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Publication Trendyol Influencers: Gender, Precarious Work, and Platform Labor at the Intersection of E-Commerce and Influencer Industries in Turkey(2024-09) Karakilic, Alkim YalinThis dissertation investigates the integration between e-commerce and influencer industries in Turkey, and how this integration shapes content creation, digital labor, and platform work. I use digital observations and interviews to examine the Turkish e-commerce platform Trendyol’s (owned by Alibaba) impact on the emergence of new forms of platformized cultural production, digital labor, and labor organizing. By doing so, I raise critical questions about feminization of work in platformized cultural production, platform contingency, and precarity experienced by content creators. Trendyol invested in influencer marketing from its early days to leverage social media entertainment and shoppability to increase platform selling. The large influencer network built by the platform was essential to gain the trust of a consumer base that largely contained women. Even if the platform’s influencer program first appealed to creators due to its flexibility, premise of profitability, and perceived autonomy, Trendyol has the platform power to govern the labor of its creators through the large influencer and sales data it owns. Content creators who helped building a feminine shopping community through different promotional forms, such as promotional live streams, are often perceived as having financial security and living glamorous lives by the audiences. However, Trendyol turned influencing into a gig type of work that is highly platform contingent and precarious, particularly due to the flexible work arrangement and sudden changes in the monetization system. Creators who take part in the Trendyol influencer program experience precarity at multiple levels, including the monetization system, dependence on predatory influencer agencies, algorithms, and the local context. To navigate this precariousness, creators adopt various forms of individual and collective tactics of resistance. The rich case demonstrated by the Trendyol influencers expands on the previous scholarship on creator and platform studies and emphasizes the importance of adopting a simultaneously global and local approach to study the impact of platformization on cultural production and labor relations that arise out of it.