Transnational Fandom: Creating Alternative Values and New Identities through Digital Labor

Introduction

This study looks at the practices of transnational audiences who use digital platforms to engage with media content produced in non-English speaking countries, facilitating its consumption and circulation in western nations. As the proliferation of digital platforms has contributed to blurring the lines separating consumers and producers, media industries develop strategies to engage audiences’ participation while simultaneously keeping them on the fringe as convenient collaborators that can easily be excluded from enjoying the success of media products they helped to generate. I refer to the case of transnational audiences that engage in the unpaid translation of TV shows for commercial enterprises that openly commodify those media products, and to analyze that condition, I focus on the video streaming site Viki.com, launched in 2010 offering TV shows from East Asia in new markets, especially those in the West. Viki reaches license agreements with content producers by simplifying the exportation process of their media products, including the elimination of translation costs. This is possible as translations are done by fans volunteering under the crowdsourcing business model, which allows the site to offer its content in two hundred languages. Viki, known for its fast translations, syndicates programs with fan-generated subtitles to mainstream services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon.com.

I investigate the collaborative production of unpaid translation for a for-profit enterprise and the significance for its participants, including how audiences negotiate tensions with the company. Based on notions of re-subjectivation and affect from Gibson-Graham (2006), I consider the motivations of unpaid translators, the type of values they obtain from their volunteering, and the possibilities that it has opened for them. As the fans’ subtitles generate economic revenue, I will address some concerns on labor exploitation that are part of the digital labor debate to illustrate the complex relationship between media industries and audiences. I argue that the gains and value that fans find in their volunteering outweigh concerns of labor appropriation or exploitation by the company. The conditionalities of fans to participate in digital activities, such as resisting some of the company’s decisions, speak of the complexity and nuances of their collaboration with a for-profit company.

Another addressed aspect is the crossover of fans as translators, questioning how they reconcile their outsider/insider positions when they become active agents for a private firm. I conducted interviews with fans who translate TV shows for Viki, along with a virtual ethnography of the website. I focused on crowdsourced subtitling as it illustrates a business model that is becoming popular due to the engagement of people in content production as a pleasurable activity in which they can apply their skills and knowledge. Although the crowdsourcing model may be successful in short-term projects, it is difficult to maintain in long-term ones, as it requires keeping the crowd highly motivated to participate (Howe 2008). That model has been used mostly for nonprofit enterprises, but Viki makes a unique case as a commercial venture that has succeeded in accomplishing a smooth collaboration with its users. Viki resembles Wikipedia in its participative nature, and in a similar way, it started in 2009 as a nonprofit project called Viki, a play of the words Wiki and video (Viki.com 2019), but was transformed to a commercial site in 2010.

Viki operates as other mainstream streaming video services such as Hulu, but it focuses on global content entirely subtitled by volunteers, which makes it unique. This company is based in Singapore—with offices in San Francisco, Seoul, and Tokyo—and its content providers include the Korean Broadcasting System, the Seoul Broadcasting System, and TV Tokyo (Viki.com 2018). Viki was launched as a startup with private investors and was acquired by the Japanese firm Rakuten for $200 million in 2013 (Roettgers 2013).

Accessing international markets is difficult because of the long process for getting license agreements and the high costs of translation services (Boyd 2012). The site simplifies that process as content owners only need to make a deal with one distributor—Viki—to have their products delivered in the markets of their choice. The firm picks up fees and shares revenues from advertising and from the syndicated programs with fan-generated subtitles to partners such as Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and Google (Viki.com 2018). Viki became one of the first streaming video services to offer licensed global content in North America in 2010 when most of that content was available mostly through informal digital platforms.

