Audience diff erentiation
In the UK, audience measurement of one kind
or another has operated since the beginning
of broadcasting. Once the monopoly of the
airwaves held by the BBC gave way to competi-
tion with the advent of commercial television,
audience preferences became increasingly
significant and audience measurement was
quickly regarded as a duty and a lifeline for
survival.
Two key terms are ratings and shares. A rating
is defi ned as the estimated percentage, in the
case of television, of all the ‘TV households’ or
of all the people within a demographic group
who view a specifi c programme or station. A
share refers to the percentage of the overall
viewing fi gures which a particular programme
commands.
As long ago as the 1980s, in Inside Prime
Time (Pantheon, 1983) Todd Gitlin dubbed the
obsession of the TV networks with ratings ‘the
fetish of immediate numerical gratification’.
Th is fetish now extends to ways of measuring
audience response using sensory devices that
register viewing habits, but the trickiest problem
concerning audience measurement is fragmen-
tation of use, through cable, video, DVD, satel-
lite, network communication and the multiple
functions of hand-held device, not to mention
the difficulties facing measurement with thenot enough on its own to disrupt established
patterns of shared culture’. Th e Breakup stage ‘is
certainly becoming more possible’, but it is ‘still a
hypothetical pattern and has not been realized’.
See topic guide under network society.
Audience differentiation Like the ‘mass’,
audiences – for radio, television, cinema or
readers of the press – are often simplistically
regarded as a homogeneous lump. It is easier to
make generalizations that way, but misleading.
Audience diff erentiation works from the premise
that analysis of audience response to media
messages can only be purposeful if it recognizes
that the mass is a complex of individuals, diff er-
entiated by gender, age, social class, profession,
education and culture. See analysis: modes
of media analysis.
Audience measurement Investigation of the
size and constitution of mass media audiences
evolved into one of the world’s major service
industries. Initially, audience measurement,
or audience research (AR) is about number-
crunching: how many readers? How many listen-
ers or viewers? Th is data is then broken down
along lines of class, gender, spending-power,
age, occupation, etc. Th ere are two categories
of measurement – quantitative and qualitative
- with pressure always to translate the one into
the other.
Models of audience fragmentation