International Journal of Communication 10(2016), 5409–5425 1932–8036/20160005

Online Entertainment:
A New Wave of Media Globalization?

Introduction

STUART CUNNINGHAM
Queensland University of Technology, Australia

DAVID CRAIG
University of Southern California, USA

This article considers the phenomena of global online screen entertainment platforms in
the context of enduring debates in communication and media studies concerning media
globalization. While the relatively frictionless globality of such phenomena demands
attention, we stress the differences between such platforms and the system of national
broadcasting, film, and DVD release and licensing by windowing and territory. The latter,
established forms of global media, enter territories with IP-controlled content, whereas
platforms such as YouTube exhibit facilitation rather than content control and much
greater content, creator, service firm, and language and cultural diversity than
traditional global media hegemons. The article introduces the Special Section and argues
that we are witnessing the rise of a proto–media industry that represents nontraditional
media ownership, disruptive platforms, and unique content innovation that challenges
our prior conceptions of media globalization, including national regulatory regimes.

Keywords: media globalization, media imperialism, social media entertainment, Chinese

online entertainment, Indian online entertainment, cross-cultural communication
analysis

For the past two decades, the United States has dominated the global online entertainment
scene, owning and operating the worlds’ largest digital television portals (HBO Now, Netflix, Amazon
Video) and social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter). These portals and platforms have
circumnavigated the planet with near frictionless ease. Netflix has 80 million subscribers in 190 countries
and represents itself as “the birth of a new global Internet TV service.” But these numbers pale in
comparison to social media platforms such as YouTube, which features 1 billion users in 88 countries and
76 languages. YouTube is a distant second to Facebook, with more than 1.7 billion users, which represents
more than half of the global online population. Meanwhile, new U.S.-owned platforms are scaling even

Stuart Cunningham: [email protected]

David Craig: [email protected]
Date submitted: 2016–09–09

Copyright © 2016 (Stuart Cunningham & David Craig). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution
Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
5410 Stuart Cunningham & David Craig International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

more rapidly; for example, SnapChat has secured more than 200 million users in half the time it took
Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter (Morrison, 2015).

With global domination nigh, arguably the last frontier for these platforms to conquer is China,
where state-based regulation has helped incubate, protect, and censor the digital and social media
industries. Parented by the Chinese BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent), Chinese online entertainment
features an even more hypercompetitive landscape than in the West. Keane (this Special Section)
describes the rise of digital TV platforms (iQiyi, Sohu, LeTV, and more), whereas Zhao (this Special
Section) accounts for the proliferation of Chinese social media platforms (Youku Toudu, Weibo, WeChat).
In Craig and Li’s interview with Heng Cai, a Chinese social media entrepreneur (this Special Section), Cai
confirms that there are already 116 Chinese live broadcasting mobile apps, roughly 100 more than in the
United States. All these portals and platforms are competing for the 700 million Chinese mobile Web
users, roughly twice the population of the United States, “or, if you prefer, 28 Australias” (Scutt, 2015,
para. 10).

These NoCal-based interlopers (Silicon Valley, with its focus on scale, automation, and iterative,
pivoting “permanent beta”) and their Chinese counterparts represent the new “King Kongs” of media
distribution (Cunningham & Silver, 2013) and posit arguably the greatest peril to the imperious content
kings of Hollywood’s SoCal media conglomerates (which exemplify premium content and mass
entertainment appeal). These deeply capitalized, aggressively disruptive, tech-focused players would
seem to affirm the next wave of American media imperialism. Yet the potential U.S. hegemony over online
entertainment features a host of considerations well beyond control over online media distribution.

Even with U.S.-owned distribution, Internet regulation focused on concerns over access, content,
and advertising on these platforms is subject to complex, disparate, variegated, incompatible, and often
inconsistent regional and national state-based mediation. The state of Turkey takes a particularly strong
interventionist stance with regard to the potential disruption to the political, religious, and social order
posed by the global-spanning digital platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and has
regularly blocked them around election periods and particularly during the current major crisis in its
political system (Coldewey, 2016). Turkish Tourism, however, had a YouTube channel from February
2014, and the national carrier, Turkish Airlines, has used YouTube content creators and multichannel
networks in developing youth-oriented, social media–based engagement strategies in its attempt to build
brand recognition in the ultracompetitive international airline market (Kerr, 2012).

While operating off of U.S.-owned social media platforms, international content creators have
proliferated and profited, representing marginal, alternative, subcultural, and subaltern voices rarely seen
in the United States or, in many cases, in traditional entertainment in their own countries. Musicians like
Elissa from Lebanon or Iranian Saudi Arabian a cappella artist Alaa Wardi or comedians Bader Sadeh, also
known as the “Saudi King of Comedy,” have launched global careers and secured cross-cultural and
diasporic Middle Eastern audiences less inhibited by local online platform or content censorship. An
Australian multichannel network works with aspiring online musicians in their attempts to break into the
booming Asian pop scene. As described by Kumar in this Special Section, India has experienced
“breakneck growth” of amateur content creation. According to The New York Times, Asian American
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Online Entertainment — Introduction 5411

YouTubers have dominated this space, in stark contrast to their near invisibility in traditional
entertainment (Considine, 2011).

