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A DIGITAL PUBLISHING PLATFORM AS A SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE FOR THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF CREATIVE CONTENT: THE CASE OF ZELLULOZA.RU

Published in Trade, service, food industry · Volume 6, Issue 3 · Pages 340–352 · Rubric: Service
EDN: SWCVYK
Received: 17.05.2026 Accepted: 30.05.2026 Published: 28.08.2026
Authors
The article examines a digital publishing platform as a designed environment for commercial, communicative, reputational, and contractual interaction in the creative economy. The case is Zelluloza.ru, a Russian platform combining online reading, author self-publishing, paid access to literary works, ranking mechanisms, feedback tools, and a contractual framework for author–platform interaction. The study determines how interfaces, rules, commercial incentives, reputational signals, and feedback mechanisms structure user actions and interaction patterns. The methodology includes a qualitative case study, structural and functional analysis of open platform sections, analysis of author and reader routes, and interpretation through two-sided markets, platform ecosystems, digital affordances, and social architecture. The study relies only on publicly available materials and does not examine personal data, payment data, correspondence, closed statistics, or commercial reporting. The article argues that a digital publishing platform is not merely a website, an online bookstore, or a technical channel for selling electronic books. It functions as a social architecture that distributes participant roles, creates conditions for trust, organizes the visibility of works, connects creative activity with content commercialization, and supports repeated interaction. The main result is a diagnostic matrix covering interface, contractual, commercial, reputational, communicative, content-related, and partner dimensions of platform organization. The approach can support analysis of digital services in creative industries and diagnostics of platform environments in online commerce and cultural production.
digital publishing platform, Zelluloza.ru, author self-publishing, content commercialization, online commerce, creative industries, platform economy, reader behavior, reputational mechanisms, digital environment
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