作者变现方案的讨论
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
影响因子：
5.2
通讯作者：
Susanne Kopf
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Susanne Kopf
这篇话语分析文章涉及社交媒体企业货币化计划背景下社交媒体公司和内容创作者之间的权力关系，即，允许创作者将其社交媒体内容货币化的计划。具体而言，本研究分析了与YouTube的货币化计划（YouTube合作伙伴计划[YPP]）有关的话语材料，以阐明社交媒体公司如何将自己定位于（寻求）在社交媒体上赚钱的创作者的更广泛观点。虽然一些关于社交媒体的研究集中在它们赋予用户/内容创作者权力的潜力上，但不太乐观的学者已经解决了社交媒体公司通过剥削创作者（例如以免费数字劳动力的形式）来获得巨额利润的问题。相比之下，关于创作者的有偿数字劳动以及社交媒体公司如何将有偿创作者概念化的研究，尤其是经验性话语分析研究，还很缺乏。这项研究弥补了这一差距，关于最古老的货币化计划之一的YPP。使用语料库语言工具来探索来自46个YouTube网站的文本数据，这些网站详细介绍了YPP，这项研究主要关注内容创建者、YouTube以及这些播放器如何相互连接。调查结果显示，虽然YPP这个名字给人以平等合作的印象，但YouTube代表着立法者、法官和行政当局。这表明，尽管合作的内容创作者有能力分享社交媒体企业的利润，但他们并没有占据一个特别有权力的位置。
This discourse analytical article deals with the power relations between social media corporations and content creators in the context of monetization schemes of social media businesses, i.e., schemes that allow creators to monetize their social media content. Specifically, this study presents an analysis of discourse material pertaining to YouTube’s monetization scheme (the YouTube Partner Program [YPP]) to shed light on the broader point of how social media corporations position themselves in relation to creators who (seek to) earn money on social media. While some research on social media has focused on their potential to empower users/content creators, less optimistic scholars have addressed social media corporations generating massive profits by exploiting creators, for example, in the form of free digital labor. By comparison, there is a lack of research, especially empirical discourse analytical research, on creators’ paid digital labor and on how social media corporations conceptualize paid creators. This study redresses this gap regarding one of the oldest monetization schemes—the YPP. Using corpus linguistic tools to explore textual data from 46 YouTube sites detailing the YPP, this study homes in on references to content creators, YouTube, and how these players are connected to one another. The findings show that although the name YPP elicits the impression of cooperation on equal terms, YouTube represents itself as legislator, judge, and executive authority. This indicates that despite the ability of partnered content creators to share in the social media businesses’ profits, they do not inhabit a particularly empowered position.