To borrow from Friedman (2005), this new world of online entertainment may be far from flat,
and a new wave of media globalization may, at best, prove to be a ripple, a consequence of the disruptive
undulations of technology and media capital and innovation in the digital age.

New Media Imperialism?

Media globalization has been an enduring topic in film and media studies. Traditionally centered
on questions of U.S. “cultural imperialism” through widespread dissemination and popularity of its film and
television output, debates of long-established vintage have been staged, for example, around whether
global television traffic is a “one-way street” (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974) or a “patchwork quilt” (Tracey,
1988). Influenced by cultural studies’ emphasis on viewer and audience agency, versions of “weak” rather
than “strong” globalization that have largely characterized recent discussion (Flew, 2007; Straubhaar,
2007; Tomlinson, 1999) continue to contend with reassertions of “strong” globalization (Boyd-Barrett,
2015).

However, a reassessment of this debate is imperative in the light of the relatively frictionless
global reach of YouTube and other major platforms and the innovative content they have spawned. On the
one hand, it is possible to posit a new wave of media globalization based on the global availability and
uptake of YouTube—and other major social media platforms, which are increasingly encouraging the
upload of video content—which is relatively frictionless compared with national broadcasting and systems
of film and DVD licensing by territory. Apart from substantial self-regulation to avoid controversy over
content offending community standards, there is little or no content regulation of Google/YouTube—one of
the world’s largest information and communication companies—as its use proliferates globally. On the
other hand, the new professionalizing-amateur screen ecology embodies a huge change in producer
diversity, both in terms of amateur backgrounds and global locations. It is the differences that we stress
between such content and platforms, and the system of national broadcasting, film, and DVD release and
licensing by windowing and territory. The latter, established forms of media globalization, enter territories
with IP-controlled content, whereas platforms such as YouTube exhibit facilitation rather than content
control and much greater content, creator, service firm, and language and cultural diversity than
traditional global media hegemons.

The implications of social media entertainment for traditional academic accounts of media
imperialism have been barely touched on. Mostly, the lead has been taken by exponents of very strong
media imperialism theses. Critical political economists Christian Fuchs (2014) and Dal Yong Jin (2013)
insist on the strong continuity between earlier media imperialism and today’s version; the question of the
contemporary nature of global online content—and its creators—is not considered.

For Fuchs (2013), social media are viewed entirely through the lens of their claims to
democratize access to and participation in information exchange:
5412 Stuart Cunningham & David Craig International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

The Internet and social media are today stratified, non-participatory spaces and an
alternative, non-corporate Internet is needed. Large corporations colonize social media
and dominate its attention economy. . . . On corporate social media, the liberal freedom
of association and assembly are suspended: big corporate and, to a lesser extent,
political actors dominate and therefore centralize the formation of speech, association,
assembly and opinion on social media. (p. 102)

For Jin (2013), there is essential continuity across a century of imperialisms (Lenin’s imperialism,
cultural imperialism, information imperialism, and now platform imperialism). “The U.S, which had
previously controlled non-Western countries with its military power, capital, and later cultural products,”
Jin argues, “now seems to dominate the world with platforms, benefitting from these platforms, mainly in
terms of capital accumulation” (p. 145). He regards “the major role of intellectual property rights as the
most significant form of capital accumulation in the digital age” (p. 146). But there are critical distinctions
to be made between information and cultural dominance, and, at least at the level of content, global social
media entertainment must be critically differentiated from earlier stages of cultural imperialism because
such content is initially primarily amateur and is generated under very different intellectual property (IP)
regimes than the strong copyright regimes through which traditional media hegemony has been exercised.

In contending with such contemporary accounts of “platform imperialism,” we have focused in

this Special Section on China, which represents a singular and central exception to notions of U.S.
platform imperialism, and India, which together with China constitutes one of the two largest emerging
non-Western online spaces in the world and whose online cultural sphere is one of intense localization.
This Special Section also advocates for cross-cultural analyses, whether comparative reception studies of
sociability (Schroeder) or new methodological approaches for conducting social media content analysis
(Shifman). These articles complement our concerns over media globalization to examine the shared and
communal practices around the formations of social media audiences and innovation of social media
platforms.

Social Media Entertainment, or “Communitainment”

The emerging shape of screen industries in the 21st century encapsulates deep changes in
consumer habit and expectation and content production related “to a larger trend across the media
industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen
media practices” (Holt & Sanson, 2013, p. 1). For this reason, while digital television platforms represent
direct competition to traditional television networks and channels, our primary focus here is with the
emergence of the protoindustry of social media entertainment. Over the past decade, scholars have
accounted for commercialized uses of YouTube, user-generated content, and social media platforms
(Burgess, 2013; Burgess & Green, 2009; van Dijck, 2013; Wasko & Erickson, 2009). Building upon their
scholarship, Cunningham, Craig, and Silver (2016) have engaged in identifying and mapping the new
screen ecology of a protoindustry—social media entertainment (SME).

