The agglomeration paradigm for creative industries has fundamentally changed under the digital economy, giving rise to a new form of virtual agglomeration within these industries. This study explores the causes of this virtual agglomeration. We collected online Chinese news texts related to the virtual agglomeration of the creative industry, used text mining to identify nine factors affecting its formation, and refined the internal and external factors for an analytical framework based on the PEST (political, economic, social, technological) and value-chain models. We then combined the relevant literature and the creative industry’s development practices, analyzed the mechanism of each driving factor, and constructed a driving-force model for the creative industry’s virtual agglomeration. The external driving factors were government policy planning, the digital economic environment, emerging consumer demand, and the application of innovative technology; the internal factors were the digitalization of cultural resources, flexible manufacturing, digital marketing and promotion, online interactive services, and virtual platform facilities. Each factor was found to contribute to virtual agglomeration through different internal mechanisms. This study’s findings have theoretical and practical value for cultivating the modes of virtual agglomeration within creative industries.

Industrial agglomeration serves as an effective model for developing the creative economy and manifests itself as the interdependence of creative subjects in geographical space. The traditional methods of resource agglomeration have undergone tremendous changes due to the development of digital technology. These transformations have given birth to a new organizational form of the virtual agglomeration of creative industries. The present work uses field interviews and grounded theoretical research methods to construct a theoretical model of this new organizational phenomenon. Questionnaire surveys and empirical testing using structural equation models are here combined to systematically analyze the formation mechanism of the virtual agglomeration of creative industries. The results show that digital technology, virtual platforms, digital creative talents, digitization of cultural resources, and government policies have driven the formation of the virtual agglomeration of creative industries. This has been achieved through network collaboration, freedom of participation, and trust guarantee mechanisms. The effect of emerging consumer demand on the virtual agglomeration of creative industries is not significant. In addition, the implications of this research are also considered and discussed.