audience measurement

This page considers audience measurement - the art of identifying who is listening, reading or viewing.

It covers -

• introduction
• history
• issues and mechanisms
• the industry
• studies

     introduction

[under development]

     studies

Studio executive Harry Cohn, in dismissing focus groups and pre-release auditions, supposedly commented that "if my ass twitches, there's something wrong with the picture." (That comment prompted what may have been an equally apocryphal response from the Herman Mankiewicz: "Imagine the whole world wired to Harry Cohn 's ass.")

Points of entry into the literature are Philip Napoli's Audience Economics: Media Institutions & the Audience Marketplace (New York: Columbia Uni Press 2003), Consuming Audiences? Production & Reception in Media Research (New Hampton: Creskill 2000) edited by Ingunn Hagen & Janet Wasko, Hugh Beville's Audience Ratings: Radio, Television & Cable (Hillsdale: Erlbaum 1988), Ratings Analysis: The Theory & Practice of Audience Research (Mahwah: Erlbaum 2000) edited by James Webster & Patricial Phalen, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption (Thousand Oaks: Sage 1993) by Shaun Moores and Measuring Media Audiences (London: Routledge 1994) edited by Raymond Kent.

Karen Buzzard's Chains of Gold: Marketing the Ratings and Rating the Markets (Metuchen: Scarecrow 1990) offers insights about broadcast rating businesses and their impact.

There is a broader treatment in Media Economics: Understanding Markets, Industries & Concepts (Ames: Iowa State Uni Press 1996) by Alan Albarran, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1998) by Harold Vogel and Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge 1991) by Ien Ang.

For a historical perspective see in particular Richard Butsch's The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990 (New York: Cambridge Uni Press 2000), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI 1999) and Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London: BFI 2001) edited by Melvyn Stokes & Richard Maltby, The Last Picture Show? Britain's Changing Film Audiences (London: BFI 1987) by David Docherty, David Morrison & Michael Tracey and Russell Neuman's perceptive The Future of the Mass Audience (New York: Cambridge Uni Press 1991).

Other works of value include Television & its Audience (Beverly Hills: Sage 1988) by Patrick Barwise & Andrew Ehrenberg, The Changing Television Audience in America (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1985) by Robert Bower, papers in Audiencemaking: How the Media Create the Audience (Thousand Oaks: Sage 1994) edited by James Ettema & Charles Whitney.

Questions are posed in Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1998) by James Hamilton and Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1997) by Joseph Turow.

BA Austin's Immediate Seating - A Look at Movie Audiences (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing 1988) is of more immediate interest.

Questions of basic box office statistics and industry accounting have always been controversial. One point of reference is John Izod's Hollywood and the Box Office, 1895-1986 (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1988).

As starting points for questioning some of the figures we recommend Darrell Huff's How To Lie With Statistics (New York: Norton 1993), which hasn't been substantially updated since its first appearance in the early 1950s but remains a classic. John Paulos' A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper (New York: Anchor 1996) is a similarly lighthearted look at the use and abuse of mathematics in the mass and specialist media. Joel Best's Damned Lies & Statistics: Untangling Numbers From The Media, Politicians & Activists (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2001) is harder going but perhaps more valuable.



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