SME is built upon the technological, networking, and commercial affordances of multiple, rapidly
scaling, near-frictionless, global social media platforms—for example, YouTube, Facebook, SnapChat, and
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Online Entertainment — Introduction 5413

Twitch. A rapidly professionalizing and monetizing wave of diverse, multicultural, previously amateur
content creators from around the world have harnessed these platforms to incubate their own media
brands, engage in content innovation, and cultivate often massive, transnational, and cross-cultural fan
communities. Our research, conducted over the past two years, features unprecedented access to industry
players, including more than 135 interviews with platform executives, content creators, and diverse SME
managers, producers, agents, and analysts, who have helped launch and grow this protoindustry.

We alternatively define this field of cultural production as communitainment. This term reflects
the dynamics of a protoindustry facilitated by networked communications technologies (social media
platforms), primary strategies of communication as much as content (intense interactivity), more
discursive and communicative content genres and formats (most notably, vlogging), and driven by an
ethos of community (an ecology where fans, subscribers, and supporters directly constitute the
communities that trigger the sustainability of content creator careers). This term further distinguishes this
industry from the professionally generated content strategies of Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and others. In
effect, these online television portals are delivering old wine in new bottles—that is, traditionally formatted
film and television digital online portals featuring alternative forms of programming, curation, and
audience analytics.

We further argue that the emerging shape of screen industries in the 21st century shows
established players, norms, principles, and practices ceding significant power and influence to the social
media platforms. Just as notably, these platforms, preeminently YouTube, have started to represent a
greater value proposition to the advertising industry that has served as the bulwark for legacy media since
the middle of the last century. Across these on-demand, ephemeral, and live broadcasting platforms,
creator entrepreneurs engage in content innovation in contrast to traditional entertainment, without little
interest in developing original intellectual property or building content libraries. This new screen ecology is
driven by intrinsically interactive, viewer- and audience-centricity. Combined, these factors inform a
qualitatively different globalization dynamic that has scaled with great velocity, posing new challenges for
screen regulatory regimes, not to mention media scholars.

Our research seeks to anatomize this emerging protoindustry based on the YouTube platform,
taking an “ecological” approach by investigating the interdependencies among its elements: mapping the
platforms and affordances, content innovation and creative labor, monetization and management, new
forms of media globalization, and critical cultural concerns raised by this nascent media industry. The
article contributes well-evidenced revisionist accounts in the political economy of new media (the clash of
cultures of globally dominant media and IT corporations); constructs an account of short form
commercializing online video culture as a highly normative space driven by appeals to authenticity and
community; extends the debate on creative labor to include the precariousness of certain forms of media
management; and assesses claims for a new wave of media globalization achieved without IP control.

We take full account of structural conditions—huge, globe-spanning online platforms whose

leaders are far bigger than the Hollywood majors that have had a dominating influence on global media; a
fast-advancing algorithmic culture; and the precariousness of online labor—but we are really driven by a
commitment to new voices, the small businesses, the amateurs developing what they hope may be
5414 Stuart Cunningham & David Craig International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

sustainable careers. We are interested in tracking cultural progressivity where it finds space within
commercializing systems. Ample evidence suggests that we are finding those voices, businesses, and
careers to a larger extent in the online social media entertainment space than in older, established global
media orders.

The scale and significance of this industry posits continuities and discontinuities with established
understandings of media globalization. While the relatively frictionless globality of such phenomena
demands attention, we stress the differences between such platforms and the system of national
broadcasting, film, and DVD release and licensing by windowing and territory. We therefore argue against
the notion that it provides a platform for new forms of cultural hegemony. Traditional media and television
have been characterized by its hegemonic domination of distribution and IP-controlled content informed
by media scarcity, highly capitalized ownership, and captured regulatory regimes. In contrast, open social
media platforms like YouTube feature content abundance and near-unlimited access—conditions that
generate agency and affordances creators and offer greater cultural and language diversity.

It additionally considers how multisited, globalizing trends in social media communications are
being approached not only in media and cultural studies but in broader communication studies
frameworks, which include psychology, political science, and political communication and which engage
from a domestication-of-technologies approach complemented by a comparative-historical perspective on
technologies for sociability as well as theories of ritual interaction and connected presence (Schroeder’s
and Shifman’s articles in this Special Section).

It is possible to posit a qualitatively new wave of media globalization based on the global
availability and uptake of platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter and which is relatively
frictionless compared to national broadcasting and systems of film and DVD release and licensing by
“windowed” territory (Cunningham, 2015). And compared to traditional film and television, there is very
little imposed content regulation beyond self-regulation—apart from content ID on Google/YouTube and
now Facebook—as their use as content distributors proliferates globally.

