15 Challenges and opportunities for recommender systems in media markets

Recommender systems have become omnipresent in media markets, fromproduction to distribution and consumption. What is often overlooked, however, isthat the multi-sided nature of contemporary media markets implies that recom-mender systems need to balance the needs and requirements of actors on differentsides of these markets, such as content providers and end-users. Starting from anoverview of the rapidly growing literature on recommender systems in media mar-kets, and emphasizing their multi-sided nature, we first describe the main typologiesof recommender systems and analyze how various stakeholders might adopt particu-lar strategies to have these systems create novel market opportunities. Then, we dis-cuss media market dilemmas that result from these stakeholders’often competingobjectives in terms of biases, notably filter bubbles, management dilemmas, and is-sues 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.