Platformed creativity: How artists make sense of changing marketplace dynamics

From visual artists selling prints and postcards to digital asset creators producing stickers and animations for Twitch streamers, creatives increasingly rely on arts marketplaces (e.g. Etsy, Redbubble) to access global consumer bases. Several qualitative and quantitative studies have explored the experiences and sensemaking processes of platform workers and entrepreneurs, yet these contributions remain limited in their applicability to platform marketplaces, as they focus primarily on creatives’ experiences of social media platforms. Arts marketplace sellers occupy a structurally distinct position from the social media creators addressed in this literature, as visibility is not their monetisable end goal but a necessary precursor to a potential sale. We draw on semi-structured interviews with creatives selling on digital marketplaces ( n  = 21), combining insights from research on platform precarity with different notions of algorithmic sensemaking, to identify which dimensions and implications of platform change are most important to arts marketplace sellers according to their own experiences. We find that foregrounded concerns centred on changing fee and content policies leading to marketplace exit, copyright flagging, algorithmic discovery, market composition changes linked to generative artificial intelligence and new entrants and the growing need to use social media to drive marketplace traffic and visibility. Our observations further suggest that, within our sample, reactions to platform changes vary by employment situation and, by extension, financial stability, with part-time creatives expressing stronger discontent and desire to alter strategies than full-time artists. As our research design is not suited to testing this connection, we present it as a hypothesis for future research.