Compare SME with the major professionally generated content streaming services such as Netflix.
Its aggressive global expansion requires it to negotiate with preexisting rights holders in each new
territory and often requires it to attempt to close down informal means of accessing its popular content
such as VPN workarounds in such territories. Nonetheless, the platform’s impressive colonization of 190
countries is remarkable. In contrast, SME content is largely “born global.” This is because this massively
growing content industry, in stark contrast to content industries in general and Hollywood and broadcast
television in particular, is not primarily based on IP control. Rather, YouTube elected to avoid the messy
and legally cumbersome traditional media model of owned or shared IP. YouTube also avoided paying fees
for content as well as offering back-end residual or profit participation. Rather, YouTube entered into
“partnership agreements” with its content creators based on a split of advertising revenue from first
dollar. This strategy has proven effective. In the eight years since the partner plan launched, YouTube has
secured more than 2 million YouTube partners worldwide who derive some revenue from their uploaded
content.
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Online Entertainment — Introduction 5415

YouTube talks of being primarily a facilitator of creators and content in the many international
markets in which it operates. The key difference between traditional media operating multinationally and
YouTube is that the former produces, owns, or licenses content for distribution, exhibition, or sale in
multiple territories, while the latter seeks to avoid the conflation of YouTubers as the IP creators with
YouTube as both platform and middleman operating to facilitate the linking of brands and advertisers with
YouTube creators and multichannel networks. There are significant reasons for YouTube not taking an IP
ownership position, which have to do with its continued status as a platform or online service provider
rather than a content company. The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, in addition to
criminalizing circumvention measures and heightening the penalties for copyright infringement on the
Internet, created “safe harbor” provisions for online service providers (including Internet service
providers) against copyright infringement liability, provided they responsively block access to alleged
infringing material on receipt of infringement claims from a rights holder.

YouTube’s lack of conventional IP control has not, of course, inhibited its monetization strategies,
which other SME platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and SnapChat are emulating. These monetization
strategies have exposed the faltering codependency between media and advertising, reflecting the
inefficiencies of traditional media advertising while highlighting the affordances and targeted efficacy of
online analytics. Throughout its AdSense and TruView technology, Google first initiated programmatic
advertising—the automation of ad buying and placement through the deployment of big data analytics—
which it simply extended to YouTube upon acquisition. Facebook followed suit, although shifting from an
open to closed ecosystem with the Facebook Audience Network ad tech system (Sloan, 2016).
Programmatic ad sales enable platforms to generate great efficiencies in matching advertising to digital
content as content travels virtually seamlessly across borders and regions. As Hector Postigo ironizes:

YouTube (or any platforms that invite UGC [user-generated content] for its inventory) is
not unlike a bettor at a roulette table who is in the happy position of betting on all the
numbers, where the payout in aggregate outweighs what appears to be an otherwise
wild investment. (2016, p. 15)

Online social media entertainment content is being distributed globally in ways that radically
depart from time-honored principles and practices of territorial rights and indeed of traditional IP control.
We are witnessing the rise of a nascent media industry that represents nontraditional media ownership,
disruptive platforms, and content innovation that challenge our prior conceptions of media globalization,
including nationalized regulatory regimes. However, such relatively frictionless globality seen in the
operations of the major digital platforms is decidedly uneven. SME platforms seek not to create or own
intellectual property and are subject to significant “lumpiness” in business culture and regulatory
frameworks across the globe.

YouTube reports that it is “localized” in multiple countries and numerous languages (i.e., it has a
local presence, usually consisting of sales forces and government/public relations operatives). Of course,
this is not a full index of the global reach—or limits—of YouTube. YouTube is accessed and used across
much wider territory than localization data show, while a number of countries block or restrict access to
YouTube. (Those that do so tend to also block access to Twitter and/or Facebook.) North Korea (where
5416 Stuart Cunningham & David Craig International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

Internet access itself is highly restricted) and China (except for the Shanghai Free Trade Zone) block
YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. As we have seen, temporary blocking at a national level has always been
an option used to deal with political and/or religious issues. In the last few years, Pakistan blocked
YouTube when it refused to remove an anti-Islamic video, and Eritrea, Iran, Egypt, the Congo, Tajikistan,
Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Morocco have instituted temporary bans.1

As well as the need to deal with global politico-cultural divergences of this order, localization is
also a response to preexisting entertainment content being subject to “location-based filtering that results
from the unevenness of content-licensing deals across national jurisdictions” (Burgess, 2013, p. 53).
Location-based filtering is usually geoblocking, which occurs when rights holders and/or content producers
may not have the rights to show some content in different regions. The most prominent case of
geoblocking is an ongoing dispute with YouTube and GEMA, a performance rights organization in
Germany.

