“Join us, we have opportunities”: the influence of intermediaries in French content production

Content creation on social media platforms is a multidimensional activity (Craig 2019). Aside from publishing content, creators manage their visibility across multiple platforms and their interaction with the audience. Despite the diversity of profiles and strategies, creators face similar sources of uncertainties (Duffy et al. 2021). Previous research has underlined the disparities in creators' career. Creators do not share similar opportunities in content visibility (Bärtl 2018), monetisation (Houssard et al. 2023) or moderation. To sustain their activity and to increase their visibility, some creators surround themselves with professionals from influencers agencies or multichannel networks (Lobato 2016). The latter are social media intermediaries. They are defined as "firms and professionals operating between creators and platforms" (Cunningham and Craig 2019). They offer help in diverse area of content creation such as advice in production, content referencing optimization. As their knowledge of this industry gives them a strong position in the value chain (Siciliano 2023), this raises the question of their influence in the cultural production: do social media intermediaries reinforce inequalities in creators' economy? This communication explores the influence of cultural intermediaries in creators' economy in two sections. The first part shows the different players that can be labelled as intermediary. The second section presents the research agenda to explore the causal effect of working with an intermediary on creators' production and carreer.