Platforms Everywhere: Understanding What Platforms Are and How to Study Them

For years, much of public and academic debates about platforms revolved around social media. Today, attention has shifted toward artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, and AI platforms. Yet many of the underlying concerns remain the same: concentration of power, data extraction, infrastructure dependency, governance, and control.

This continuity reflects a broader transformation. Platforms are no longer simply apps or websites. They increasingly function as infrastructures that organise communication, commerce, cultural production, education, logistics, and artificial intelligence itself.

This is the starting point of our new book, Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2026). The book offers an accessible introduction to the field of platform studies while developing a framework for understanding how platforms operate, evolve, and exert power across contemporary societies.

We argue that platforms should be understood as socio-technical systems that simultaneously operate as services, companies, and technologies or infrastructures. Across these dimensions, platforms act as powerful convenors and shapers, bringing together users, developers, advertisers, businesses, governments, and institutions while structuring the conditions under which these actors interact.

A second central argument is that platforms should not be studied as isolated entities. They operate as ecosystems that connect multiple actors through shared infrastructures, standards, interfaces, and governance systems. This ecosystem perspective helps explain how platforms become indispensable intermediaries and why their power extends far beyond individual apps or services.

The book also makes a methodological case for studying platforms infrastructurally. Beyond interfaces and user practices, we need to examine APIs, cloud infrastructures, developer ecosystems, governance systems, business models, and technical dependencies. Understanding these often less visible layers is essential for understanding how platforms shape contemporary society.

Platforms are not simply technologies we use. They increasingly organise the conditions under which social, cultural, economic, and political life takes place.

The book is published by Polity and available now. More information can be found here: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509568109

Polity is currently offering a 30% discount through its website with the code HVD30. Feel free to use the code yourself or share it with others who may be interested.

A dialogue between Migle Bareikyte, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Jonathan W. Y. Gray, Anne Helmond, Ian Milligan, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, and Valérie Schafer.

Anne Helmond: For me, the datafied web refers to an evolving ecosystem in which the collection, analysis, and monetisation of data have become central operational logics of the web, app, and now AI-based environment. It is not limited to visible metrics such as likes or shares in the user interface but extends to largely invisible back-end infrastructures that enable audience construction, tracking, and targeting. The datafied web is composed of interconnected platforms, data intermediaries, and advertising technologies that exchange data through APIs (Application ProgrammingInterfaces), SDKs (Software Development Kits) and other technical means as well as through strategic organisational partnerships (van der Vlist & Helmond, 2021). Digital advertising has played a key role in creating and sustaining this ecosystem, and continues to shape how data is produced, collected, circulated, and made economically valuable. In this sense, the datafied web is both infrastructural, organisational, and political-economic in nature.

Bareikyte, M., Gerlitz, C., Giessmann, S., Gray, J. W. Y., Helmond, A., Milligan, I., Thylstrup, N. B., & Schafer, V. (2026). The datafied web: A round-doc discussion. Internet Histories, 0(0), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2026.2671555

Over ten years ago I coined the term ‘platformization’ (2015) to understand how platforms expand beyond their own boundaries in Social Media + Society.

Editor Zizi Papacharissi invited me, along others, to celebrate the journal’s 10 years’ anniversary by reflecting on a decade of platformization.

The Platformization of Everything: From the End of the Like Button to AI Infrastructure in Space
A decade after the term was coined, “platformization” has evolved from describing the infrastructural expansion of platforms into other domains to capturing a broader transformation in how platforms organize (digital) life. This article traces this shift from the early social web to today’s AI-centered platform models. The retirement of Facebook’s Like button and Google’s “Suncatcher” space-based AI initiative are used as illustrative examples to demonstrate how platforms continually adapt their expansion strategies. Although the concept has been productively adopted across disciplines, its frequent conflation with the term “digitization” has led to conceptual erosion, weakening its analytical precision. To reclaim its explanatory power, this article redefines platformization as a form of platform-specific “transcoding”: a situated process whereby practices and domains are made “platform-ready.”

Full article (open access): Helmond, A. (2026). The Platformization of Everything: From the End of the Like Button to AI Infrastructure in Space. Social Media + Society, 12(2), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261436101

This chapter introduces methods for analysing app ecosystems, emphasizing that apps are not stand-alone entities but exist within larger ecosystems. It outlines three approaches: apps “for that,” examining thematic collections of apps like those addressing the COVID-19 pandemic; apps “for” apps, focusing on apps developed for specific platforms like social media apps; and apps in apps, investigating third-party services embedded within apps. The chapter concludes by highlighting the importance of these approaches for understanding the cultural, economic and political dynamics of app ecosystems.

Link: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003166016-38.
(or: author’s pre-print PDF)

A History of Researching the Datafied Web

It’s a real pleasure to return to the RESAW conference, and to Siegen. We were asked to contemplate a deceptively simple question: how did the web become datafied?

