Shared Visibility Practices

The platform-enabled new actors impact media industries in terms of visibility as well as commercializing

Social media influencers (SMI), influencer marketing (IM) and social media entertainment (SME) have a significant role in media industry development. I argue that there are shared visibility practices consisting of mutually beneficial activities of influencers and media companies.

The shared visibility practices, in essence, are

• Influencers are cast on TV shows to attract audiences

• In turn, TV exposure results in new followers

In the wider picture, SMI obviously excel at their platform-related visibility practices of uploading content and engaging with their followers. Media companies concentrate on programming their owned media destinations because that is where they can collect the firt party data, to measure the audiences, in order to sell them to advertisers, and also monetize the audiences by selling them paid access to content in form of subscriptions.

My preliminary findings are that the industries also begin to intertwine commercially in that legacy media companies, expecially the large, multi channel media companies engaged in several media businesses of television, radio, events, lifestyle magazines, and news, are also entering the business of influencer marketing, in search of revenue growth areas.

Picture above. Having a coffee break during NordMedia conference in Bergen, accompanied by two of my dissertation supervisors, Associate Professor, Journalism studies, (tenure track) Heikki Heikkilä and University lecturer (Radio), D.Soc.Sc. Marko Ala-Fossi.

I presented the draft paper, “Influencers in Media Context — The Platform-enabled New Entrants in The Finnish Media Landscape” in the Journalism Division in NordMedia 2023 conference on August 17th. The work continues towards theorizing the develepments. Subscribe (it’s free!) to follow my research.