Variegated media regulation and policy are helping to shape, restrict, and censor, as well as
assist this emergent industry. Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (dubbed EMEA in the dialect of
globalizers) are much more regulated in terms of community standards, sponsorship, and advertising than
the United States. The relative free-for-all in branded content and sponsorship in the United States is by
no means mirrored elsewhere. These are the same “glocalization” dynamics seen in multinational
advertising debates for decades, with the difference that the dollar value is at this stage of the
monetization of digital content worldwide much lower, and thus the “education” of brands and advertisers
is required to be that much more strategic.

In the U.S. system, the dual regulatory regimes of the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complicate matters, creating confusion and anxiety among
platforms, creators, intermediaries, and advertisers. The FCC’s concerns over net neutrality providing full
access is impacted by the FTC’s Child Online Protection and Child Online Privacy Protection rules limiting
children’s access.

Neither Hollywood nor Bollywood

Outside the United States, in addition to outright, strategic, and temporary blocks on the digital
platforms, national and regional regulation can sometimes create friction that challenges the globalizing
imperatives of these platforms. India’s rejection of Facebook’s self-aggrandizing efforts to provide free,
but limited, online access to the market was rejected even as the country still suffers from limited,
irregular, and expensive access despite interventionist efforts by the government such as the Digital India
Programme. These state-based interventionist efforts have, nonetheless, nurtured an SME industry
operating with national, cultural, and subculture distinctions from the U.S. and Western versions, as
reflected in Kumar’s essay in this Special Section.

1
Data on these matters vary; however, Google posts traffic disruptions to its site at http://www.
google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/disruptions/#expand=Y2015,Y2014,Y2013,Y201.
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Online Entertainment — Introduction 5417

India is a global incubator of IT talent. In 2016, the chief executives of Alphabet (Google),
Microsoft, MasterCard, Adobe, and SanDisk are all Indian-born. (One in three residents of Silicon Valley
are first-generation migrants.) But, while nurturing the growth of U.S.-owned platforms, the success of
global Indians in IT abroad has further contributed to a booming Internet economy back home. Chennai-
born and -raised Google chief executive Sundar Pichai’s interest in India is obvious: There are already
more Indian than American Internet users, with several hundred million still unconnected. And Indian
prime minister Narendra Modi’s interest in the digital platforms is equally clear: Digital India will have to
be largely built on corporate investment.

It is estimated that India will become the youngest country in the world by 2020, and it already
has the world’s largest population in the age 10 to 24 demographic. Although vast numbers of Indian
youth are moving online, connectivity remains significantly underdeveloped. 4G and corresponding data
speeds are yet to be rolled out in India. In addition to speeds, the cost of mobile telephony and streaming
plans remains prohibitively high, despite the rapid growth of the Indian middle class, limiting access to
online video mainly to urban dwellers and cosmopolitan youth. However, with the imminent rollout of 4G
mobile, there is expected to be an unparalleled ramp-up of new voices online and on mobile.

The technological and economic limitations of the Indian mobile market may only temporarily
inhibit the growth of Indian SME, whereas the lack of diversity and access to India’s traditional film,
television, and music industries may further accelerate it. Bollywood has dominated Indian film for
decades, inhibiting new genres, stars, voices, and formats. Representing a limited form of vertical media
integration, over 70% of all music released in India is filmed music, foreclosing alternative genres such as
Indian rap, pop, or hip-hop. Despite 850 channels vying for attention and the advertising rupee, Indian
television remains focused on older audiences and traditional format and content, including prime-time
soap operas and political news discourse. In numerous accounts, our interviewees deride hegemonic
Indian popular discourse as ABCD—astrology, Bollywood, cricket, and devotional.

As a consequence, Indian millennials have turned off television, migrated online, and begun to
create content outside these national and indeed global expressions of Indianness, grounded in hyperlocal
regionalism, millennial popular interests, and sharp satire. Indian SME has fostered wave of new voices,
genres, and formats alternative to traditional Indian film, TV, and music, albeit representing more
mainstream genres seen in the West. The earliest creators in this space featured stand-up comedians and
alternative musicians, who first harnessed YouTube to promote their concerts and performances. In short
order, these performers evolved into concert promoters and comedy tour agents, music labels, and talent
agents and, more recently, multichannel networks, like OML (Only Much Louder). OML produces India’s
largest circuit of Weekender music festivals, while representing numerous pop, rap, and hip-hop music
acts and representing and producing content featuring India’s most popular comedy troupes, All India
Bakchod and East India Comedy.

Similarly, the dearth of scripted television comedy tailored for millennial audiences has nurtured
the unlikely success of scripted online Web series, such as Permanent Roommates produced by The Viral
Fever. Other traditional genres that emerged online include regional food culture, like the Indian Food
Network, fostered by the Mumbai-based PING network in partnership with Tastemade, a U.S.-based food-
5418 Stuart Cunningham & David Craig International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

themed multichannel network. OML and PING represent a wave of highly differentiating media
intermediaries operating within this new ecosystem, jockeying for space, value, brand equity, and, most
urgently, creators, advertisers, and audiences.

