Finally, regardless of the models developed and the strategies deployed, startup platforms have the same dependencies as the projects they help develop. Project creators depend on the investment of their community and, similarly, platforms depend on their own investors. In order to grow and develop they must carry out regular, substantial fundraising, public and private, as already analyzed in the framework of the so-called ‘collaborative’ web (Bouquillion and Matthews 2010). As a result there are uncertainties as to their future, but there is also growing competition, leading to the takeover and/or demise of platforms—as illustrated by the closure of MyMajorCompany in 2016.
The ‘Ecosystem’ as a Stimulus for Extensive Partnerships
The third point follows from the logics of intermediation created in this way. It particularly involves the search for partnerships that will allow these platforms to be integrated into the existing economic ‘ecosystem’, making them new intermediaries—which somewhat tempers, while not entirely invalidating, the idea of the alternative. If the notion of the ‘ecosystem’ resonates with both environmental issues and the core questions posed by the ‘commons’ movement, it is implemented in a wholly diferent perspective here. The ‘ecosystem’ we hear so much about must be understood in terms of a double movement of synergetic partnerships and competition driven and regulated by the market economy. The new world market, made up of a myriad of small- and medium-sized economic players linked by digital communications networks, supposedly depends on the systematization of peer-to-peer approaches in the economic domain, as well as on a hypothetical fusion between the spheres of production and consumption, as described in The World is Flat (Friedman 2005) and Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams 2006).
The partnerships forged can be of diferent types, sometimes private, sometimes public, and sometimes by way of white-labelling. They may change over time. In France, from its very beginning the platform MyMajorCompany was associated with the music label Warner, which handled its publishing and distribution. In 2010 it chose to diversify its activities by moving into literary publishing, and forged an alliance with the publisher XO. In 2011, wanting to enter the comics sector, it formed a partnership with the Belgian group Media Participations, owner of Dupuis, Dargaud and Le Lombard publishing houses, and in parallel it formed other partnerships with companies as diverse as the insurer AXA, the interiors store Habitat and the music streaming site Spotify. In 2018, KissKissBankBank announced partnerships with numerous public and private players, including La Banque Postale, the newspaper Le Parisien, a number of Chambers of Trade and Industry, and MK2 cinemas. Ulule’s partnerships are less visible, and seem instead to work by inviting local companies and collectives to function as white label products, and through targeted and branded campaigns. The UK’s number one cultural project platform, Crowdfunder (a spin-of of the equity platform Crowdcube) boasts numerous such partnerships with a range of companies including M&S, Santander, Virgin Business, AXA, JCDecaux), as well as universities and local authorities across the country.
Far from an Alternative: Intermediation Apparatuses
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