To begin, we should ask: what do we mean by the datafied web? Drawing on the work I’ll present this afternoon with Fernando van der Vlist, we understand it as an evolving ecosystem where data collection, analysis, and monetization are central to its operations (van der Vlist and Helmond, 2021; Helmond and van der Vlist, 2023). For better or worse, digital advertising underpins most of the web and app ecosystem– through often invisible mechanisms of tracking and targeting.

Today, we will argue and show that the datafied web is a vast, complex ecosystem of interconnected platforms, intermediaries, and advertising technologies, many operating seamlessly in the back-end. Some actors are linked in long chains, each offering part of the services or infrastructure needed for targeted advertising. Others—like Google—have built fully integrated ad stacks, serving all sides of the market, which has resulted in a now highly-contested monopoly power.

To understand how this came to be, we need to trace the actors, tools, techniques, and infrastructures that enabled it—and crucially, the purposes for which they were built. On the front-end, we’ve seen increasing datafication through metrics like likes, shares, and retweets. But on the back-end, we’ve seen the rise of programmatic advertising, tracking and targeting techniques such as cookies and header-bidding, data broker networks, and opaque data infrastructures that underpin a billion-dollar industry centered around audience data—which we’ll talk more about this afternoon.

Central to this transformation were APIs, which, as Tim O’Reilly (2004) once framed it in the era of Web 2.0, turned the web into a programmable interface. APIs expose website data and enable websites and platforms to talk to each other and exchange data and functionalities. APIs are central to the platformisation of the web, enabling platforms to technically weave themselves into new domains (Helmond, 2015). They interconnect platforms and now function as the material pipelines of the datafied web.

But how do we study this vast, layered, and often invisible ecosystem in the back-end?

Here, I want to make a case for the continued relevance of web archives and the humble hyperlink as analytical objects, even as the web increasingly shifts from open websites to mobile apps and AI-driven interfaces.

Hyperlinks may seem mundane, but they are incredibly rich. They are highly standardized, yet diverse in their use. They can carry data flows—for example, through short URLs (see Helmond, 2013) or campaign parameters. They can function as API calls, connecting websites to other platforms and databases. And they can point us to the broader ecosystem of actors and data infrastructures in which a website is embedded.

In my very first paper, with Esther Weltevrede, we used Internet Archive data to reconstruct historical hyperlink networks to map the evolution of the Dutch blogosphere (2012). We showed its decline and the growing presence of social media. But one striking finding was the abundance of web counters in the early blogosphere—bloggers weren’t just sharing content, they were proudly displaying visitor stats. It signaled an early culture of measurement in the datafied web.

Later, with Carolin Gerlitz, we examined how social media platforms introduced Like and sharing plugins. These tools didn’t just show popularity—they also enabled tracking. They linked websites to the platform, pinging back user data and building what we called a “data-intensive infrastructure” supporting the commercial surveillance complex (Gerlitz and Helmond, 2013).

This led me to develop what I later called historical source code analysis—an approach to studying archived HTML not for its content or visual design, but to reconstruct the data infrastructures behind websites: counters, trackers, third-party scripts. I see it as a way to study website ecologies, revealing the broader data ecosystem of the web from the vantage point of a single site (Helmond, 2017).

So even as we move away from the open web, web archives remain valuable. They let us reconstruct the political economy of datafication: how advertising technologies, analytics tools, and platform integrations have evolved and have reshaped the web’s infrastructure.

Because while the front-end of the web has changed dramatically, the back-end has undergone a deeper transformation: from simple counters and cookies to complex stacked infrastructures designed for the capture, circulation, and commodification of data.

So let’s use this week to ask: how did the web become datafied? Who built it that way and for which purposes? And how can we use the tools of web historiography—web archives, archived source code, and hyperlink networks—to tell that story?

References
Gerlitz, Carolin, and Anne Helmond. “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web.” New Media & Society, vol. 15, no. 8, Nov. 2013, pp. 1348–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812472322.

Helmond, Anne. “Historical Website Ecology. Analyzing Past States of the Web Using Archived Source Code.” Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web, edited by Niels Brügger, Peter Lang Publishing, 2017, pp. 139–55, https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/8e8618c9-1a47-438b-89d0-f637501e434e.

Helmond, Anne. “The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink.” Computational Culture, no. 3, Nov. 2013, http://computationalculture.net/article/the-algorithmization-of-the-hyperlink.

Helmond, Anne. “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” Social Media + Society, vol. 1, no. 2, Jan. 2015, pp. 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080.

Helmond, Anne, and Fernando van der Vlist. “Situating the Marketization of Data.” Situating Data: Inquiries in Algorithmic Culture, edited by Karin van Es and Nanna Verhoeff, Amsterdam University Press, 2023, pp. 279–86, https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463722971_ch17.

van der Vlist, Fernando N., and Anne Helmond. “How Partners Mediate Platform Power: Mapping Business and Data Partnerships in the Social Media Ecosystem.” Big Data & Society, vol. 8, no. 1, Jan. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025061.

Weltevrede, Esther, and Anne Helmond. “Where Do Bloggers Blog? Platform Transitions within the Historical Dutch Blogosphere.” First Monday, vol. 17, no. 2, Feb. 2012. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v17i2.3775.