Do you know ‘LittleMonsters.com'? It is the official fan platform for fans of pop icon Lady Gaga, called Little Monsters. For some time it was very successful and popular. However, over the years the platform changed. In this article, I will discuss the full story of this transformation.

An online platform for ‘Little Monsters’ only!

This story starts in January 2011 when Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager at the time, co-founded a company called Backplane (Crunchbase, 2020). Its focus was to create online platforms for specific niches and communities. The first and main project of Backplane would turn out to be LittleMonsters.com. In mid-2011, fans of Lady Gaga could make a request to be part of a private version of the platform (Figure 1). 

If you were accepted you would receive an e-mail. Only a certain number of Little Monsters got an invitation to join this try-out in the beginning.

Lady Gaga herself visited the platform regularly. She would post exclusive pictures under the name ‘Mother Monster’.

In May 2012, Carter sat down with Wired to talk about his vision for Backplane (Pollack, 2012). He then said that the platform was running a beta-version test on 50.000 members, with a million more invitations to fans on stand-by. Two months later the social media platform opened officially to the public. It set out high expectations. Backplane got a financial investment of 13.9 million dollars by sponsors and partners, including Google Ventures, Sequoia and Gaga herself across 2011 and 2012 (Crunchbase, 2020).

'Welcome home Little Monster!'

At the time, when entering the site, the first thing you would see was a message saying ‘Welcome home Little Monster!’ The main page showed a Pinterest-like layout, as Business Insider called it, with pictures everywhere (Bort, 2012).

On top of the page was a ‘Little Monsters’ logo in black and white, with the ‘T’ spelled as a cross, taken after Gaga’s album "The Fame Monster". Next to this logo were several options. An example of these is ‘EVENTS’, where you could see Lady Gaga's concert dates. You could join a group especially made for specific shows. Added to this page were also links to the Livenation page of the Gaga concerts, where you could purchase tickets. Another option was ‘DISCUSSIONS’. You could enter chats about songs, outfits, rumors, and much more.

A user's profile included a biography, profile picture and your interests. When making a post you could add a title to it and also hashtags, like on Twitter. Other fans could leave comments and ‘like’ it just as on Facebook, as said by Huffington Post (Smith, 2012). The difference was that the like button was, in fact, a ‘heart’ that would turn red when clicked on it (like on Instagram).

 

Exciting times to be a Gaga fan

For fans, it was very exciting, not the least because Lady Gaga herself visited the platform regularly. She would post exclusive pictures under the name ‘Mother Monster’. Sometimes a photo was accompanied by a headline which would turn out to be lyrics from a yet to be released song.

She also liked and commented on posts created by fans whenever she was online. Joining group chats in secret was also something she did quite often. In those chats, she answered questions and told fans scoops (example: Figure 5). Another thing that made the platform exciting was that the singer created projects fans could participate in. Examples are a contest to design an outfit for an upcoming tour and the Body Revolution. The latter included posting about body insecurities fans were battling with; this project also caught the attention of NME (Stevens, 2012) and MTV. 

When the platform was launched to the public it was a website. After a few months Backplane put out a mobile application for LittleMonsters.com (Staff, 2013). The app made it possible for fans to connect to the medium much more easily and at all times.

LittleMonsters.com content and monetization

Social media are a process, which ‘entails [..] a transformation of the audience or consumer experience, from a static role of viewer to a role as active, mobile user or participant within the creation’ (Miller, 2011). This is also the case with LittleMonsters.com. Much of the content that was posted was UGC, user-generated content. A lot of the posts included fan-art or recreations of Gaga’s looks and videos. Another part of the content was reposted professional content like photos from photoshoots Gaga did.

At first glance, LittleMonsters.com looks like an intermediary platform. Intermediaries, as van Dijck (2013) explains in her book ‘The culture of connectivity’, are platforms that provide the means and opportunity for users to communicate with each other. LittleMonsters was just that, it created the environment for Gaga's fans to talk to each other and share photos and stories.

But it was, in fact, a mediator, just like other platforms. It did not show users neutral content. Like Twitter, it followed the popularity principle that states that big accounts are more valuable to the platform (van Dijck, 2013). This meant that the more followers an account or user had and the more regularly he or she created posts, the higher their posts would be on the main page’s ‘Hot’ section.

Sometimes a photo was accompanied by a headline which would turn out to be lyrics from a yet to be released song.

