2025/04/01 by David B. Nieborg, Thomas Poell · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Digital Platforms and Economics #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Digital Economy and Work Transformation
paper · doi:10.1177/14614448251314405
openalex publication_date 2025/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This article calls for systematic analysis of the accumulation and exercise of institutional platform power in the digital economy. We examine how the relatively open mobile advertising ecosystem is nevertheless dominated by a handful of platform conglomerates, most prominently Google, Facebook, and Apple. Although extant scholarship acknowledges the concentration of corporate power in digital advertising, as well as its cultural, societal, and environmental harms, a comprehensive approach to platform power is missing. Providing a framework to develop such insights, we analyze how shifts in the advertising ecosystem are driven by four interrelated institutional platform strategies: infrastructuralization, platformization, conglomeration, and financialization. The 2021 introduction and subsequent rollout of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework serves as an example to demonstrate that even though institutional relationships of dependence are constantly evolving, control over infrastructural nodes tends to entrench the already dominant position of leading platform conglomerates.