The Impact of Digital Platforms on Traditional Media Industries: Disruption, Reconfiguration, and Emerging Power Structures

Abstract

Digital platforms have fundamentally disrupted traditional media industries by reconfiguring distribution, monetization, production, and audience relationships. The rise of algorithmic recommendation systems, data-driven advertising, and user-generated content has challenged legacy business models while creating new forms of value and dependency. This review examines these transformations, grounded in platform economics, creative destruction theory, and media convergence perspectives. Recognition of platform power has driven shifts from linear broadcasting models to algorithmic distribution, from advertising-supported revenue to subscription and data monetization strategies, and from centralized gatekeeping to platform-mediated content creation. Specific technologies—including recommendation algorithms, programmatic advertising, and data analytics platforms—have accelerated these changes. Applications in news, audiovisual entertainment, and music demonstrate both efficiency gains and significant risks of market concentration, content homogenization, and loss of editorial independence. Challenges of algorithmic opacity, revenue extraction by platforms, and declining trust in media persist. Prospects center on regulatory intervention, alternative platform models, and hybrid strategies that combine platform reach with greater autonomy. The analysis concludes that digital platforms have not merely supplemented traditional media but have restructured the fundamental economics and power relations of cultural production, requiring new frameworks for understanding media industries in the platform era.