Like any social media platform, LittleMonsters.com is owned by a company that wants to make a profit. As van Dijck said, social media found out that ‘besides generating content, peer production yields a valuable by-product [..]: behavioral and profiling data.’ Carter said in his 2012 interview with Wired that he wanted to have and use all the data Gaga fans provided on LittleMonsters.com:

“There will be a time where we’ll be able to release music through the Backplane, where we’ll be able to release music videos through there, we’re going to be able to sell all our tickets through there. Over a period of time, we’ll be able to build that audience so they’ll know exactly where to come. For us, it’s important to be able to identify who’s listening to what. We want to own that data. We have to own that data” (Pollack, 2012, par.15).

Later on, Lady Gaga announced new concerts and world tours on the platform. Members could get early access to tickets. For her perfume FAME, she posted the official campaign ad firstly and exclusively on LittleMonsters.com (Lady Gaga, 2012). It was exciting for fans to know about and buy perfume and concert tickets thanks to the platform. However, it was also monetization. Fans were naturally going to buy everything their idol created and released.

So far the story of this special online platform sounds good. Sadly, it did not last. There are multiple reasons why it went wrong.

Backplane finds itself in trouble

The home of LittleMonsters was as said Backplane. When things began to go well with LittleMonsters.com, the company wanted to do the same for brands. This was not a success. The company started to lose money. A new CEO was hired, Scott Harrison, who drastically changed the firm’s course. He cut the spending budget which had been ridiculously high. They hoped to turn back the tide by changing into Place.xyz. Place’s official message was that they are ‘a platform that allows like-minded people to connect across their shared interests. Discover, join, or create your own. Your Place awaits’. (Instagram, 2020) Instead of focusing on brands, the new chairman wanted to help people who wanted to start an online platform for their business.   

But it did not work and it proved to be too late. Old investors did not want to put in more money and new investors were scared off by bad deals. In early February of 2016 Backplane had to file for bankruptcy. They sold all their assets, including software, URLs, and patents.

In early February of 2016 Backplane had to file for bankruptcy and so LittleMonsters.com disappeared

A consequence of the bankruptcy was that LittleMonsters.com disappeared. The former CEO, however, already said there were talks with a new company to eventually get the fan social medium back up again. It was much more interesting for investors now all the costs and losses got out of the way (Constine, 2016).

Honeycommb introduces LittleMonsters 2.0

The company Carter talked about would turn out to be Honeycommb. In February of 2017 Honeycommb announced that they were about to launch a new mobile application for LittleMonsters. They worked together with fan administrators of the earlier version of the platform to get it running again. The entire layout was changed. It went from black and red to white and purple. The singer herself posted a message on it stating she hoped this new version would turn out to be a continuation of the online Little Monsters community of the early days.

A cry for moderation

After some time complaints were made by Lady Gaga herself about the fact that there was a high increase in online bullying, sexually related chat themes, and nude posts on the site. That content went against the site’s terms of service, called the Monster Code. It stated amongst other things that ‘users should treat everyone with respect, love and acceptance’ according to The Guardian (Micheals, 2012). It is the platform’s duty to ‘protect one user from another, or one group from its antagonists, and to remove the offensive, vile, or illegal—as well as to present their best face to new users, to their advertisers and partners, and to the public at large’ (Gillespie, 2018: 5).

The project of ‘content moderation, is one that the operators of platforms take on reluctantly. Most would prefer if either the community could police itself, or even better, users never posted objectionable content in the first place’ (Gillespie, 2018: 5). This is also the case here, at first LittleMonsters.com simply monitored the situation. The only intervention they made was blocking several accounts. This did not change anything, the problem got bigger. A team was hired to clean up the platform (Figure 8).

These moderators would look at newly created posts and would delete them if its content or message was against the site’s policy. But moderation is difficult. There are no universal rules about what is ‘acceptable’ and what is not. ‘The blurry edges of bright line rules involve important and long-contested cultural questions: [...] When is an image of the human body artistic, educational, or salacious? Are representations of fictional violence merely entertaining or psychologically harmful?’ (Gillespie, 2018: 10).

After complaints had been made about inappropriate content, a team was hired to clean up the platform. The moderation was more than necessary, but it did not succeed.

The moderation was more than necessary, but it did not succeed. Both the singer and the fans kept complaining about inappropriate content and behavior. This seems like a logical explanation for why users turned their back on the platform, and why the online medium lost a lot of its subscribers.

The negative spiral continues...

Things really started to become worse in 2014. Gaga and her manager Carter parted ways after a creative disagreement. The singer was broken by this. She stopped joining group chats on LittleMonsters.com and posted less and less on it. This decrease in Mother Monster’s active involvement in the site also led to a decrease in the interest of fans in staying active on the platform.

Over the years the singer’s activity had followed a circulating pattern of periods of being highly active accompanied by periods of a lack of activity. The periods of non-activity grew longer and longer.

