Discussing Audience.

Audience

Audience is a word used to describe people that consume media products; the readers of newspapers, the listeners of radio and the watchers of TV.

Passive audience: those who take in everything the see, hear or read – like a sponge.

Active audience: those who consume media products but make up their own minds about how much they believe.

Hypodermic Model of Audience: The idea that the media injects its consumers with the message and meaning it chooses and that the audience has no real power to resist.

Audience segmentation

The segmentation of audience is likely to increase as technology allows people to watch what they want to see (also known as ‘niche marketing’)

The audiences effect on the media TV programmes, magazines, soap operas etc go out of business because nobody consumes them and therefore they make no money. ‘Niche marketing’ also shows importance of the audience as media produces would not need segmentation if the audience wasn’t there.

Gratification model

This way of looking at the relationship between the media and its audiences is called the uses and gratifications approach. It considers how people use media products and what they get out of them.

Audience Research Techniques:

Questionnaires

Interviews

Asking people to keep diaries of what they listen to or watch

Monitoring TV sets to see which programmes are being watched

Data:

Quantitative data or information in the form of numbers such as how many people watched a particular programme or read a specific magazine.

Quantitative data or information on peoples opinions ...