Platform Livelihoods: Working, trading, renting, and creating in digital marketplaces
Recently at Caribou Digital we have been working on several projects exploring youth employment, entrepreneurship, and digital financial inclusion in a changing global economy — an economy shaken by the pandemic and increasingly shaped by emerging digital technologies.
One of the biggest shifts in the economy has been the rise of digital platforms — digital marketplaces in everything from goods and services to ideas and software, or, in the parlance of the industry, everything from e-commerce and gig work to social media and app stores. Some of the most massive companies in the world are in the business of platforms, which now have literally billions of users. As such, millions of people depend on these platforms to make a living.
This post updates and refines our approach to “platform livelihoods,” an umbrella term (or lens) we use to connect the broad structural transformations associated with the rise of platforms to the experiences, challenges, and opportunities facing workers, entrepreneurs, and the self-employed. This approach intentionally draws on several elemental activities to join and cross-pollinate between distinct debates in the digital development literature about gig work, e-commerce, the sharing economy, and the attention economy, for while each of these new “economies” is different, they each have platformization at its core.
The content of this Medium post will also appear on our microsite www.platformlivelihoods.com, which contains a literature review and details of several of our recent and ongoing projects. We shared an earlier version of this concept in a post called “The Platform Livelihoods Framework’’ in October 2020, written as part of our project with Qhala and in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation on the Quality of Youth Digital Livelihoods in Kenya.
A broad look at “platform livelihoods”
In our view, platform livelihoods are the ways people earn a living by working, trading, renting, or engaging in digital marketplaces.
It’s an intentionally broad concept, and many terms work together to create it:
The term “platform” is common in industry and specialized discussions about the digital economy. There are many typologies of platforms available, but at the broadest level, Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffe (2019) make a useful distinction between (a) innovation platforms — software (like an operating system or suite) that runs other third-party software and (b) marketplace platforms — digital hosts, usually businesses themselves, that connect buyers and sellers of goods, services, or labor in two-sided or multi-sided markets. Social media platforms can be understood as either (2a) a special kind of marketplace platform or as (c) a close cousin — monetizing attention to user-created or creative content via advertisements.
Platformization is powerful and increasingly common, but never neutral. With the platformization of almost every kind of market (including labor markets) comes new “logics” — new structures, rules, incentives, and pressures. Platformization makes new winners and losers, scrambles value chains, and alters age-old relationships among labor, capital, and the state. For the digital development discussion, we are more interested in marketplace and social media platforms, as shown in our approach’s emphasis on “digital marketplaces.”
“Livelihoods” draws on a broader discussion in the development literature. As a concept, it is broader, more fluid, and more flexible than “jobs” or even “work.” “Livelihoods” better encompasses part-time, casual, and informal work, and is sensitive to combinatory practices in which several activities and skills are necessary for survival. Rather than emphasizing a specific role or job title, livelihoods involve making a living as a set of strategies to combine assets, capabilities, labor, and social resources.
Here’s how “platforms” and “livelihoods” connect: when combined, they refer to more than gig work. The broad umbrella of “platform livelihoods” suggests that there are many ways to earn a living and many ways in which platforms are becoming involved. To convey this heterogeneity, we’ve settled on a view which focuses on a few elemental livelihood activities — on what people do — rather than on what platforms provide. These are working, selling, renting, and creating.
- Working links most closely to “gig work” and is perhaps the most prominent and hotly debated example of platform livelihoods. Individuals rely on platforms to match their labor to compensation outside the contexts (and any protections) of employer-employee relationships.
- Trading maps onto e-commerce and social commerce. Individuals or small enterprises offer products and services to customers via marketplace platforms and/or social media. Almost every microenterprise involves trading — wholesalers, retailers, manufacturers, service providers, and even artisans and artists can sell their products and services via platforms small and large.
- Renting is the monetization of assets via a platform. Lending or leasing a tractor or truck by the hour or day, or offering a room of one’s house on Airbnb all fall under this kind of asset utilization, as does lending (renting) money on peer-to-peer loan platforms.
- Creating has, literally, captured the online world’s attention: Instagram influencers, YouTube and TikTok content creators, even affiliate marketers getting commissions for well-placed clickable ads. All of these can be seen as engaged in platform livelihoods, too. The key element distinguishing this platform livelihood activity from the others is that it involves at least three parties besides the platform: the creators, the audience, and the advertisers. Through a remarkable, though often problematic, combination of platform design, scale, algorithmic weighting, and (often) targeting data, the result is an “attention economy,” in which engagers can prosper by being compensated for bringing attention to content (and/or to the ads alongside that content).
