Audience Evolution and the Future of Audience Research

Abstract

This article considers how changes in audience behaviors and in audience information systems are affecting the future of academic audience research. This article first illustrates how changes in the media environment are undermining traditional approaches to audience research while also giving rise to alternative analytical approaches. This article then outlines the contours of a next-generation audience research agenda that reflects these ongoing conceptual and methodological developments. Reflecting these developments, this article next argues for a definition of ratings analysis that focuses not on a particular aspect of audience behavior (i.e., exposure), but on whatever forms of currency are employed in the audience marketplace. From this standpoint, the new media environment provides new forms of “ratings” that exist alongside—and integrate with—the old, and that can renew and revitalize the field of ratings analysis.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this research was presented in June 2011 at the COST Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies Workshop in Helsinki, Finland.

Notes

1. For an important context in which the transformation of media audiences and its implications for audience research is being explored, see the ongoing work of the COST Initiative, Transforming Audiences, Transforming Scientists (http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu).

2. It is important to recognize that there are a wide range of important audience research traditions that do not engage with questions that generally fall within the purview of the fields of media management and economics.

3. The term dark matter is borrowed from astronomy, where researchers have determined that there is a substantial amount of matter in the universe that is undetectable, but the existence of which can be inferred from its apparent gravitational effects on visible matter.

4. This statement was made by a panelist at the Advertising Research Foundation's Audience Measurement 4.0 conference, which I attended in June 2009 in New York.