15 Challenges and opportunities for recommender systems in media markets
Heritiana Renaud Ranaivoson, Annelien Smets, Pieter Ballon · 2024
Recommender systems have become omnipresent in media markets, from production to distribution and consumption. What is often overlooked, however, is that the multi-sided nature of contemporary media markets implies that recommender systems need to balance the needs and requirements of actors on different sides of these markets, such as content providers and end-users. Starting from an overview of the rapidly growing literature on recommender systems in media markets, and emphasizing their multi-sided nature, we first describe the main typologies of recommender systems and analyze how various stakeholders might adopt particular strategies to have these systems create novel market opportunities. Then, we discuss media market dilemmas that result from these stakeholders’ often competing objectives in terms of biases, notably filter bubbles, management dilemmas, and issues around privacy and transparency. We argue how revisiting these concerns from a multi-stakeholder perspective opens up new angles to understand recommender systems’ impact on contemporary media markets.