This view of “many livelihoods” touches almost every sector of the economy. Indeed, many familiar roles are actually combinations of these activities. Take, for example, the ride-hailing driver who owns their car, drives nine hours a day via two different platforms, and rents their vehicle to another driver in the evenings. Their efforts are better understood as a combination of renting (assets) and working (labor) rather than as the application of labor alone. In this view, it is best to avoid assuming that people are exclusively renters or traders or engagers; instead, many will combine these practices in distinct ways to pursue their distinct livelihoods.
We situate these activities “in” instead of “by,” “via,” or “for” platform marketplaces. These platforms aren’t merely tools that workers and sellers can use, but structures they must navigate. Nor are these individuals engaged in activities “for” the platforms as employees or agents; individuals and small firms operate without employer-employee contracts. For now, “in” best describes how individuals pursue livelihoods within the contexts (affordances and constraints) at least partially established by platforms.
Advantages of the platform livelihoods lens
The lens is broad, making it easier to see connections between different livelihoods
The breadth of “working, trading, renting, and creating in digital marketplaces” is part of what makes the concept of platform livelihoods useful.
There are robust and ongoing policy conversations about platform workers on labor platforms (summarized, for example, in this recent ILO report) and about platform sellers and e-commerce (summarized, for example, in this recent UNCTAD report). But the literature and policy conversations about platform work and platform sales rarely seem connected, despite commonalities and overlaps in how platform logics change markets, and how power and prosperity is allocated within them. To be clear, we don’t want to challenge or replace the frames employed by these existing inquiries. Instead, we aim to complement and put them in dialogue, drawing new connections between them.
Meanwhile, economic developments, such as the mega-merger of Gojek and Tokopedia in Indonesia, mean that in some cases, workers, sellers, sharers, and creators are bound up together in the same platform ecosystems. The “superplatform” or “super app” presents a different environment for livelihoods, collapsing several economic sectors onto a singular interface with interconnected data about users accruing to the platform itself, and may require different policy responses than distinct, sector-specific platforms.
The lens allows assessments of people’s experiences.
Together with Qhala, we conducted a review of 75 primary research studies of platform workers, traders, renters, and engagers from throughout the majority world/emerging markets. We drew on frameworks from the ILO, Richard Heeks, and Julie Zollmann and Catherine Wanjala, coding studies to identify “twelve elements — the kinds of experiences that individuals share and value when discussing their livelihoods with friends, family, and even the occasional researcher. They are a mix of economic, subjective, and broader human development experiences”.
These elements can prompt attention not only to earnings and access, but also to how the experience of platform livelihoods intersects with human development goals such as gender inclusion, social protection, and opportunities for advancement and fulfillment.
The lens helps count and compare roles and vocations
When compiling the literature review, we offered “a landscape of nine illustrative types of platform livelihood,” noting that “these are roles that individuals or small enterprises can fill, rather than ‘business models’ or the names of specific platforms.” Our argument remains that these nine types, while not comprehensive, “represent enough of the diversity in platform livelihoods to make two key distinctions. These types mix local and global (digital only) markets,” and “some of these roles are for individuals seeking work and offering their labor. Some of these roles are for small enterprises and even small farms, looking for new sales channels and new ways to connect with markets.”
But this map is only one of many we could make to list, identify, and contrast different kinds of platform livelihoods. Notice the switch in the illustrative map from elemental activities (working, trading, renting, creating) to more specific roles, industry sectors, and types. These labels better approximate how we might count and differentiate among those with and those without platform livelihoods.
Further complicating this enumeration are the ways in which people fractionally mix livelihood activities. If a person works as a teacher during the week and a freelancer via a platform on the weekend, is that person a platform worker? If a restaurant relies on delivery platforms for 30% of its sales, is that business a platform trader? What if the same business had to stop in-person dining during the pandemic, and was getting 90% of sales through delivery platforms? What if that business uses three different delivery platforms, deriving fractional earnings from each? As we detailed in our literature review, several studies point to how platforms may play a partial rather than exclusive role in many people’s livelihoods.
Similarly, sometimes seemingly individual accounts are actually “hidden MSEs” or otherwise represent hidden hierarchies. Freelancers can maintain a single profile with high ratings, and then subcontract work. Airbnb hosts may employ a housekeeper. Small online retail shops may have an assistant or two. Are these other workers, each more or less invisible to the buyers and the platforms themselves, pursuing platform livelihoods as well?
Indeed, given how broad these activities are, and how they govern the variety of products and services digital giants like Facebook and Google provide, it can be difficult not to classify anything done for work digitally as a platform livelihood. For example, people can learn their crafts via watching YouTube videos or run an entire business on a Google suite, but these activities don’t involve directly matching buyers and sellers. We think it is best to restrict platform livelihoods to the activities that directly involve exchanges of value — transactions — between buyers and sellers. That is likely how the platforms see their role — they don’t always expect a 100% share of anyone’s livelihood, but they do seek to provide the infrastructure to facilitate as many transactions as they can, to generate revenue through advertisements, transaction fees, subscriptions, etc.