Digital Labor: Approaches to the Collaboration of Audiences and Media Industry

The relationship that fans/audiences have with corporations has been addressed from different perspectives, with some scholars expressing concerns of labor exploitation, and others stressing the enjoyable nature of digital practices and the incentives that people find in them. One of the most popular activities among dedicated audience members has been the translation of their favorite media content. Subtitling by fans, known as subbing, began in the 1980s when followers of Japanese animation or anime organized to translate them on VHS format to make them available to other fans (Lee 2011). As the goal was to bring Japanese animation to new audiences, it usually meant the circulation of unlicensed content, which explains why a significant number of scholarly works on fansubbing are focused on issues of copyright infringement (Daniels 2008; Denison 2011; Hatcher 2005; Lee 2011).

One of the ways in which fans negotiate the tensions of copyright infringement with the industry is the agreement to translate only content that had not been distributed in new markets, and their commitment to remove their subtitles once these programs had been officially released (Itō 2012). That implicit agreement has found difficulties as companies cannot match the speed of fans’ translations, and audiences prefer to access amateur subtitles rather than waiting for days to get the official ones. That situation led the anime industry to strike deals with platforms that were informally distributing their media products in other countries, which was initially the case of Crunchyroll.com, one of the best-known streaming online sites of anime in the United States (Denison 2011; Lee 2011). In contrast with those old websites, Viki emerged as a streaming site with licensed global content, acting as a smooth mediator between international media producers and western audiences.

Henry Jenkins adopted the term participatory culture to describe the cultural production of fan communities. The concept has evolved to include different groups using media production and distribution to serve their collective interests, highlighting the cultural and social practices that motivate individuals to create content and share it through technological means (Jenkins et al. 2013). But in addition to positions that acknowledge its creative side, the participation of audiences as co-producers of content has raised concerns of labor exploitation, especially when the skills of the users generate financial benefits for private companies. In her influential work, Terranova (2000) explores labor relations in the digital media industry. She refers to the digital economy as one that depends on new technologies and free labor, promoted by both an affective desire for creative production and the capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of value. She considers that the problem of free labor is its invisibility, as it exists in forms of production that are not recognized as labor as such, including chats and mailing lists. Applying a similar perspective, Andrejevic (2008) downplays the celebration of participatory culture by stressing that the engagement of fans, even when in the form of communal activity that enhances social relations, also benefits commercial interests. Jenkins et al. (2013) urge others to consider the different positions of the debate on the creation of media content by not looking at it exclusively through an “economic lens” which, they argue, diminishes the noncommercial logic governing the engaged participation of audiences online. Looking at these activities from a noncommercial logic facilitates understanding what moves people to engage.

Baym and Burnett (2009) observe that the nonmonetary rewards that fans find in their labor are undervalued in the rhetoric of labor exploitation. They see fans articulating a complex system of costs (time, money, etc.), rewards (social connections, pleasure), and relational interpretations that motivate them to keep volunteering. This is a key aspect to consider the gains from the perspectives of volunteers. On his work on user-generated content and free labor, Hesmondhalgh (2010) warns against considering wages as the only acceptable form of reward for work, as it downplays other gains that people may find in their online activities such as contributing to a project for a common good or building new skills. He considers it a mistake to imply that “any work done on the basis of social contribution or deferred rewards represents the activities of people duped by capitalism” (Hesmondhalgh 2010, 278).

These positions shed light on different aspects that need to be considered when looking at the relationship between audiences and media industries. Although I acknowledge the importance of fans’ activities in the media industry, the aim of my work is to study the motivations and meanings of those collaborations from the perspective of the audiences. To find out the incentives of people to engage in these projects, I interviewed volunteers and studied their online exchanges. As Gill and Pratt (2008) suggest, it is necessary to listen to the participants to find out the meanings that they give to those activities. Among the myriad reasons to engage in online activities, interviewees mentioned the collaborative effort toward a common goal. That type of association, known as crowdsourcing, emerged during the open software movement proving that a community of peers could create a better product than a corporation (Howe 2008). The engine of crowdsourcing is the community: a group of people doing what they like, finding pleasure in working together, and helping one another.