In turn, these conditions have further contributed to platform dominance, enticing YouTube to
launch another of its creator-focused YouTube Spaces in Mumbai in 2016. The space is dedicated to
“democraticizing access,” according to Jigisha Mistry Ieyengar, the head of the space, helping further
professionalize creators operating out of their living rooms by offering them digital studios featuring state-
of-the-art technology and postproduction support. Ironically, the space shares facilities with Whispering
Pines International, one of India’s most prestigious film schools.

The Great Chinese Firewall or Tidal Wave?

As with India, the contours and evolution of China’s digital and social media industries have been
fueled by the growth in China’s economy and middle class. In the past 35 years, China has incubated, and
cocooned, one of the largest experiments in autarkic development yet seen. In that period, China’s per
capita gross domestic product has grown 17 times over. Venture capital funds raised more than $320
billion in 2015. In the past two years, China has opened 1,600 start-up incubators. Many of the current
innovations in online commerce (e.g., QR codes, digital wallets), messaging, and live streaming have been
incubated and popularized in China.

In many ways, China’s singular and rapid development of its tech and online industries is due to
the fact that

it was able to fill a vacuum after the country essentially created much of its economy
from scratch following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike in the United States
where banks and retailers already have strongholds on customers, China’s state-run
lenders are inefficient, and retailers never expanded broadly enough to serve a fast-
growing middle class. (Mozur, 2016, p. 81)

For this reason, there is a much more sustainable basis to monetization, as China can be
characterized as a very much early-stage consumer culture. Outside the “first-tier” cities on the east
coast, there is significant fall-away of major branded bricks-and-mortar consumer outlets, and thus e-
commerce thrives. Competition among digital platforms is more intense than in the United States,
because they are more unilaterally focused on mobile applications in a country that leads the world by far
in mobile phone ownership and where the installed base of standard computers per capita is low.

As discussed by Michael Keane in this Special Section, China has built an alternative online
ecosystem based on state-based intervention, which includes not only banning YouTube, Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram but nurturing the growth of their own platforms. The government’s digital
economy strategy incubated the massive tech giants, the so-called BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent),
which, in turn, either birthed or adopted multiple highly competitive online TV platforms. As a
consequence of a highly charged, iterative, competing landscape, a number of online TV platforms have
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Online Entertainment — Introduction 5419

since been aborted, including Ku6, and other platforms have pivoted aggressively toward a subscription-
based, professionally generated content model—for example, iQiyi, LeTV, and Sohu. The latter platforms
have not only engaged in a programming arms race over U.S. and Chinese film and television content;
like Netflix and Amazon, China’s iQiyi is producing high-stakes, expensive, “complex” TV (Mittell, 2015)
that surpasses the audiences plugged in to their linear, terrestrial, satellite, and cable-distributed
counterparts.

Meanwhile, as Zhao describes in this Special Section, platforms such as Youku Tudou have
moved away from the more expensive and competitive professionally generated content portals to return
to their original value proposition of user-generated content with social networking capabilities. Similar to
the West, multiple social media platforms have launched to compete with or offer diverse affordances with
Youku. China’s game-play platforms such as Duoyu and PandaTV have already outpaced Western
equivalents such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming while accelerating China’s booming e-game industry. The
live-broadcasting affordances of these platforms supercharged the launch of more than 100 live mobile
applications in the past few years, which, in turn, contributed to a swift backlash from China’s censors
(Custer, 2015). What the state incubates, it may also abort.

Second-generation platforms such as Tencent’s WeChat, China’s formidable messenger service,

have reverse-engineered platform development in the West. Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp messenger
service for an exorbitant $19 billion may have represented a defensive effort by the West to block Chinese
platform penetration outside China’s Great Firewall. In light of Chinese commitment to the soft power of
media (Xi, 2014), Zuckerberg barely thwarted the first salvo in the art of a social media war rapidly
looming on the digital horizon (Lunden, 2014).

Microblogging platform Weibo makes an interesting contrast with its U.S.-based counterpart
Twitter. Like Twitter, Weibo is a text-based microblogging service that has been threatened repeatedly
with demise from various competitors, not least of which being WeChat (Custer, 2016). Unlike Twitter,
Weibo integrated photos and a video player into the platform from the beginning, which helped nurture
key opinion leaders, Weibo personalities from throughout the public sphere, including entrepreneurs,
politicians, and celebrities, engaging millions of Chinese netizens around the globe. With the proliferation
of smartphones with 4G speed fostering 700 million subscriptions, leaping over Youku, Weibo has become
the premiere platform for short video content, helping foster the advertising-defined “influencer”
(Wanghong 网红) economy.

