Appendix B Understanding Mass and Mediated Communication^535click-through behavior with links. Your “second screen” time matters as well—
advertisers want to know, for example, how often while you are watching TV
that you also “check in” with an app like Viggle on your mobile device.
Big box office and high ratings are keys to mass media success because mass
communication messages are expensive to make and deliver. For example, the
production and promotion costs of a half-hour TV sitcom can range from several
hundred thousand dollars per episode to several million. Such high investment
costs mean that profit can be elusive. In fact, most new TV shows are canceled,
few movies become blockbusters, most novels do not become bestsellers, and few
albums have strong sales (Vogel, 2011). How, then, do they ever make money?
The few blockbuster movies, bestselling books, and hit television shows or albums
must make up for all the rest. In economics, this is called exponentiality: rela-
tively few items bring most of the income, while the rest add only a little (Vogel,
2011). Across the media industries, about 80 to 90 percent of mass media revenue
comes from only 10 to 20 percent of the products made.Broad Versus Narrow Appeal
For the biggest of the mass media, network television, messages must have very
broad appeal to attract the millions of viewers that the networks need in order
to sell profitable advertising time. The Super Bowl is such a widely popular
event that the cost of advertising is extremely expensive: in 2014, a thirty-second
commercial during the Super Bowl cost on average $4 million. But prime-time
network TV (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and CW) requires programming that at-
tracts a very large audience on a regular basis. The traditional way for networks
to capture broad audiences has been to rely on content that is often described
as low culture—entertainment that appeals to most people’s baser instincts,
typified by lurid, sensational images and news stories charged with sex, violence,
scandal, and abuse (Berger, 2007). In addition, the networks have relied on
programming that doesn’t require a great deal of thought or cultural sophistica-
tion, leading critics to echo the sentiments of former Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) chairman Newton Minow when, in 1961, he first called
commercial television a “vast wasteland” (Minow, 1961; Minow & Cate, 2003).
But, wait, you say: there are a lot of popular shows on television right now
that are intellectually stimulating, well written, and impressively produced.
Scholars agree. Jason Mittel (2006), for example, makes the case that theFOLLOWING THE
economic principle of expo-
nentiality, blockbusters such
as Despicable Me 2 bring in
most of the film industry’s
profits and pick up the slack
of box office bombs, such as
R.I.P.D. (left) © Universal Pictures/
Courtesy Everett Collection; (right) Scott
Garfield/© Universal/Courtesy Everett
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