My approach to studying audiences’ digital practices draws on Gibson-Graham’s (2006) feminist economic perspective on alternative economies, which provides the tools to understand volunteering as an activity producing nonmonetary rewards that impact positively on the lives of the volunteers by showing their agency and providing opportunities that exceed considerations of submission or exploitation. Gibson-Graham question notions of capitalism as the near-absolute form of economic activity, as well as discourses that define it as a dominant, fixed structure that expands based on economic growth and labor exploitation. Instead, they consider the existence of a plurality of economies that sometimes struggle to survive as they do not completely adhere to the classic principles of capitalism, but that can still open possibilities of change for individuals. For example, volunteering and household work are overlooked in classic capitalist terms because they do not receive monetary compensation; however, they still form part of the economic activity and generate nonmonetary rewards for people, usually in affective forms such as appreciation or recognition.

One of the most useful notions from Gibson-Graham refers to the creation of different identities or re-subjectivation. The authors consider that class identity may be understood beyond terms of the production and distribution of surplus labor. For them, class processes may happen in diverse forms and social sites, not only in capitalist places but also in noncapitalist enterprises such as social groups and households (Gibson-Graham et al. 2000). In this way, fansubbers may be unpaid content generators from a strictly capitalist view, but they are also productive translators within their digital communities. Although their online activity does not receive monetary payment, they get affective compensation in the form of pleasure and appreciation. Volunteers consider that what they obtain from their experience positively impacts their different activities and roles beyond the online community.

The new identities that subjects find through alternative economies are powerful ways to resist and transform exploitation, as they give participants agency to act and change circumstances. Re-subjectivation refers thus to the creation of new identities, mobilization, the transformation of desires, and the cultivation of capacities. Simultaneously, although the value of their work is not received as a wage as in the classic market economy, there is still a nonmonetary compensation to which volunteers condition their participation. For Gibson-Graham (2006), including different kinds of labor and compensation as alternative economies allows appreciating economic identities that are usually disregarded for not fitting into the limited category of employer/employee. As volunteers expressed during interviews, they all find different forms of value in their labor—community recognition, social relations, pleasure—which challenge the claims of exploitation from a purely capitalist perspective.

A Closer Look at Volunteers’ Digital Practices: Virtual Ethnography and Interviews

The questions guiding this article are the following: Why do fans agree to subtitle for free and what do they get from it? Does this transaction between fans and private companies embody fairness or exploitation, or something else? To answer those questions, I conducted a virtual ethnography of the website and I interviewed users who volunteer as translators. Virtual ethnography provides the tools to approach online communities as ethnographic field sites where culture is formed and reformed (Hine 2000), and from that perspective, it is a suitable method to study a site that operates as a digital community. I discovered Viki as a fan of Asian content, and a few years later, in my role as a researcher, I conducted a two-year observation of the site, studying its operation, the interaction of the users and volunteers, and its work organization. I took notes, captured, and recorded online exchanges, and revealed my identity as a researcher to volunteers, which facilitated finding informants. The participant observation gave me a deeper understanding of the organization of the community and the language used on the site, such as slang and technicisms. The data gathered in the participant observation informed the elaboration of the questions for the interviews, which were focused on the motivations that people find in this activity.

Those willing to subtitle need to create a profile and log in to the site. Viki’s volunteers are mostly female, multilingual, and fans of global TV dramas. I interviewed fifteen volunteers occupying different positions in the translation process: subbers, editors, channel managers, and segmenters. I selected the interviewees based on the information displayed on their public profiles at Viki, choosing those who were active in different projects. I contacted thirty-one female volunteers through private messages, as it is rare to find males volunteering at the site, but only fifteen agreed to be interviewed. Those interviewed included one languages teacher, one civil servant, two housewives, one masseuse, two nurses, one farmer, one retired professional, and five students. Among the interviewees are two Koreans, two Korean Americans, one Swede, one Filipina, six Americans, one Lebanese, and one Peruvian. Their names have been changed to protect their privacy. While the ethnography revealed key aspects of the work organization, and how social connections are an important incentive of collaboration, the interviews provided the opportunity for private discussions. The interviews informed me about the impact of volunteering on the lives of women participating on the site, such as the personal satisfaction produced by learning a new skill or language, gaining public recognition, and making friends.