The Chinese influencer economy affirms how these platforms have helped create the
technological and commercial conditions upon which an alternative Chinese social media entertainment
industry (CSME) has emerged. CSME features rapidly professionalizing amateur Chinese content creators
engaging in content innovation distinct from traditional Chinese film and television, like the
aforementioned game players; food, fashion, and style vloggers; and a wave of social media celebrities.
Once again, the Chinese state has engaged in tandem actions, nursing and disciplining these upstart
microcelebrities, like the Chinese vlog queen, Ms. Papi (Jiang). Wrist-slapped by censors for foul language,
Papi issued a message of contrition to her 11 million followers while simultaneously securing multimillions
in investment and brand integration (“China Internet Star,” 2016).
5420 Stuart Cunningham & David Craig International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

As in the West, the CSME industry coevolves alongside traditional Chinese media. In contrast to
the United States, but comparable to India, the industry exploits the lack of diversity in traditional film
and TV to feature more professionally generated traditional content, albeit in more affordable formats than
traditional scripted fare. One of the most popular shows on Youku is The Luogic Show, a history and social
issue–themed talk show hosted by former CCTV producer Luo Zhen Yu. Baozoudashijian is an
entertainment show hosted by Baozoumanhua, who remains anonymous, emerging on-screen solely in a
papier-mâché mask, providing arguably a brilliant ploy to thwart state censorship.

As in the West, a new wave of intermediaries operating between platforms, creators, advertisers,
and traditional media have emerged. Unlike in the West, these firms also function as digital production
companies generating original IP content across multiple platforms. Feidishuo features original animation
designed for millennials, or rather 1980s and 1990s balinghous and jiulinghuos featuring mature topics
around relationships, sex, and social pressure rarely discussed on Chinese TV (“China’s Top Video
Channel,” 2015). Heng Cai (interviewed in this Special Section), a social media entrepreneur and partner
in Star Station TV, discusses his company’s multipronged strategy of developing its own vertical brands
around sports, foods, antiques, and more, converting off-line experts into online influencers, and engaging
in content marketing with leading brands and advertisers. Operating as both influencer agency and
multichannel network, Xinpianchang also features its own content as well as not owned but nonetheless
operated channels. Unlike their multichannel network counterparts that have been acquired by traditional
media firms, these upstarts have accelerated through several rounds of investor financing, including
courting Palo Alto–based VCs or, in the case of Xinpianchang, launching and securing an initial public
offering (IPO) in Beijing’s New Market exchange.

Investment, acquisition, or successful IPO launch are no guarantee of sustainability, however;

Youku was recently bought back from the market and returned to the private sector. Based on interviews
with senior personnel at Youku, this buyback affords the company greater leeway to pivot, innovate,
disrupt, but mostly generate much-needed synergies with e-commerce partners in the Alibaba
corporation, including T-mall and Taobao stores. In contrast to the West, along with the lucrative fan-
funding virtual goods market fostered by the game-play platforms, influencer-fueled e-commerce
monetization represents one of the more sustainable revenue strategies of CSME. Little surprise, then,
that Amazon is trying to emulate Alibaba’s Youku Taobao synergies by launching its own user-generated
content platform, Video Direct. Like Facebook’s WhatsApp messenger play, Amazon is operating on the
defensive, trying to thwart a potential incursion from the online East.

As reflected by the strategic interplay between the U.S.-based and Western-oriented global and
China’s emergent SME industries, China’s Great Firewall has fostered a playing field comprised of
numerous major teams, players, rules, and skirmishes operating at the level of the domestic and the
global—many of which are larger and some of which are more innovative than U.S. leaders in the field.
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Online Entertainment — Introduction 5421

Articles in This Special Section

Michael Keane, in “Disconnecting, Connecting, and Reconnecting: How Chinese Television Found
Its Way Out of the Box,” puts Chinese online culture into the wider context of the rapid evolution of
Chinese television. Keane is concerned to balance views of Chinese exceptionalism by emphasizing
continuities with other major evolutions in the television system:

My argument is that the Chinese television industry is moving through similar

technological developments as those seen in the rest of the world, albeit with
considerable restrictions on content and controls on investment from private capital.

He structures his article around the themes of disconnecting, connecting, and reconnecting. Disconnecting
refers to the fact that, despite rapid commercialization and expansion of the system, the state
unrepentantly intervenes to censor content deemed “unhealthy” or “harmful” before production or force
offending content to be removed from screens. This causes online entrepreneurs, as the interview with
Heng Cai brings out, as much as mainstream broadcasters to need to be agile and creative in the way
they commission and produce content. On the other hand, connecting describes how audiences and users
are finding ways to access a diversity of content, including content that is restricted. Finally, reconnecting
deals with the way Chinese television has “got out of the box” and made its way overseas.

