Influenciadores digitais e diversos modelos de negócios: a busca por uma carreira autêntica na creator economy

• Ano de defesa: 2025
• Autor(a) principal: Motta, Caio Pigatto
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Santa Maria; Brasil; Comunicação; UFSM; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação; Centro de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
• Palavras-chave em Português: Influenciadores digitais; Modelos de negócios; Autenticidade; Comunicação; Creator economy; Digital influencers; Business models; Authenticity; Communication; CNPQ::CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::COMUNICACAO
• Link de acesso: http://repositorio.ufsm.br/handle/1/34557

This master's thesis is situated within the field of digital influencer studies and is delimited by their various business models. From this central theme, I aim to answer the following question: how do digital influencers diversify their business models in the creator economy? To this end, on a macro level, the research seeks to understand how influencers authentically diversify their business models within the creator economy. On a micro level, I establish four specific objectives: (i) to experience the creation of a business model as a content creator; (ii) to discuss the inequalities present in the creator economy, both online and offline; (iii) to map the different types of business models adopted by creators; and (iv) to understand the limits and possibilities of digital influencers in diversifying business models within this industry.To achieve these objectives, I adopt digital ethnography (Hine, 2016) as a theoretical-methodological approach (Peirano, 2014), which is composed of three main strands. The first is "experiencing," in which I begin with online participant observation (Caiafa, 2019; Travancas, 2010). Over the course of the research, I adopt autoethnography (Hine, 2016; Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2019) and take on the role of a content creator, both to generate data for the study and to combat fake news disseminated within the industry. This is done through the podcast titled "They're Not Voices in My Head." The second strand is "participating," where I use offline participant observation to report on what I captured at the Brazilian edition of the largest global content creator event in 2023, Vidcon São Paulo. The final strand, "interviewing," involves using insights gathered from the field to support the 11 open-ended interviews (Duarte, 2010) I conducted with creators and executive directors in the content creator economy. The theoretical foundation of this dissertation is built upon three interrelated fields of study. The first consists of platform studies (D’Andréa, 2020; Poell, Nieborg & Van Dijck, 2020), with an emphasis on the platformization of cultural production (Poell, Nieborg & Duffy, 2021), where I position the creator economy as an economy similar to traditional cultural industries, marked by deep inequalities and opportunities. The second axis explores digital influencer studies (Karhawi, 2018), which help to understand the premises of the society of the spectacle, as proposed by Debord (1997), through the promotion of intimacy (Abidin, 2015) and authenticity, which assigns commercial value (Banet-Weiser, 2021) to the construction of their various businesses. Finally, monetization studies examine the different revenue sources of creators, based on the three phases proposed by Cunningham and Craig (2019) and the categorization by Goanta and Bertaglia (2023), which not only guide business modeling but also reveal how influencers are shaping themselves as a ‘commodity self’ (Karhawi, 2016). As a result, I identified 15 aspects related to how influencers multiply their business models within the industry, linked to the creation of data-driven content, integration into the creator economy, the construction of apparent intimacy, and the value of authenticity.