It’s an intentionally broad concept, and many terms work together to create it:

The term “platform” is common in industry and specialized discussions about the digital economy. There are many typologies of platforms available, but at the broadest level, Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffe (2019) make a useful distinction between (a) innovation platforms — software (like an operating system or suite) that runs other third-party software and (b) marketplace platforms — digital hosts, usually businesses themselves, that connect buyers and sellers of goods, services, or labor in two-sided or multi-sided markets. Social media platforms can be understood as either (2a) a special kind of marketplace platform or as (c) a close cousin — monetizing attention to user-created or creative content via advertisements.

Platformization is powerful and increasingly common, but never neutral. With the platformization of almost every kind of market (including labor markets) comes new “logics” — new structures, rules, incentives, and pressures. Platformization makes new winners and losers, scrambles value chains, and alters age-old relationships among labor, capital, and the state. For the digital development discussion, we are more interested in marketplace and social media platforms, as shown in our approach’s emphasis on “digital marketplaces.”

“Livelihoods” draws on a broader discussion in the development literature. As a concept, it is broader, more fluid, and more flexible than “jobs” or even “work.” “Livelihoods” better encompasses part-time, casual, and informal work, and is sensitive to combinatory practices in which several activities and skills are necessary for survival. Rather than emphasizing a specific role or job title, livelihoods involve making a living as a set of strategies to combine assets, capabilities, labor, and social resources.

Here’s how “platforms” and “livelihoods” connect: when combined, they refer to more than gig work. The broad umbrella of “platform livelihoods” suggests that there are many ways to earn a living and many ways in which platforms are becoming involved. To convey this heterogeneity, we’ve settled on a view which focuses on a few elemental livelihood activities — on what people do — rather than on what platforms provide. These are working, selling, renting, and engaging.

• Working links most closely to “gig work” and is perhaps the most prominent and hotly debated example of platform livelihoods. Individuals rely on platforms to match their labor to compensation outside the contexts (and any protections) of employer-employee relationships.
• Trading maps onto e-commerce and social commerce. Individuals or small enterprises offer products and services to customers via marketplace platforms and/or social media. Almost every microenterprise involves trading — wholesalers, retailers, manufacturers, service providers, and even artisans and artists can sell their products and services via platforms small and large.
• Renting is the monetization of assets via a platform. Lending or leasing a tractor or truck by the hour or day, or offering a room of one’s house on Airbnb all fall under this kind of asset utilization, as does lending (renting) money on peer-to-peer loan platforms.
• Engaging has, literally, captured the online world’s attention: Instagram influencers, YouTube and TikTok content creators, even affiliate marketers getting commissions for well-placed clickable ads. All of these can be seen as engaged in platform livelihoods, too. The key element distinguishing this platform livelihood activity from the others is that it involves at least three parties besides the platform: the creators, the audience, and the advertisers. Through a remarkable, though often problematic, combination of platform design, scale, algorithmic weighting, and (often) targeting data, the result is an “attention economy,” in which engagers can prosper by being compensated for bringing attention to content (and/or to the ads alongside that content).

This view of “many livelihoods” touches almost every sector of the economy. Indeed, many familiar roles are actually combinations of these activities. Take, for example, the ride-hailing driver who owns their car, drives nine hours a day via two different platforms, and rents their vehicle to another driver in the evenings. Their efforts are better understood as a combination of renting (assets) and working (labor) rather than as the application of labor alone. In this view, it is best to avoid assuming that people are exclusively renters or traders or engagers; instead, many will combine these practices in distinct ways to pursue their distinct livelihoods.

We situate these activities “in” instead of “by,” “via,” or “for” platform marketplaces. These platforms aren’t merely tools that workers and sellers can use, but structures they must navigate. Nor are these individuals engaged in activities “for” the platforms as employees or agents; individuals and small firms operate without employer-employee contracts. For now, “in” best describes how individuals pursue livelihoods within the contexts (affordances and constraints) at least partially established by platforms.