Fans as Co-producers: Community Work Organization and Social Connections

Viki manages the site, but the translation process is organized and supervised by fans who get together in teams to focus on a project like a TV show or a film. The subtitling process starts right after the company uploads a new episode on the platform: segmenters cut the video into sections; then, subbers translate the TV show; and finally, editors check every line for grammar and accuracy. The average time to translate a popular one-hour TV show is about two hours, with teams of thirty or more people, but less popular shows can take three days or more, depending on the number of subtitlers. Media content produced in non-English speaking countries is first translated into English and that translation, known as the genesis file, becomes the basis for subtitling into all other languages (Diaz-Cintas and Anderman 2009).

The organized work at Viki has been a characteristic of traditional fansubbing from the 1980s (Denison 2011), which allows fast-paced subtitling and a self-correction process that enhances the quality of the translation. The division of the labor into little units is one of the trademarks of the crowdsourcing model based on a come-one, come-all approach (Howe 2008), which allows volunteers to enjoy their tasks without feeling overwhelmed. The platform is key for the engagement and productivity of the community with its unique translation software that is open to the simultaneous collaboration of people on the same project. Technical features play an important role in Viki’s platform to hook up users and volunteers, such as the user-friendly translation software that encourages people’s interaction while translating. Making the platform entertaining is key to keep participation going, but the best way to attract new participants has been the promise of finding a community of people with similar interests. Users who are willing to translate contact the volunteer in charge of the project, known as the channel manager, who puts together the subtitling team. The company appoints the channel manager from a pool of candidates, usually experienced volunteers. Channel managers are free to recruit people for their teams, and they usually apply tests to assess their skills. CK, a channel manager, requests aspiring volunteers to translate a small video: “This is all for new Korean subbers who are non-native speakers, even though they may be fluent. Because subbing is different from knowing the language.” Senior volunteers train new members on technical requirements. In studying segmenters at Viki, Henthorn (2018) notices that such practices borrowed from business environments seek to professionalize amateur or noncommercial labor to manage the community, as they replicate traditional workplace situations such as hierarchies while privileging segmenters who observe particular work practices.

Once subtitles are done, editors check for accuracy, and a second group of editors checks the grammar. To maintain a consistent translation through all the episodes, channel managers create guidelines for their teams containing grammar rules. Translators at Viki follow the fansubbing style that does not translate foreign words that are familiar to fans, keeping them in their original language to transmit the true flavor of the TV show. Adopting words that are common to all fans strengthens the bonds within the online community, for example, fans of South Koreans dramas enjoy using Korean terms during their exchanges, as they feel that they are learning something about that culture.

Alternative Economy Activity: The Nonmonetary Values from Free Online Labor

Viki refers to its users as community members and invites them to participate on the site to “help make shows accessible to millions of viewers” (Viki.com 2018), emphasizing the notion of working for the common good. The tone of that invitation clashes with the for-profit nature of the company but has succeeded in recruiting volunteers. I found a few rewards were consistently cited by volunteers as reasons for collaborating, and while they are diverse, the social aspects are the most frequently mentioned: collaborative tasks, friendship, and peer recognition. Working together requires communication among volunteers, and those interactions forge social connections that manifest as long-term collaborations and friendships. The communication exchanges during the subtitling of TV shows resemble those of a regular work environment: volunteers share knowledge, responsibilities, and they reap together the satisfaction of an accomplished project. Working together provides enjoyment and motivation, as CW, a volunteer, explained:

Working with other team members who have the same common goal and common interests is also a part of the enjoyment . . . That sense of collaboration and camaraderie that develops as you work on projects together is wonderful. We get to know each other as we chat and suggest words back and forth.

