12 The audience in media markets

Resumen

The field of media economics has always been concerned with research on understanding audiences as the recipients of media content. With the development of the internet, media audiences have become more diversified and fragmented over multiple services and forms of media use. In this chapter, 1) we examine some trends that define audiences in the digital landscape, 2) we study the issues of audience measurement and the consequences of the analytics applied to media consumption, and 3) we analyze some practical consequences of involving the audience in value chain phases where they were absent in the past. Audiences are perhaps the most crucial part of the value chain of media industries; they consume media, pay for media content, are the reason advertisers pay for media, and can cooperate with and inform decisions on content creation. The relationship between the media and public is no longer distant or superficial. When these relationships are satisfactory, the consumer experience can generate long-term connections with consumers that can become a fundamental element of the value chain. However, the greatest challenge in the digital economy is to attract the attention of readers, viewers, and users because in today’s technology society the human mind is completely dispersed in a multitude of inputs and devices. That is why media economics needs to pay “attention to attention” (Myllylahti, 2020).