Awareness Of Audience

Audience in the Media Industry is one of the most important aspects of any text that has been created and distributed to the world. An Audience, by definition, is the group of people at which a certain piece of text is aimed. For example, an animated movie is aimed at a younger demographic whilst a horror movie is aimed at a more adult audience. All movies have to maintain a targeted audience that their product is aimed at. This target audience that has been presented to them then has influence on the production, editing, marketing and final distribution of the product (as different audiences want to see completely different things). Here are some different audience categories;

There are also different types of audience based on the number of people that they contain;
A Mass Audience is a very wide-spread audience that does not hold any key prejudices or ideals and will consume most if not all main-stream films.
A Niche Audience is one with a comparatively smaller population with interests that are more focused into unique areas.

Media audiences are researched in many different ways. This is mostly done through ratings, sales and figures but there are a few organisations (like BARB and ABC) that monitor audiences throughout their targeted Media outlet. These organisations carry out research in two different types;
Quantitative research - number based, factual and focuses on questions that give very exact answers.
Qualitative research - individual preferences, open questions and aims to show opinions and thoughts.