Abstract
The last few years have seen a welcome wave of new research and thinking on audiences, prompted by the profound changes in media consumption and use following the rise of digital and mobile technologies. This insightful edited collection adds to this growing body of work by focusing on audience measurement, and specifically on the ‘peoplemeter’ as the most widely accepted technology of television ratings. In their introductory chapter, Bourdon and Méadel distance themselves from the usual academic criticisms of ratings as a market-driven mechanism responsible for the deteriorating quality of television programmes, and argue that audience measurements ‘are not only about economics but also about politics, not only because they are a tool of management in the industry, but also because they pose key questions about democracy and culture, inclusion (or exclusion) of certain audiences’ (p. 28). Audience ratings are therefore rarely an outcome of commercial interests alone, but need to be understood as a product of competing and shifting interests involving a range of actors including advertisers, media producers, regulators, political actors and of course the ratings professionals themselves. The remainder of the book includes a total of 14 case studies that span from North America across Western Europe to India, Brazil, Russia and Australia. Taken together, these case studies offer a good sense of the global spread as well as local variations in audience measurement techniques and the economic and political struggles surrounding them. Part I comprises historical case studies that examine the early history of television ratings and their institutionalisation in Britain (Schwartzkopf, Balnaves), France (Bourdon and Méadel), Germany (Vollberg) and Canada (Savage and Sévigny). Part II turns to the struggles surrounding the introduction of television ratings beyond the early adopters in the West: India (Chakrabarti), Brazil (Hamburger, de Almeida and Aidar), Italy (Scaglioni), Australia (Balnaves) and Russia (Davydov and Johansson). Part III examines the most recent changes in audience measurement, including those initiated by the digital switchover and the challenge of measuring ratings in a digital and mobile media environment, in Ireland (Murray), the United States (Napoli) and Belgium (Evens and Berte). The concluding chapter (Bjur) addresses social scientists themselves, and argues that audience measurement data offer a rich yet little exploited resource for academic audience analysis.