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