Job demands and work–life balance on digital labor markets. An analysis of content creators on YouTube

• In Event: Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 11. Jobs & markets

Abstract

As platform labor and other digital work arrangements have expanded over the past decade, they have become a critical focus for designing equitable policies and protections for future work. Unlike established forms of employment, platform labor is rarely institutionally safeguarded and often characterized by precarious conditions and structured by algorithmic systems of governance. A special case in this context are content creators (CCs), whose job demands and work–life balance are at the center of this paper.
CCs have evolved into a distinct occupational group, as social media platforms offer the prospect of social and economic capital and increasingly promote an economically oriented mode of production. Despite widespread attention to high-profile success stories, research has shown that the majority of content creators encounter precarious working conditions. They are highly dependent on the platform algorithms, face high economic inequality and irregular income. Working as a content creator requires self-determined organization and self-economization, control, and the centering of the platform in one’s life. In this context we know relatively little about the connection of subjective attitudes towards work and its relationship with social inequality for content creators. With a view to the discourse on precarity in digital employment, the paper examines the extent to which a specific work-related subject form has emerged among CCs– one that internalizes self-responsibility, meritocratic performance orientation, and market-oriented self-optimization – and how this affects their work–life balance. The basis is an online survey from 2025 including N=500 German YouTubers merged with their platform metrics using web scraped data. Using descriptive analyses and linear regressions, we investigate which factors influence the working conditions and the work–life balance of CCs. The paper thus makes an empirical and theoretical contribution to debates on the transformation of digital labor, subjectivation, and orders of recognition in digital capitalism.

Authors

• Sarah Weissmann, University Potsdam

• Aaron Philipp, University of Potsdam

• Roland Verwiebe, University of Vienna