INTERVIEW SERIES: Alternative Media Ecologies and Digital Voices INTERVIEWER: Gökhan Çolak | INTERVIEWEE: Tugce Bidav

Your doctoral research compared the labour practices of YouTubers in Turkey and Ireland. What stood out to you as the most significant differences in terms of production, precarity, and visibility?

In my doctoral research, I examined the creative digital labour practices of YouTube creators in Ireland and Turkey. However, it was not designed as a formal comparison, as that kind of approach can risk overlooking the specific complexities of each country. Instead, geography functioned as one of several key factors in the analysis. This allowed me to explore how creators’ working conditions were shaped by where they were based, while building theory grounded in their own lived and subjective experiences.

This approach helped me theorise localised precarity, which refers to a wide range of insecurities and uncertainties rooted in the complex relationship between platforms, creators, and geographical context. When describing these experiences, creators in Ireland often pointed to the small size of the Irish population and the country’s peripheral position within wider creative and cultural industries. They felt these dynamics limited their algorithmic reach and access to opportunities, even when producing English-language content. Creators in Turkey, on the other hand, spoke about a broader set of challenges linked to the country’s economic, political, sociocultural, and linguistic contexts.

You often describe the position of content creators on digital platforms through the lens of “precarity.” In today’s YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok ecosystems, how is this precarity evolving into new forms?

Content creators are part of a broader trend of precarization, where risk and insecurity are increasingly shifted onto workers. In that sense, there is continuity with other forms of precarious labour. For example, non-standard employment relations, the lack of basic protections such as a stable income, paid sick leave, and pensions, long working hours, and deunionisation have long been described as key features of creative and cultural work.

While these older forms of precarity are built into platforms, platform-mediated cultural work has also introduced newer ones. Precarity is produced through constant changes to platform algorithms and policies, especially around content moderation and monetisation, where decisions usually favour advertiser priorities and, in some contexts, state interests. At the same time, the platformed cultural production ecosystem is constantly evolving: New sociotechnical tools and formats emerge quickly, competition is intense, and creators are expected to adapt at speed. In this environment, precarity is not a temporary phase. Even creators with large followings and high incomes can experience audience flight, algorithmic invisibility, income fluctuation, or fewer opportunities when new dynamics emerge.

You frequently highlight the tension between “global platforms and local creators.” What structural barriers limit content creation in peripheral countries like Turkey? (algorithmic, economic, cultural, etc.)

While social media platforms allow global distribution of media, traditional barriers to media globalisation, such as language and cultural differences, still shape audience tastes and apply to social media entertainment.

For example, the majority of creators in Turkey produce content in Turkish, which limits their global reach. While Turkey is one of the leading exporters of TV drama globally, its social media entertainment industries still hold a more peripheral position. This is partly because, unlike traditional media industries, creators do not have access to professional translation and dubbing services due to financial precarity, and platform-provided auto-translation tools often do not work well for peripheral languages. On the one hand, this limits creators’ ability to compete in the global social media entertainment market. On the other hand, it means they are also competing with traditional media industries for visibility on social media within a smaller and less lucrative national advertising market.

Furthermore, audience tastes are strongly shaped by cultural context. In that sense, producing content in dominant languages like English does not automatically guarantee a global audience for creators in Turkey. This can push creators towards producing more ‘culturally odourless’ content that may appeal to broader audiences, and certain genres, such as gaming, beauty, and travel, allow more room for this.

Finally, national advertising markets are closely tied to a country’s economic conditions. Given the ongoing financial instability in Turkey, this creates further uncertainty and fluctuation in creators’ income.

Your recent co-edited book, Global South Creator Cultures, examines creative labour from Global South perspectives. Why is creator labour in these regions particularly fragile and often invisible?

What the book shows is that the fragility and invisibility of creator labour in Global South contexts are not accidental; they are produced through a combination of structural conditions that shape how creator labour is performed, valued, and seen.

First, Global South creators often operate within uneven economic and infrastructural environments that are historically and regionally produced. They may work within less developed media industries with less lucrative advertising markets and/or experience forms of digital divide, where digital infrastructures are unstable, unevenly distributed, or underdeveloped. These geographically rooted asymmetries mean that even when creators achieve visibility, it does not necessarily translate into stable income or long-term sustainability.

Second, there is the issue of language and visibility, as mentioned in my answer to the previous question. Platforms impose global norms that disproportionately favour certain linguistic communities, as their algorithms favour dominant or widely spoken languages, which often marginalise content in peripheral languages and reinforce existing global hierarchies.

Third, state policies and regulatory environments shape creator labour in important ways. In some contexts, creators need to navigate censorship, platform restrictions, or shifting governance frameworks, which can limit what they produce and how they engage with audiences. Fourth, creator labour is deeply embedded in sociocultural conditions. Expectations around gender, caste, class, race, and religion influence who can participate in creator cultures, what kinds of content are valued, and how audiences respond.