Jing Zhao’s “Professionalization of Amateur Production in Online Screen Entertainment in China:

Hopes, Frustrations, and Uncertainties” offers an analytical architecture for understanding the history of
the online video space in China and its uneven professionalization. Initial enthusiasm for the possibilities
of user-generated, amateur content saw a major correction when swathes of copyright-infringing content
and platforms were closed down by the state in 2007–2008. Platforms swung, pendulum-like, to
professionally generated content, but many struggled with the cost of licensing increasingly expensive licit
content. Zhao focuses on the current period of the “resurgence and revalidation” of user-generated
content. Online video production has rapidly come to offer alternatives to officially sanctioned institutions
in cultural production, distribution, and consumption.

Many online video platforms, Zhao argues, have their roots in amateur practices, facilitating flows
of content unavailable in the official marketplace. Her article draws on cases of productions by
professionalizing amateurs to examine their creative strategies. By reflecting on professionalizing
amateurs’ experiences in negotiating creativity/commerce/community relations, platform politics, and the
regulatory landscape, this article reveals the cultural and political implications of the professionalization of
amateur content.

The conversation with Heng Cai conducted by David Craig and Junyi Lv provides insights into the
strategy and operations of key intermediaries in the Chinese social media entertainment space—that is,
the so-called multichannel networks. Cai is a partner in Star Station TV, a multichannel network that
creates its own content and owns or manages 14 verticals—that is, channels dedicated to a single topic,
including sport, fashion, education, and lifestyle, which had garnered more than 438 million views by the
end of 2015. The firm partners with advertisers and creators to produce and distribute content across all
5422 Stuart Cunningham & David Craig International Journal of Communication 10(2016)

major platforms, including Youku, Weibo, Bilibili, iQiyi, and Maopai. Notwithstanding this, it does not
regard itself as an IP generator; it adds value through facilitating access to advertising, developing talent,
and strategic media management while also dealing with Chinese media regulation in its guise as both
censor and protector. Cai forensically enumerates five ways the government seeks to manage online
video.

Sangeet Kumar’s “YouTube Nation: Creation, Agency, and Precarity in India’s Online Video
Scene” navigates several overlapping questions in mapping the development of social media
entertainment in India. Kumar sees it as “gradually chipping away” at the structural dominance of
institutions such as Bollywood, television networks, and the celebrity culture that have remained the
hegemonic forces within the sphere of cultural production in India. Like Zhao on China’s online producers,
Kumar provides diverse snapshots of creative entrepreneurs on India’s YouTube. In doing so, the article
showcases particular forms of agentic subjectivity that arise from common citizens unconnected to
professional media industries who are able to carve a cultural and communicative space for themselves.
Kumar looks to fully acknowledge the tendencies of capital but eschews the doctrinaire divide positioning
the consumer and the citizen in an irresolvable either/or binary.

The articles by Keane, Zhao, and Kumar and the interview with Cai work largely within, and seek
to respond to, theories and debates mostly derived from media and cultural studies. Ralph Schroeder’s
article, “The Globalization of On-screen Sociability: Social Media and Tethered Togetherness,” is a
departure, with Schroeder considering the globalizing dynamics of social network sites from a
domestication-of-technologies approach complemented by a comparative-historical perspective on
technologies for sociability as well as theories of ritual interaction and connected presence. Schroeder
offers a careful, judicious overview of claims, debates, and findings about “on-screen sociability” in the
context of comparative insights from four countries: the United States, Sweden, India, and China.
Schroeder is concerned to rebalance much debate in the social sciences, which has focused on deviant
behavior, such as bullying, and issues requiring policy interventions, especially privacy. The vast bulk of
social uses, he says, are unlike these. He posits a divide between the “relative degradation” of the mobile-
only social media experience in India and China and the multimodal experience (mobile device plus
computer) practiced by Western users.

Like Schroeder, Limor Shifman’s “Cross-Cultural Comparisons of User-Generated Content: An

Analytical Framework” is also concerned to essay an analytical framework to deal with cross-cultural
comparisons of user-generated content, which she describes as a “conceptual and empirical minefield.”
Drawing on a broad communication studies framework that includes psychology, political science, and
political communication that has usually been applied to the analysis of news and advertisements, but
adding analytical frames more typically applied to one-on-one/less mediated forms of human
communication, Shifman analyzes note-card confessions and recut trailers through a cross-linguistic
comparative analysis. Carefully stepping through a repertoire of analytical tools, she exemplifies how
genres function both as “models of writing” for authors and as “horizons of expectations” for readers.
Genres are “revealing sociocultural testimonies.” The central importance for Shifman of digital culture is
that the ones who produce it are also often the ones that consume and interpret it. Shifman may be
regarded as offering a middle-way alternative to, on the one hand, big data analytics and “distant” reading
International Journal of Communication 10(2016) Online Entertainment — Introduction 5423

as an answer to the scale and chaos of user-generated content and, on the other, an anecdotal or
tendentious focus on nonrepresentative sampling.

Both Schroeder and Shifman are looking to delve deeper than usual comparative exercises can at
the cultural roots that drive different uses of and engagements with social media. They add significantly to
this Special Section’s understanding of the cultural and communicative diversity arising from globalizing
social media.

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