Investigación de audiencias: lost in transition

Abstract

El proceso de digitalización ha supuesto una auténtica revolución en el sistema de la comunicación mediada institucionalmente. La gran mayoría de medios de comunicación tienen dificultades para encontrar un modelo económico para subsistir. Puede decirse que, a falta de nuevos modelos, están anclados en prácticas de difusión masiva y centralizada que cabe considerar como básicamente cosa del pasado. Pues bien, lo mismo ocurre con algo tan básico a tal modelo centralizado como la investigación de audiencia. Tras describir cuál ha sido el papel de la investigación de audiencias en ese modelo de difusión masiva y cómo se ha mantenido, a pesar de las críticas emergidas desde los principales actores de ese modelo a su forma de funcionamiento, se establece una sintética panorámica de los retos que ha de afrontar la investigación de audiencias para adaptarse a la transformación digital, ya que el sistema de la comunicación mediada institucionalmente y su relación con el sistema de mercado han cambiado radicalmente.

New audience dimensions in streaming platforms: the second life of Money heist on Netflix as a case study

“…The growth in popularity of streaming and on-demand content consumption, boosted by large global agents such as Netflix, Amazon and HBO, has produced significant disruption in consumption habits and further heightened the phenomenon of audience fragmentation, marking the switch from paleotelevision to neotelevision (Vacas, 2012). As well as these new operators, the appearance of new packages and types of data has had a significant impact on companies operating in the context of TAMs (Portilla, 2015;Callejo-Gallego, 2019). Exponential growth in content available to users (reducing viewer concentration on a limited selection), its commercialisation through a subscription-based business model (removing advertising value from the content) and the boom in consumption outside broadcasting times on different receivers, many of them mobile or outside the home (thus complicating monitoring with people meters) has generated a new ecosystem where success can no longer be assessed exclusively using traditional audience measurement systems.…”

“…The larger offer (which has lowered the figures for audiences concentrated on a small number of programmes), its operating model (subscription without advertising) and the rise in signal reception devices, leading to increased mobile viewing (beyond the range of people meter monitoring), have produced a new model that combines infinite consumption that is difficult to parameterise. As Callejo- Gallego (2019) notes, what we are seeing is an audience that has not yet been produced by measuring instruments or which still lacks the instruments for its comprehensive measurement.…”

“…On-demand consumption invalidates the premise behind TAMs: collective, concentrated and synchronous consumption, structurally linked to scheduling (Callejo- Gallego, 2019). With streaming platforms, individual, disseminated and asynchronous consumption abounds, although paradoxically, as Huertas (2018) notes, this does not imply a decrease in continuous consumption.…”

“…-Audience research in this context involves interpreting and assigning a value to each new audience dimension arising from online consumption (weighted audience) and not just accumulating data. -The volatility inherent in these platform audiences, jumping easily between content and services -a volatile or 'gaseous' audience, using the term in Callejo- Gallego (2019)-, suggests that weight should be given to what is chosen and the quality of such choices, thereby producing new audience dimensions based on the connection established with content (adhered audience).…”

Preferencias televisivas de la audiencia española (2005-2019): programas, formatos y cadenas

“…En la televisión líquida (Quintas-Froufe y González-Neira, 2016) la oferta se hace infinita por lo que el concepto de parrilla televisiva se diluye. La audiencia se dota de mecanismos para ser su propia programadora, conformar su propia dieta audiovisual al margen de las tradicionales parrillas, en un consumo cada vez más individualizado (Napoli, 2011;Polo-López, Miotto, y Fondevila-Gascón, 2018;Roel 2019;Callejo, 2019). La competencia de los agentes emisores deviene infinita al coincidir dos modelos de distribución audiovisual: la tradicional de televisión lineal y la oferta tipo biblioteca (Netflix, repositorios digitales de los canales generalistas).…”