Book review presentation for Mass Media Seminar class at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. I reviewed Philip Napoli's "Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace" (2003)

1. Audience Economics:
Philip Napoli
Media Institutions and the Audience
Marketplace

2. Why the dual nature of
media economics is so
important?
Selling the programs and selling the
people who watch the programs.

3. Content for specific audiences

4. 1. The audience marketplace
•Media
•Advertisers
•Audience Measurement
Organizations
Trend: monopolization
of data services
(Google)

5. 1. The audience marketplace
•The audience product:
-Predicted
-Measured
-Actual

6. 2. The Predicted Audience–
Measured Audience Relationship
• Testing the audience
- “sample” audiences
- “pilot” programs
- “call-out” (radio)
- “dial” testing
Problems:
- Random audience for
testing (theaters)
- Cable testing audience is
not representative (only 30
% of viewers subscribe to
cable)
The Office TV show
produced 9 seasons. This
is how duplicating
successful content works.

7. 3. The Measured Audience–Actual
Audience Relationship
• Telephone recall
• Coincidental surveys
• Audiometer; paper
dairies
• People meter
Problems?
• Vehicle exposure versus ad
exposure
• Irrational willingness to
accept the measured size
of the audience
“Current practice is to assume that the average-minute
program audience and the average commercial
audience are the same”

8. 4. Audience Valuation
• Audience valuation affect content strategies
• Scarcity paradox: Hard to reach audiences are more
expensive
• Factors:
 market;
 demographic;
 media.
Is Transformers movie just
a fancy car advertisement?

9. 5. New Technologies and the
Audience Product
• Audience fragmentation
• Audience autonomy
Existing audience measurement systems
are not able to keep up with the pace of
new media environment

10. 6. The Future of the Audience
Marketplace
What might the decline in the quality of the
audience product mean for the future of
advertiser-supported media?
• In an increasingly fragmented, increasingly autonomous
media environment, in which it will become increasingly
difficult to monetize audiences, the extent to which both old
and new media technologies and services will be able to
support the production of original content will drop.