Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences

Metrics and analytics in the newsroom: an ethnographic study exploring how audience data are changing journalistic practice

“…The collection of audience data has a long history (Lee et al 2014;Zamith 2015;Carlson 2018) and online metrics often mimic the role of more traditional ones, such as print circulation numbers (MacGregor 2007;Thurman 2014). Media outlets have long strived to predict the popularity of news content with the audience; however, now they have the tools to implicitly quantify detailed aspects of that audience and how individual members of the audience consume news (Cottle 2000;Anderson 2011;Napoli 2011;Zamith 2015). The idea of catering content to audience likes and dislikes, sometimes regardless of its editorial worth or sensationalist nature, is an inveterate part of news coverage (Altheide 1976;Bourdieu 1996;Pariser 2011;Allen 2013).…”

“…Zamith identifies a current "third wave" of media attempts at understanding the audience "characterized by the intense development of systems to capture, link, and organize…digital trace data" (p.25). As Napoli (2011) wrote, analytics "are making it possible for media industries to fundamentally redefine what media audiences mean to them and how they factor into the economics and strategy of their businesses" (p.5). Cottle (2000) describes as their "imagined audience 6 " (p.28), journalists now have an audience that can be both quantified and analysed.…”

“…Bourdieu (1996) was concerned that the fixation with audience ratings was imposing "the sales model on cultural products" (1996, p.27), which is borne out in newsrooms putting renewed emphasis on attracting eyeballs and advertisers by developing popular content (Heinderyckx 2015;Witschge 2012a). As noted by Napoli (2011), "…traditional approaches to media audiences fail to capture all of the important dimensions of audience behavior…Exposure-focused analytical approaches …emphasize only the more passive element of media consumption-basic exposureto the neglect of more active elements that may have substantial economic and strategic value for media organizations" (p.9).…”

“…De-selection was practiced by participants in my own study, and was also common practice in newsrooms in Singapore studied by Duffy 17 Banerjee (2017) and Gabielkov (2016) both also suggest looking at the long tail of traffic as opposed to the short term to accurately measure success in terms of pageviews. However, Napoli (2011) questions whether creating revenue via the long tail is an effective strategy because of audience fragmentation, and suggests focus might be better spent in figuring out how to "infiltrate the fat head" (p.66). et al (2017).…”

Techniques of commensuration in the videogame industry

“…Within the media industries literature, much has been made of techniques of commensuration and their role in generating value. For example, literature on the television industry have long suggested that the measurement of audience attention has become a site of commodification (Meehan, 1984;Napoli, 2011), and a key force in institutional governance (Ang, 1991) a way to render 'unknowable' audiences as 'knowable', as fit-for-purpose data enabling decision-making about television programming (such as advertising). More recent work has focused on newer forms of digital scraping and data captureforms of social-media metrics to gauge audience viewing habits, reactions and opinions (Kosterich and Napoli, 2016).…”