The socialization is key to fostering a sense of community where people get to know each other, and they feel appreciated, as Jenna, a volunteer, explained: “The people I work with are really generous and care about the community.” The satisfaction of working with others was frequently mentioned by volunteers, becoming the top reason to engage in this activity. In his study on fansubbers, Itō (2012) finds that their contribution to a common goal was a source of value that required no additional reward, which is important at Viki, where volunteers rely on other activities to make a living, and they regard the site as a space to have fun, make friends, and learn new skills. Digital teamwork is unique because it benefits both the volunteers and members of the community. While they are housewives or part-time workers in their regular activities, these women said they found in this a satisfying engagement for their leisure time, and when the source of their enjoyment benefits others, their volunteering is considered fulfilling. As Appy, one of the volunteers, claimed, “The whole thing with an online community working together on a project for a common goal is appealing to me.”

Volunteers as Outsiders/Insiders: Negotiating Tensions with Viki

Volunteers at Viki are both fans and co-producers of content, and they must manage their positions as outsiders/insiders at the site. Although they usually enjoy volunteering, they may face conflicts with their peers, and/or the company. A common difficulty is dealing with the pressure to produce fast translations, and subtitling may become stressful, leading people to drop projects. In general, fansubbing is not a long-term activity and participants are active only a couple of years. New volunteers may find it difficult to balance the number of projects they can handle. Lee, one of the respondents, claimed she struggled when she was translating five dramas a week, taking her up to six hours a night on weekdays and all day on weekends:

I was really into it and got a little overwhelmed when I bit off more than I could chew and was subtitling two dramas at night and three on the weekends, but since then I’ve gotten a grip on it and scaled it back to what I could handle.

Collaborators may abandon projects after becoming tired or bored, but others share a strong sense of commitment to their peers and continue working on a project even when they would like to stop. Loyalty is a strong motivation to collaborate, as Lee explained:

I’ve heard of people joining teams and then dropping out little by little . . . for the most part I figure if I’ve made the commitment to join the team since there are people depending on you, I do try to follow through until the end.

Despite the community guidelines established by the company to encourage a respectful environment, disagreements with other volunteers may erupt over work decisions, team hierarchies, and miscommunication. Those situations are mediated by senior volunteers.

Conflicts with the company may also hinder volunteering. Fans have a sense of the value of their work, even if it is not financially rewarded, and they have quit collaborating with Viki over their subtitles. Merri, an experienced subber, stopped volunteering for eight months in 2012 when a delay in the licensing of a drama was solved by Viki using the subtitles of the content provider. Volunteers considered those subtitles of bad quality, Merri complained to Viki and quit, but she resumed her collaboration due to a friend’s request. That incident shows how subbers develop a co-creative relationship with the company as they would like to share control over the content they help produced (Banks and Deuze 2009). The copyright of the subtitles is managed through a creative commons license that ends up providing greater control to the company over the content. While volunteers may see themselves as co-participants, their collaboration is personal; hence, individual decisions do not have a real impact on the company and its decisions.

The conflict over the bad quality of the “official subtitles” also exhibits the claims of the legitimacy of fansubbers’ work, which they regard of a higher value because it does not depend on the economic pressures of the market and it is given out of love. Fiske (1992) observes that fans give a high value to the texts they produce as they are not subjected to the market economy. Fans subtitling media content have always rejected any form of compensation. To guarantee their selfless motives to translate, independent digital fansubbers groups developed an ethical code condensed in six premises stressing the goal of translating for free to make the products accessible to fans without affecting the interests of producers. ¹ That code happened before the creation of Viki.

