Post 7f - Audience

DEFINITION: A collective group of people who comsume a form of media, whether it be film, text, radio etc.

Mass audience - a.k.a 'broadcast audience' - Very large groups of people - Hollywood Blockbusters.

Niche audience - Small groups - very influential - art house films common for this audience

Classification of Audience types:

Two of the main ways of dividing audience are:
Demographic: Gender, sex, ethnicity, age, class.
Psychographic: Interests, hobbies, attitudes, beliefs.
Media outlets mainly use social grades, starting at A with the upper middle class to E, the students and unemployed.
This is done so that during research of a film or television show, production companies know who their film or program is target at and how to target them in the best way.
(Table below is from here)

Grade	Social class	Chief income earner's occupation
A	upper middle class	Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B	middle class	Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1	lower middle class	Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2	skilled working class	Skilled manual workers
D	working class	Semi and unskilled manual workers
E	non working	Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners, and others who depend on the welfare state for their income, this also includes students.

The negative side of this that households are pre-determined based on one person's income, a household will most likely have conflicting views on media.

Impact of New Technology on film audiences:

• Old media [TV, PRINT, RADIO] were directed for high audience numbers, but in the last few years must now work hard to maintain this audience.
• New media [DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY] has led to an increasing uncertainty in how audience should be defined, as audience fragmentation has led to multiple branches of audience type.

Fragmentation:

• The branching out and breaking up of audiences into smaller groups
• With this media must change their ways to meet their audience, such as newspapers and magazines, who now have both online and hard copies of their text in order to meet as many people as possible.

How institutes make money to combat both new media and fragmentation:

• Free apps have adverts
• Websites and search engines target you towards certain adds.
• They attempt to lower production costs to make profit - Such as newspapers printing less copies.