The decrease in Mother Monster’s active involvement in the site led to a decrease of active fans on the platform.

In early 2018, Gaga became active on the (new) platform again after she had to cancel concerts of her Joanne World Tour due to chronic pain. Her first post was an apology to the fans who were jeopardized by the situation (Figure 11).

She also said she would be more active while resting and recovering in the upcoming months. For a few weeks, she kept her promise. After that short period of time, she began to post messages that were also posted on her other social media pages like Instagram and Facebook. The singer went from LittleMonsters.com exclusive content to duplicated content. Today, that is still the case (Figure 12 & 13). From the fans’ point of view, this is sad because for most of them interacting with the singer and being able to see fan exclusive posts were the main reason to join that social medium in the first place. Since that went away the platform has lost its attraction to Little Monsters as it has now become the same as any other social media site or application.

Honeycommb claims the LittleMonsters.com app has over 10.000 downloads (Figure 14). My observation is that that number does not fit the actual number of users. It could of course very well be that in total 10K people have downloaded the application. That exact number of people may have used it for some time, after which many deleted it or stopped using it. Because if you look at the likes and comments on Lady Gaga’s posts (Figure 13), they barely hit 200, while in the heyday of activity a post by the singer could easily get 8000 likes in just a matter of hours. In those days LittleMonsters.com had a million users (Lady Gaga, 2013).

Where did it go wrong for LittleMonsters.com?

At first, LittleMonsters.com rose sky-high, with millions of users. The home of the platform, Backplane lost a lot of money due to bad management, however. They tried to turn back the tide by pivoting into Place. But it was too late, a year later the Gaga start-up had to file for bankruptcy. LittleMonsters.com was no more. In 2017 Honeycommb announced themselves as the owners of the ‘new LittleMonsters’ mobile application. There was some excitement that the platform was back, but it would never have as many subscribers as in the heyday.

Then, actions that were taken to moderate the platform against pornographic and hateful content failed. As Gillespie (2018) has pointed out, platform moderation is very difficult, so it is not entirely surprising that they did not succeed in moderating the social medium. However, this led to much frustration among its users, Lady Gaga herself included. Consequently, many users quit the social medium.

Last but not least, the platform also lost a lot of its members due to the singer becoming less active. The site says ‘Little Monsters’, but what really made it big was Lady Gaga. She would not only post exclusive content but also talk to fans in group chats. She really provided the excitement with her active involvement. When she began to distance herself from the platform, fans lost interest. LittleMonsters.com lost its popularity among the fan base as it no longer had an advantage over other social media that were used by the singer.

As Lady Gaga is very big on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, it could be that her withdrawal from LittleMonsters.com was a well-thought out decision. Social media like Facebook and Instagram have become even bigger than they already were. And they have broadened their usage functions and their audience as well, maybe that is why a specific niche platform might be of less interest to Gaga nowadays. The exact reason(s) why the artist distanced herself from LittleMonsters.com will never be known, we can only guess and try to interpret certain facts, like I have tried to do in this article.

References

Bort, J. (Jul 10, 2012), FIRST LOOKS: Lady Gaga Opens Her Own Social Network To The Public, Business Insider.

Constine, J. (April 11, 2016), Lady Gaga’s startup Backplane burns out and sells assets, Techcrunch.

Crunchbase (2020), Backplane

Gillespie, T., (2018), Custodians of the internet. Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lady Gaga [@ladygaga] (2012, July 16th). So last minute surprise! In a few hrs were going to debut FAME, the fragrance campaign ad shot by STEVEN KLEIN on http://littlemonsters.com [Tweet].

Lady Gaga [@ladygaga] (2013, January 28th). In about 2 weeks http://littlemonsters.com will have 1 million users! Our little idea grows everyday, Backplane is rockin [Tweet].

Michaels, S. (2012, August 17th), Lady Gaga to ban bullying from her social networking site, The Guardian.

Miller, V., (2011), Understanding digital culture. London: Sage.

Pollack, N. (2012, May 12th), How Lady Gaga's manager reinvented the celebrity game with social media, Wired.

Smith, C. (2012, July 10th), LittleMonsters.com, Lady Gaga's Social Network, Opens To The Public. Paws Up For Lady Gaga's New Social Network, Huffington Post.

Staff (2013, April 6th), Littlemonsters.com Goes Mobile!, littlemonstersofficial.com.

Stevens, J. (2012, September 27th), Lady Gaga launches ‘body revolution’ campaign. Mother Monster posts pictures of herself in her underwear and encourages fans to celebrate their perceived flaws, NME.

 

Van Dijck, J., (2013), The culture of connectivity. A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.