The position of fansubbers toward the media industry illustrates the complexity of that relationship, where they operate as outsiders/insiders at different points. Booth (2015) argues that the relationship of fans to the media industry is neither entirely resistant nor totally complicit. While fans take, rework, and share with others the media texts under the gift economy, the media industries have found ways to commercialize those “gifts.” Overall, fans have learned to navigate their roles within the creative processes. Hills (2017) notices how they manage their contradictory position, operating within the gift economy and outside the market forces, while simultaneously respecting and supporting the distributors that promote their favorite TV shows. Fans participate in Viki and they seek the company’s recognition, but they are not included in the financial remuneration circle. That monetary exclusion is, however, what makes their fandom valuable and authentic in the eyes of the fan community. Volunteers at Viki receive appreciation because their engagement is for the sake of the community, instead of financial incentives. Hellekson (2009) says that in the gift economy of fans, the system of giving, receiving, and reciprocating gifts consolidates the social cohesion of the community, and it can operate as a form of exclusion that preserves and solidifies the group.

Viki: Community Collaboration or Exploitation?

Viki offers some nonmonetary rewards to its volunteers: promotional gifts and access to some free services, but Viki’s founder Razming Hovaghimian (2012) says that what drives fans to volunteer is their passion for the TV shows and the recognition of their peers. Viki was inspired by the fansubbers’ practices from the 1980s, which explains the collaborative, organized, and nonlucrative drive moving its volunteers. People participating in crowdsourcing projects are not primarily motivated by money and their engagement is a form of leisure, or a hobby (Howe 2008), that produces personal satisfaction. But Viki is a commercial enterprise that commodifies user-generated content, the type of platform that has raised concerns over appropriation and exploitation of users’ labor. Viki’s founder claims to be aware of those concerns, but he rejects that they apply to Viki as the site acknowledges subbers and is open about its commercial nature. Keeping volunteers engaged is not an easy task for companies, and though people are not primarily moved by money, they do want to be informed of the real motivations of the enterprise (Howe 2008). Although Viki does not hide the syndication of its subtitled TV shows, it does not share its financial information with its users and volunteers. Mayer (2016) argues that even if fans consider themselves co-participants in production processes, they are in fact excluded as they cannot access the same form of capital as creators and executives. Media industries make distinctions between producers and audiences by organizing them in different categories and hierarchies, reinforcing the marginalization of users.

Volunteers are aware of the commercial nature of Viki, and they accept it as a necessary condition for the website to be able to operate. They are aware as well of the concerns of exploitation that question their unpaid collaboration, but they reject them claiming they do not seek a wage for their voluntary engagement. “I honestly don’t care that Viki is a for-profit company. I volunteer because I like it and enjoy doing so,” explains Carol, a volunteer.

People’s volunteering is not uncompensated, as they condition their participation to nonmonetary gains such personal satisfaction and social connections. Chin (2014) argues that fans do not see themselves as exploited; instead, they may consider their contributions as a service or a gift to fandom. The value of their labor is not monetary, but it has an impact on their lives. There is a re-subjectivation in Gibson-Graham’s terms, as those activities build new identities in which volunteers are not reduced to unpaid labor, but they emerge as celebrated translators, trustworthy friends, and influential community members. They conciliate their position as volunteers for a commercial company explaining it as a matter of divergent interests: while the company seeks profits, they are invested in the media content and personal rewards. Volunteers see that partnership as a fair and mutually beneficial “exchange” because they do not expect a wage from their engagement. “I do this for fun,” said one of the volunteers, explaining that she is moved by her own motives and not by those of the company. “So, I don’t really care if it is for a for-profit company or a non-profit company as long as I enjoy my free time,” she added.

Some volunteers consider their rewards to be more valuable than money, such as the opportunity to make friends, the enjoyment of working on common projects to benefit the community and/or their self-improvement. Sere, a volunteer, said her biggest rewards are “making new friends and connecting with people from all around the world,” and the appreciation of her work, which she does not get in her regular job. For others, volunteering helps them to escape from routine and enjoy their leisure time. Fans collaborate motivated by the different types of rewards they find in such activities. Baym and Burnett (2009) claim that fans perceive their practices as fair because they are moved by their own personal motivations. What makes crowd collaboration successful is not always the financial reward but the openness of its nature. Participation is enjoyable because it is open, flexible, and not subjected to the obligations and restrictions of paid work. Becky, a volunteer who works as a private nurse for an elderly patient, says she can make friends through her volunteering, which is hard in her regular job:

I’m (working) on health care so no I do not have professional aspirations (as a translator). But it has widened my horizon, especially that I work live-in. I’m not expecting any benefits from this either. Knowing people around is more than enough for me.

