“Attracting and branding: co-producing live pornographic content in the age of platform capitalism”

Over the past decade, the online platform economy has grown extremely rapidly. Numerous studies have analyzed the emergence of platform capitalism and its effects on labor, employment and consumption (Scholz, 2013; van Doorn, 2017; Abdelnour, Méda, 2019; Naulin, Jourdain, 2019; Casilli, 2019 ). While certain types of platforms have been studied in depth (Fuchs, 2014; Einav et al., 2016; Rosenblat, Stark, 2016; Scholz, 2017; Schor, Attwood-Charles, 2017; van Doorn, 2019), researchers still largely ignore those related to sexuality (Jones, 2020; Brasseur, Finez, 2019; van Doorn, Velthuis, 2018) which represent an economy estimated at several billion dollars (Paasonen, Jarrett, Light, 2019).

In this communication we will focus on sex camming platforms, and more specifically on the information cycle between broadcasters, their audience, and the platform. The peculiarity of the production and distribution system lies in the existence of a double regulation. This consists, first of all, in the implementation of an instantaneous micro-messaging system introducing a method of feedback from the audience on the progress of the show. The spectators are thus engaged by their verbal interactions and their financial contributions in a production system which combines negotiation and public bidding aimed at lifting the limits fixed by the models on their performances. It resides, secondly, at the level of the platform in the instantaneous organization of a competition for services in a bouquet of simultaneous offers that are constantly renewed. Thus, the audience is likely to come together and disperse, depending on alternative offers and their attractions. Capturing attention (Citton, 2014), but also creating a brand (Bourdieu, 1975) are then strategic issues for models, who require increased mastery of tactics and production mechanisms, involving a differentiated positioning as well as global multi-support communication. What methods of co-production of content between audience and models are developing on sex camming platforms? How do spectator intervention tactics, and broadcasters’ capture and differentiation strategies, work together?

Our study combining sociology and information and communication sciences is based on an original mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology. This involves different datasets extracted from a sex camming platform – cam4.fr -, resulting from an innovative chrono-scrapping technique implemented continuously (Francony et al., 2020). At the same time, semi-structured interviews were carried out with male and female content producers (30 interviews) and male viewers (17 interviews).