Audience Research

Doing complete research into your audience - age. ethnicity, gender, geodemographics, psychographics, standard occupational classification.
Audience research is the collection and analysis of information about the target audience for a particular media product or sector of the media industry. Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites.

Effective and successful media products target the right audience and communicate to them in an effective way. As the media industry becomes more fragmented, competition for a share of the audience becomes even more intense. Knowing who your target audience is, and what makes them tick, is therefore increasingly important.
Audience research is about investigating the statistical data about the size and profile of the audience for a particular media product. The extent to which potential audience members are aware of a particular media product or service. And finally, what members of the target audience think about particular products and services and their patterns of behaviour and potential use of the products.
When they research the audience, they research their age, ethnicity, gender, geodemographics, psychographics and standard occupational.

An example of audience research, this information tells me what gender and age and what type of movies or TV do they watch.
There are many different methods about the audience research and the different methods are interviews, questionnaires, surveys and discussion groups etc. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, advantages of interviews are that the interviewee is on their own so they can tell the truth. Also you can get to properly know or understand the participating audience.
Disadvantages of interviews are that interviewer can steer conversation to own advantage. Also it is time consuming to interview enough people and lastly it could make the interviewee feel uncomfortable.

Advantages of Questionnaires are that it can be distributed on a wide scale. It is easy to evaluate data and can contain both open and closed questions.

 Disadvantages of questionnaires are that it is tempting to skip questions or fake answers. Distribution method may collect more of one type of audience than another.

Advantages of Surveys are that you can get views from a diverse audience and it is high reliability.

 Disadvantage of surveys is that not all of the audience sample may reply.

Advantage of Discussion groups is that it can thoroughly cover subjects as the discussion gets different points of view.

Disadvantages of discussion groups are that dominant characters influence other participants so they do not voice their own opinions. Not everyone gets an opportunity to voice opinions.