Quarterly Learnings Report Q2 2026
Blake Hallinan
The PAY4PLAY: Entrepreneurial Organizing in the Platform Society team is growing! The big news from Q2 2026 is all about personnel. Emilija Jokubauskaitė started in May as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Digital Methods and Lukas Lautenschlager will be starting as a PhD Research Fellow in September. They both come from the University of Amsterdam and bring some serious methodological skills, theoretical creativity, and curiosity—plus Emilija is a leading expert on the design and operations of adult webcamming platforms. I’m looking forward to working with them both and know that the project will be much richer from their involvement. I’ll be hiring a second PhD Research Fellow in the fall focused on VTubers. The call will go out in September, with a submission deadline in October. If you’re interested in learning more, please reach out.PAY4PLAY Quarterly Learnings Report
Blake Hallinan presenting at the International Communication Association Conference
All is well on the research front. The project’s first publication—Copyright at the margins: Mapping informal governance through Wikitubia—is forthcoming in New Media & Society, co-authored by CJ Reynolds, D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Landrous X. Shen, and me. Bondy and I promoted
the paper at the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Cape Town in June. I also started my 2-year term as the Vice Chair of the Media Industry Studies interest group of the association. Emilija Jokubauskaitė and co-author Stijn Peeters presented on-going research on content niches, more on that below, at the annual conference of the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies in Montepellier, also in June. Finally, I led a workshop on controversy mapping for creator studies and presented a theoretical overview of creator governance as the University of Copenhagen as the inaugural speaker in the “Digital Creators and Platforms” speaker series, hosted by Christoffer Bagger and Bjarki Valtysson as part of the Follow Me: The Influence of Danish Digital Media Creators project in April.
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye presenting at the International Communication Association conference.
The team will continue to present research throughout the fall, including at the Social Media Influence conference in Aarhus in August, the European CommunicationResearch and Education Association in Brno in September, and the conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Mexico City in October. Keep an eye out for what’s to come.
New Team Members:
Emilija Jokubauskaitė holds a PhD in Social Sciences and an rMA in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled Beyond winner-take-all: Examining market competition on and between webcam sex platforms. In it, she explores the webcamming industry through digital methods and fieldwork, drawing from platform studies, creator studies, and online sex work literature. She is joining the PAY4PLAY team as a postdoctoral researcher to further explore and map the adult industry and its interconnections with the rest of the web.
Lukas Lautenschlager joins the team as a PhD Research Fellow focusing on "Cultures of Participation within and among Creator Communities." He comes from the University of Amsterdam, where he studied how automation and software are reconfiguring human relationships. Methodologically, he draws on quanti-quali methods, combining zoomed-in deep ethnographic engagement with a zoomed-out perspective from digital methods. At PAY4PLAY, Lukas will investigate how gaming creators organize themselves and their fan communities behind the scenes — the labor, hierarchies, and alliances that turn a streamer's audience into mega-events like La Velada del Año, which fills stadiums IRL and topped the charts on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. Over the next three years he'll embed in these communities across three language spheres — Spanish, English, and German — and map how relationships are built, governed, and monetized from the inside.
Ongoing Projects:
Goodbye YouTube! A history of the platform as seen through the eyes of creators who make videos announcing their intention to leave it. We’re in the midst of analyzing nearly 13,000 videos of YouTubers talking about leaving the platform, published from 2006—2025. [Contributors: Blake Hallinan, Manon Raynaud, CJ Reynolds, Maria Rasskazova]
Bad Refunds: An investigation of creator experiences with social transctions (e.g., tips and subscriptions) that get refunded by the platform or charged back by the credit card company. [Contributors: Blake Hallinan, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, CJ Reynolds]
Content Niches: An investigation of how content niches in the webcamming industry can be conceptualized and empirically studied through the case of Chaturbate. [Contributors: Emilija Jokubauskaitė, Stijn Peeters]
Transactional Affordances: A collaboration with the Finfluence: The Interplay Between Trading Platforms, Investment Communities, and Financial Influencers project at the University of Copenhagen which introduces a typology of transactional affodances (donation, subscription, purchase, token) that facilitate payments between creators and fans, maps these affordances across ten mainstream and adult-oriented platforms, and shows how they configure the relationship between creators, fans, and platforms. [Contributors: Blake Hallinan, Dana Theiler, CJ Reynolds, Kai Roland Green, Isabell Knief]
Creator Policy Priorities and Actors: A map of creator involvement in the platform governance policy process constructed through a dataset of industry conference programs. Please reach out if you know of conferences or have any programs yourself! [Contributors: Blake Hallinan, TBD]
Upcoming Events:
Blake Hallinan will present “Anticipatory (Non)compliance: How AI Streamers Monetize the Content Moderation Game” at the Social Media Influence: Understanding Digital Infrastructures confernece in Aarhus, Denmark, in August.
Blake Hallinan will participate in the roundtable discussion on “Platform Governance from Social Media to Generative AI: Shifting Grounds in the Governance of Digital Media” at the 11th European Communication Conference in Brno, Czech Republic, in September.
Blake Hallinan will present “Anticipatory (Non)compliance: How AI Streamers Monetize the Content Moderation Game” at the 11th European Communication Conference in Brno, Czech Republic, in September.
Emilija Jokubaskitė and Blake Hallinan will present “Creator protection practices: Publicizing the financial risks of social payments” at the conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Mexico City, Mexico, in October.
Blake Hallinan will present “Goodbye YouTube! A longitudinal analysis of creators leaving the platform”at the conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Mexico City, Mexico, in October.
Photo by Caroline Ommer on Unsplash