New Audience Research

The new media audience is consuming and interacting with media in vastly different ways to what has previously been known. The increasing prevalence of online communities and the rise of the participatory culture means there are great changes in audience behaviour. Banks (2002, 189) suggests that “internet technologies and the users forming around them are in the process of constructing a very different ‘audience’, with different practices, expectations, materials, tools and technologies”. With these changes, however, must come changes in media audience research. Researchers are being left behind as traditional methods are no longer adequate to measure the change in behaviour of this new media audience. Livingstone (2005) suggests that "audience researchers are faced with a moving target as once-'new' media become familiar and ever-newer media emerge". Audience research needs to adapt their research techniques if the media industry is to successfully monitor and measure this new media audience.

"We do not know how to describe the audience for new media. 'Audience' fits the activities of listening and watching. New information and communication technologies open up more active and diverse modes of engagement with media - playing, surfing, searching, chatting and downloading." (Livingstone 2005, 44)

An interesting article addressing this idea is "Dude, Where's my Audience". They suggest that traditional media measurements and tracking aren't keeping up with new habits such as time-shifting programs and multi-tasking (sitting with one eye on the TV with another on the laptop in front of you). They suggest that because media measurements are failing to measure this, the new media audience is probably being vastly underestimated.

References:

Banks, J. (2002). "Gamers as Co-Creators: Enlisting the Virtual Audience - A Report From the Net Face," in M. Balnaves, T. O'Regan and J. Sternberg (eds) Mobilising the Audience, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Livingstone, S. (2005). "Media Audiences, Interpreters and Users," in M. Gillespie (ed.) Media Audiences, Maidenhead: Open University Press.

TheAge.com. (2007). Dude, Where's My Audience? Retrieved April 15, 2008, from http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/dude-wheres-my-audience/2007/07/24/1185043119701.html?page=fullpage

Changes in the New Media Audience

Web 2.0 sites have become the fastest growing category on the Internet (MediaPost Publications 2006). The increasing uptake of Web 2.0 has now also led to the blurring between the producer/consumer boundaries, leading to terms such as "viewsers, prosumers, DIY cultures, co-creators, user-generated content, participatory cultures, and produsers" (Bruns 2007). Users are now adding value to the network and many varied DIY communities are emerging. For example, online publishing via blogs, media sharing, information and knowledge management, and social networking are now important parts of Web 2.0 (Bruns 2007).

But do the changes that come with these new technologies lead to the emergence of an empowered, interactive audience? How is the relationship between this somewhat new audience and new media technologies, changing from the more traditional audience and their use of media?

I believe this new audience certainly envelopes a degree of empowerment that hasn’t ever been seen before. Today’s users are consuming media in a way that is completely unlike the behaviour of the more traditional audience decades ago. With new media, audiences have the ability to pretty much choose when and where they engage with media. This is vastly different to traditional broadcasting where TV shows are broadcast at a particular time, and the audience has to either be there to watch it, or they miss out. Now, audiences can download TV shows before they’re even broadcast, or use timeshifting programs, such as Foxtel IQ, which enables the audience to watch programs whenever they feel like it. I believe this has led to a new empowerment of the audience, i.e. they have more control and power over how they consume media.

This new audience also provides a challenge for marketers and seems to be slipping under the radar. New media viewing habits are being formed, i.e. it's not unusual to be involved with two or three media touchpoints at the one time. This provides a challenge for marketers as these new ways of interacting with media are not being adequately measured or tracked by the standard media measurements (theage.com.au, 2007).

Not only is this new audience elusive and hard to pin down, define, measure and manage, but DIY communities are also impacting on the traditional media. Blogging and open news sites that practice citizen journalism, for example ohmynews.com are undermining traditional news sources. Social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube are becoming more popular for emerging musical artists, as they find more of a following online. These social network sites are now rivaling major record labels as artists can now build their fan bases online. Furthermore, audiences are turning to the Internet to download TV shows and movies well ahead of release dates, and this is also undermining traditional mainstream media.

All in all, I believe the changing new media environment is allowing for a more interactive, empowered audience.

References:

Bruns, A. (2007). Produsage: A Working Definition. Retrieved April 15, 2008, from http://produsage.org/produsage

MediaPost Publications. (2006). Web 2.0 Growing Faster than Online Video, News. Retrieved April 15, 2008, from http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=50754&Nid=24887&p=380828

TheAge.com. (2007). Dude, Where's My Audience? Retrieved April 15, 2008, from http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/dude-wheres-my-audience/2007/07/24/1185043119701.html?page=fullpage