Section 4: understand the targer audience of media products

Mainstream audience - A mainstream is one that is available to a wide range of people that share common interests.

Niche audience - A niche audience is a particularly small, unpopular and is only known to a small range of people. A small number of people that fall within specific demographic profile (eg ethnicity or age).

Examples of Mainstream audience - X factor, I'm a celebrity get me out of here, TOWIE, The lion king, vogue, OK!
Mainstream films are usually made my large conglomerate companies

Example of niche audience - golf world, Lobster, Juno, Match of the day,
Niche movies are usually produced by independent audience.

Why are audience's important?

• Without audiences there would be no media.
• Media organizations produce media texts to make profit - no audience = no profit
• The mass media is becoming more competitive than ever to attract more and more audiences in different ways and stay profitable.
  

Impact of new technology on audiences

• Old media (TV, print, radio) which used to have high audience numbers must now work harder to maintain audience numbers.
• Digital technology has also led to an increasing uncertainty over how we define an audience, with the general agreement that a large group of people reading the same thing at the sae time is outdated and that audiences are now 'fragmented'

Fragmented audience-

• The vision of audiences into smaller groups due to the variety of media outlets.
• EXAMPLE: newspapers and magazines - you can now view the hard copy and online version (sometimes free)
• The aim is to hit as many people as possible, sell more copies/generate larger audience. But measuring that audience becomes hard! You may have some people that only look online, some that only read the hard copy or some that do both!

How do institutions continue to make money?

• Nothing in life is free
• Free apps always have adverts, unless you pay to remove adds.
• Websites and search engines work had to target you with ads whilst you consume 'free online' versions of your media product
• These adverts are carefully constructed and selected for the primary audience for each text
• With newspapers, printing less copies and switching to online distribution can reduce production costs.

Types of audience - Mass audience - often termed 'broadcast audience'. Those who consume mainstream or popular texts.

Demographics - When media producers study the breakdown of their target audience and is based on the Characteristics that we can measure into media consumers such as age, race, gender, education and income level.

psychographics - Profiling of audience members based on personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests and lifestyles.