Other volunteers who have gone through unemployment or health issues have found in their volunteering a way to feel “productive” and “helpful,” terms they used to describe their online activities. There are varied reasons to collaborate in projects, but it is not easy to understand the motivations and gains that people find in them from a monolithic, fixed capitalist economy perspective. I argue that these activities function as alternative economies that produce nonmonetary compensation, while also create new identities for the women who participate in volunteering, showing their agency and how they resist labels and roles of subordination.

Conclusion: Creating Values and New Identities through Digital Practices

The collaboration of users may generate criticism, especially when their work produces financial gains for private enterprises while fans receive little or no monetary compensation. In the case of Viki, the fact that the company is making money out of fans’ translations is crystal clear, whether the company acknowledges it or not. The commodification of amateur subtitles is as undeniable as the fact that fans do not get a monetary reward, a type of dynamic that has raised justified concerns of exploitation (Andrejevic 2008; Terranova 2000). This article regards the different stances on that debate as helpful to exemplify its complexity and it aims to shed light on the diversity of values that transform the subjectivities of fans, and to use Gibson-Graham’s (2000) terms, abandon the tradition of measuring all possible trades and gains from a capitalistic standpoint. Fansubbers do donate their time and language skills to produce translations that generate financial profits for a private company, but reducing them to an exploited class would underestimate their activity, agencies, and the existence of alternative forms of economic activities producing value other than monetary. In her essay about domestic labor, Cameron (2000) weakens the claims of exploitation and oppression frequently attributed to those practices by suggesting that some women considered to be exploited in their household, may indeed be busy constructing their gender and sexual relations—as caring mothers, and so on—and may not necessarily be oppressed. She stresses that what some consider “class exploitation” may be roles that people assume because they produce satisfaction and enjoyment in different areas of their lives.

Thus, subbers are not only unpaid translators, but they are also paid employees in their regular jobs, mothers, students, and so on. Gibson-Graham et al. (2000) claim that class identities can be produced and practiced in different ways, and they can be a powerful way to resist and transform exploitation. In this process, the value of their labor is transformed and it is not ruled by a wage or financial compensation, but by a nonmonetary one. Fans volunteer in their free time and they claim to enjoy it not only because it is fun, but because it positively impacts other areas of their lives—for example, acquiring language skills. The surplus of their volunteering has produced values that have transformed and improved the production of their other identities. Gibson-Graham’s alternative economy approach exposes how the rewards that volunteers obtain can outweigh their exploitation by a commercial enterprise, and it also exposes the conditionality involved in the transformation of fan activities across leisure and work. The choices and awareness of the volunteers, as well as the possibility of resistance toward certain practices, tell how they become active agents in the process of collaboration.

The study of Viki sheds lights into the complexity and nuances of fans practices in relation to a commercial global TV platform, showing the perspective of the volunteers and their different levels of investment, which can be applied to other online communities when considering the engagement of people, especially to those that require specialized skills and labor. The aim of this analysis is to contribute to the study of fan motivations and fansubbing labor, highlighting the perspectives of volunteers in relation to the benefits of commercial enterprises. I argue that the voices of participants expose the richness and complexity of the collaboration with the media industry, exposing the creation of values and new identities that take place in that process beyond concerns of exploitation.

Some of the limitations of this work derive from its limited focus on the perspective of fans when analyzing the values produced in their digital engagement. Future research seeking a more comprehensive work on those activities could benefit from looking at the audiences’ contributions to the platform from a media industry studies perspective.