But alongside these structural conditions, there is also a form of invisibility within dominant scholarship. Much of the existing research on creator cultures has been shaped by Global North contexts, so the dominant concepts, assumptions, and frameworks we use do not always capture these realities. As a result, Global South creator labour is often either marginalised or interpreted through frameworks that overlook its specific conditions.

So when we talk about fragility and invisibility, we are referring not only to how creators are positioned within platform economies, but also to how their labour has been marginalised and underrepresented within academic and public discussions of creator cultures and economies.

Data shows that many content creators struggle to sustain their income. Do you think platforms genuinely support the creator economy, or are they producing a new model of labour exploitation?

Platforms are for-profit actors within capitalist digital economies. So, yes – there is a clear element of labour exploitation in how creator economies are organised. Platforms generate enormous value by collecting user data, which is then used to sell targeted advertising. Users are solely compensated through free access to these platforms. The vast majority of user-generated content on social media platforms remains unpaid. Even among creators who monetise their content, many struggle to earn a livable income and often rely on other income-generating jobs alongside content creation.

At the same time, platforms do support creator economies but largely because it aligns with their profit-seeking goals. They need a constant supply of content to keep users on their platform, attract more users, and generate more data and ad revenue. This is why they invest in creator monetisation schemes and incentives.

Research shows that creators diversify their income streams via joining platform programmes (i.e., YouTube Partner Programme), securing external brand deals, or crowdfunding and fan-funding models. Patreon is a well-known example, but platforms have also introduced their own fan-funding features, such as YouTube Join and Super Thanks. These options can genuinely help some creators, but they are also strategic from the platform’s perspective as they keep creators and their audiences inside the platform ecosystem, rather than sending them elsewhere for financial support.

Alternative media theories emphasize the importance of new expressive spaces against media monopolization. Can social media creators be considered alternative media actors, or does platform dependency restrict this potential?

Social media creators have definitely emerged as new media actors, as platforms have provided access to audiences and advertisers, allowing people to bypass traditional media gatekeeping. However, within this ecosystem, traditional gatekeeping is often replaced by algorithmic gatekeeping, which shapes which content becomes visible and which remains invisible. Furthermore, in the context of social media, what is sayable and unsayable is strongly influenced by platform content moderation, including advertiser-friendly content guidelines, as well as by state regulations and audiences’ sociocultural, political, and religious sensitivities. So, while social media can create new spaces for expression, this potential is still shaped, and in some cases, limited by platform dependency and the broader conditions in which creators operate.

Ethical issues are always central to discussions of digital labour. What do you consider the most critical ethical risks in the influencer and content creation ecosystem? (manipulative content, child influencers, brand pressures, etc.)

I do not think we can place ethical issues in the content creation ecosystem into a clear hierarchy. Ethical concerns exist at every stage of the process, from platform design to content production, and from advertising to everyday user practices.

For example, in recent court cases, Meta and YouTube have been found liable not only for the content they host but also for how their platforms are designed, particularly in relation to creating addictive environments that can harm young people.

At the level of content, we also see creators sometimes taking advantage of people in economically vulnerable situations, encouraging risky financial decisions. For instance, in the current economic climate in Turkey, with high inflation rates, many people are struggling to make ends meet, let alone save money. In this context, content such as ‘how to save up your wedding expenses in 30 days,’ often linked to sports betting, encourages people to see gambling as a form of income.

In relation to branded content, ethical concerns involve responsibility in representation, such as avoiding harmful stereotypes, misinformation, or manipulative content, as well as transparency around sponsored content, etc.

So overall, ethics in the content creation ecosystem is not about a single issue, but about how responsibility is distributed across platforms, states, creators, audiences, and brands at every stage of content production, distribution, and consumption.

Finally, content creation is increasingly becoming a formalized career path. How do you envision the future direction of digital labour research and creator culture studies?

As we witness professionalisation and formalisation of content creation as a media career, we are also seeing it become increasingly embedded within formal learning structures. For example, universities, vocational schools, and private or non-profit training institutions have launched a wave of new programmes, from full degrees in content creation and social media to short courses run in partnership with platform companies such as YouTube, aimed at preparing aspiring creators for work in the platform-driven creative economy.

This shift reflects the fact that creator competencies, such as content creation, audience development, data-driven optimisation, and brand management, now align closely with a wide range of roles across advertising, broadcasting, film and TV, games, and cultural institutions. As a result, educational institutions are responding to growing industry demands for platform-native skills.

However, academic research has not yet examined what kinds of knowledge and skills these programmes prioritise, or how they align with both industry expectations and the everyday realities of creator labour. This is something I will be researching next with Dr Smith Mehta, through our project ‘Creator Pedagogy in the Platform Age: Mapping Skills, Labour, and Professional Pathways,’ funded by the British Academy Small Research Grant scheme.