Platform Evolution: A Study of TripAdvisor

Abstract

The recent commercial expansion of social media platforms challenges their origin as places of networking and community building and raises important questions as regards their status as institutional entities. After briefly reviewing the literature on platforms and ecosystems, we conduct a longitudinal case study of TripAdvisor. Our findings show the critical role networking and social data have historically played in positioning TripAdvisor as a hub in a vast digital travel ecosystem. At the same time, our analysis unravels the growing diversification of data types linked to the roles performed by different types of actors (e.g. end users, advertisers, business owners, online travel agencies). The shifting nature of these roles and the data types they produce largely account for the patterns of platform evolution and its market position.