That said, we acknowledge that there are other elements of people’s livelihoods that aren’t easily understood as transactions at all — for example, cultivating family support and connections, gifting instead of exchanging, supporting instead of lending — that are also core parts of social life, and are increasingly also mediated by platforms, whether via mobile money like MPESA, social sites like Facebook, or purpose-built sites like GoFundMe. (For recent work in this space see Sibel Kusimba’s Reimagining Money). We would be interested in exploring and discussing whether these behaviors might be better considered a fifth elemental livelihood activity.
Regardless, this discussion of specific vocations or livelihood types underscores how any efforts to enumerate those involved in platform livelihoods will face definitional challenges — tough decisions of where to draw the lines between platform livelihoods, other digital livelihoods, and livelihoods more broadly. On the other hand, this lens helps bridge the arbitrary gap between an individual worker and a small enterprise, and helps us be sensitive to how platform livelihoods often coexist with fractional and/or non-digital ways of earning a living.
Our assessment in late 2020 was that “the early research and policy literature has been concentrated in platform work, especially ride-hailing, freelancing, and microwork, but in the longer run, platform sales [trading] (whether via marketplaces, social commerce, or search and discovery) may end up altering the livelihoods of a greater number of people around the world.” We’re excited to test this hypothesis in Indonesia. With the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFS Lab, and Rise Indonesia, we will be fielding a study in 2021–22 that, among other things, will estimate the proportion of people nationwide involved with platform livelihoods, capturing platform working, trading, renting, and engaging in the same study, perhaps for the first time.
The lens allows for deeper dives into new digital practices
A recent essay by our colleague Bryan Pon helpfully contrasts classic platform e-commerce, where platform hosts set the rules on dedicated e-commerce sites, and bottom-up, appropriated social commerce, where individuals use more flexible social media platforms to sell goods and services. (There is significant attention to this segment among the financial inclusion community, for example, by Women’s World Banking and by CGAP, which calls these practices informal e-commerce.) We see social commerce as a channel or a modality: a kind of platform livelihood activity that can be applied to working (job-seeking), trading (selling), renting (asset-sharing), and, in the case of social media influencers, engaging.
Don’t forget maps, searchers, reviews, and ads. Paid for the click, rewarded for the link, punished by a bad review — people are cultivating their skills to navigate the platformed dynamics of algorithms. Engagers get paid for clicks, traders and renters promote their brand/business identity, “and as we noted in the previous post, there is often (still) search and discovery. Millions of small businesses pay for advertising on Facebook and Google and other social media platforms. Many work to refine how their businesses appear on maps, review sites, or other digital databases and apps. These activities, too, support platform livelihoods.”
This wide range of activities points to the complexity and content dependency of digital literacies as craft. For example, our colleague Jessica Osborn shared a great illustration of this in a debrief of a 2019 Caribou Digital Live Learning visit in China; the team met with several farmers and manufacturers who have had to hire social media managers to keep up with the demands of social commerce.
But for those without the wherewithal to hire social media specialists, the “digital literacies” or platform practices demanded of a small business may be as diverse as the platform landscape itself — the success of a even a tiny microenterprise may increasingly depend on a mix of placing ads and appearing in searches, on conducting authentic social commerce, and on navigating formal digital marketplaces. To link back to the “livelihoods” perspective, this represents a set of new skills and strategies that gig workers, the self-employed, and entrepreneurs must all acquire, refine, and deploy in ways that earn them a living in platformed markets.
Conclusion
There are many organizations and researchers involved in studying and building policy around the activities this post calls “platform livelihoods.” The community of practice is broad, as are its perspectives and frames.
Our goal with the lens of “platform livelihoods” isn’t to refute or diminish the existing frames and debates about gig work, e-commerce, or any other element of an increasingly platformed economy, but rather to bring together disparate parts of this arena, to spark conversations and share knowledge. Therefore, we hope the concept is useful to you.
Please reach out to us with questions and suggestions for the next revision, and watch for new studies on youth livelihoods, gender, platform agriculture in Kenya, and the quantitative Indonesia research to be posted to our website soon. All the materials in this lens are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. We ask only that you provide attribution if this turns out to be useful to your research.
To sum up, a variety of platform types (marketplaces for labor, goods and services, assets and attention, and platforms for innovation) have emerged in every sector of the economy (freelancing to farming) to support a variety of elemental yet combinatory livelihood practices (working, trading, renting, and creating).
Ultimately, few analog livelihoods may remain untouched by digitalization and platformization. The world is in the midst of a shift in how markets function, with implications beyond the digital development discussion. It is our hope that this lens, and the contrasts and commonalities it may reveal, will inform conversations and efforts to make the digital economy more inclusive.
*Note: an earlier version of this post used the terms “working, trading, renting, and engaging” but we have updated it (June 3 2022) to replace engaging with the more commonly used creating.
