Post 12 - Audience

Audience can be defined as a collective group of people who read or consume any form of media. All texts have an audience in mind, an important question to consider is always what is the audience?
Without audiences there would be no media, the audience can often too determine the success of a media product. Media organisations produce media texts to make profit, quite simply this means that no audience means no profit. Mass media is all about the profit!

Katz and Blumer proposed

Katz and Blumler – link!

They proposed audience research into their behaviour that audiences use media texts for a variety of reasons.

INFO

PERSONAL IDENTITY

INTEGREATION AND SOCISL INTERACTION

 

New technology and audience

Old media forms such as TV, Print and Radio, used to have high audience numbers and now they must work harder to maintain audience numbers.

Digital technology has also led to an increasing uncertainty over how we define an audience.

Fragmented audience

The division of audiences into smaller groups due to the variety of media outlets.

EG. Newspapers and magazines you can now find online copies

How do institutions continue to make money?

Nothing in life is free

Free apps

Websites and adverts

Newspapers print fewer copies, to switch to online/tablet copies, mean less money for producing copies.

Mass and niche audiences and examples of both

How do we categorise audiences?

Audiences can be divided into categories based on social class.

Audience research – major part of any media companies work – survey monkey

They use questionnaires, focus groups, pre film screenings and spend a great deal of time and money finding out who would be interested in their product.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Media producers and interested in

Age

Gender

Race

Location of their potential target market. This is called the demographic.

PSYCHOGRAPHICS

Every advertiser wants to target a particular type of audience. Therefore media companies produce texts that target a particular ‘type’ of audience.  Audiences interests and tastes and hobbies.

Link – thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav/914

Group A – what types of media texts would they consume?

Lawyers

Doctors

Scientists

Well paid professionals

Group B

Teachers

Middle management

Fairly well paid professionals

Group C1

Junior management

Bank clerks

Nurses

White collar professionals

Group C2

Electricians

Plumbers

Carpenters

Blue collar professionals

Group D

Manual workers

Drivers

Post sorters

Group E

Students

Unemployed

Pensioners

PUT SCRIPTS UP there

Stuart Hall – Hall views audiences as both the producers and consumers of texts: decoding the meaning encoded by the originator of the text. His approach to textual analysis is that the consumer actively negotiates the meaning.

How do we measure audiences?

Sales, subscriptions, ratings, figures

Who measures them?

NRS

ABC

BARB

Bookseller

New ways in which we measure audience

Social networking

YouTube + google+1 views

Twitter trends

Research

Quantitative

Qualitative

Niche –  Some fishing programme

Mass – Sky sports

Audience engagement

Audiences’ expectations

Audiences’ foreknowledge

Audience Identification

Audience placement

Audience research