The Economics and Financing of Media Companies: Second Edition

CHAPTER 6. Audiences and Consumers

120 CHAPTER 6 Audiences and Consumers The concepts of consumers and audiences are not synonymous when dealing with media and communications industries. Despite the tendency to use the two interchangeably in common discussion, the differences between the two concepts are important and affect how their activities are measured and understood. Consumers are individuals or firms who acquire and consume something, typically through a monetary exchange. Individuals purchasing subscriptions to satellite television systems or buying CD players are clearly consumers , as are online content providers purchasing the rights to content to place on their sites. The term audience, however, focuses not merely on acquisition but upon actual use of the product or service by people. Members of an audience may or may not fall into the category of consumers depending upon whether they pay for the media or communications product. This later distinction is a fine point, however, because even if individuals don’t make monetary payments for a product or service, they must exchange the very scarce resource of time when they use media or other communications products or services. In the last two decades, as the number of television, cable, and satellite channels have risen dramatically across the developed world, the amount of time spent on television viewing has not risen proportionally because demand for more content has grown more slowly than the supply of programming . This is further constrained by the fact that the time available for television viewing is limited due to the human need for sleep, work, and other daily activities. Table 6-1 shows the basic relationship requirements for use of media and communications products and services; individuals who use them are variously consumers, audiences, or both. This chapter explores these audience and consumer relationships with media and issues that influence how companies deal with the individuals with whom they interact. audiences We need to understand the idea of the audience as an abstract concept denoting those persons who attend to a communications channel. It is not the population. It is not those who have access to a medium or channel. It is those who actually select a channel for use. The audience is the whole of those persons that is measured as a collective. Nevertheless, it is made up of individuals and the behavior of these individuals dictates the behavior of the audience. These individuals are different persons who use communications to satisfy their different wants and needs for information, ideas, and diversion in different ways. They spend different amounts of time satisfying their different wants with different media and in doing so create multiple audiences, that is, multiple collections of individuals seeking to serve those needs simultaneously. The audience for a particular media channel is never stable. It is a constantly changing collective. A single audience for any media channel rarely exists; instead most channels have many audiences. A central reality of audiences in a multiple channel world is that they cannot be controlled but can merely be courted. In order to court audiences in this highly competitive environment, media managers in broadcasting, cable, and publishing—especially magazine publishers—tend to engage in audience segmentation. This means that they work to serve an audience with characteristics that differ from the general audience for their medium. The forces promoting these segmentation efforts are made possible by advances in audience measurement that stem from the audience fragmentation created by multiple channels, from audience polarization to specific content of their choice, and from advertiser interests in reaching specialized audiences. Media content providers tend to segment the audiences by their motives for using media, the dominant characteristics of these groups of persons, and their interests. In doing so they make efforts to appeal to different groups with different types of content and to offer a package of content that maximizes the audience that they have chosen to reach. a u di e n ce s a nd c o ns u m er s 121 122 au di e n ce s a nd c o ns u m er s table 6-1 䡠 relationship requirements for users to selected media and communications Additional Consumption Hardware Software/Content Required Newspapers Consumer of copies Audience of copies Magazines Consumer of copies Audience of copies Books Consumer of copies Audience of copies Telephone Consumer of Consumer of telephone/line telephony services Radio Consumer of radio Audience of Electricity/batteries receiver programming Television Consumer of Audience...