Living from one’s views

A content creation industry is emerging through the emblematic figures of influencers, YouTubers and streamers. While this industry appeals to brands, there are still many unknowns around the conditions of production and the economic mechanisms structuring it. This article explores these conditions and the implications of the changes underway, showing how activities formerly perceived as recreational have become professions in their own right. Based on a synthesis of the literature, it acknowledges the difficulty of studying the content market from a platform infrastructure perspective, due to their opacity. It therefore proposes to go through the creators and intermediaries of this market to reconstruct its overall economic logic, successively examining the themes of work, market configurations, business frameworks and income inequalities. The question of content creators thus appears to be part of a more profound evolution of the labour market, establishing self-entrepreneurship, self-employment and precariousness as professional standards.