Digital media has become a part of everything that individuals do today. Nowadays, accessing information has been made easy by the availability of digital information on the internet. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook have made the sharing of information possible. In my case, I at one time tried to provide calculus tutorials on YouTube; I would also post the videos on Facebook. At first, managing a YouTube channel was hard, especially with getting viewers and subscribers. I hoped that since many students struggled with calculus at school, I would get many subscribers and viewers. Unfortunately, that was not the case. However, I never gave up on the idea of making some extra cash from YouTube; therefore, I decided to advertise my channel in groups and through Twitter.
The response was a little sluggish at first, with negative energy by some individuals. However, with time, the number of views on my channel increased significantly. During the last few weeks of the Fall semester, the number of views increased; one day, I had about 27 000 views. It turned out that some individuals who viewed my tutorials liked them. They recommended my channel to their friends. This helped increase the number of views significantly. After the end of the Fall semester, the number of views decreased significantly. The channel did not bring the results I wanted, and I decided to take a break. Although I failed as a YouTuber, I learned a few lessons regarding audience analysis from the experiment.
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The audience in digital media can be analyzed based on its segmentation. In my experiment, my audience was high school students and first-year undergraduate students. The audience was from both genders and involved students who were taking calculus at school. The main aim of starting the YouTube channel was to help students who had difficulties with calculus. Unfortunately, I had miscalculated the demand, needs, and hopes of most students. Based on my observation and views analysis, most students were not interested in an every day tutorial. Most students have other issues to handle, meaning that they do not have enough time to watch videos daily. Also, I realized that students needed a more summarized approach to the tutorials. The last video that I had uploaded had summarized all the other tutorials; it had the most views. Based on this analysis, it is clear that content and audience thoughts should be a primary consideration when creating or delivering content.
Besides, an audience can be analyzed by determining its attitudes, barriers, and facilitators of communication. When delivering digital content, an interactive environment is key; it creates an environment for providing feedback. Feedback is crucial in enabling the content creator to identify areas of weakness and making improvements. According to Sullivan Chapter 9, today's digital media audience often expects to provide feedback (Sullivan, n.d.). The feedback could either be positive or negative. All the same, the content creator may use this information to improve their content or content delivery. As for my case, receiving feedback was impossible since I had disabled comments. This took away the power of the audience to contribute to the discussion. With the interactive environment unavailable, there was no way that I could have received feedback on how to improve my method of content delivery. Additionally, the lack of consistency in the videos uploaded was another problem. People in the digital media world expect consistent content that grows them. Altogether, it can be seen that communication and consistency are important for success in the digital market.
Moreover, in the digital media world, the audience can be analyzed using audience influence (power). The audience in digital media often influences how successful a content creator can be. For example, if an individual like certain content they see, then there is a high probability of recommending it to their friends. This is similar to normal life cases; individuals become returning customers to certain stores, like Walmart, due to reliability, quality goods, and quality services. This also applied to the digital media world. As stated in Sullivan Chapter 9, the audience has power. Unlike Amanda Hawking story provided in the chapter, my story began slowly, became promising, and then collapsed at once. Audience power can be seen by the increasing number of views per day. Most individuals visited the channel since it had been recommended to them. This simply means that an audience can positively or negatively influence the success of a content creator. Taking Amanda's example in her hawking story, it is clear that the few individuals who accessed her books and found them interesting recommended them to others, making her a successful seller. Therefore, the audience in digital media is very powerful.
In digital media, the audience can be analyzed through analytics. The advancement in technology has provided tools that could be used to analyze audience; one common tool is google analytics. These analysis tools provide information about the audience's location, how often they interact with the content, and their feelings towards the information provided. According to Athique (2018), big data has become a crucial part of analyzing the audience and their future behavior. For instance, in my YouTube channel, I could access how my content was doing by checking data on the number of views. If the number of viewers decreased, I would understand the expected trend. Also, the number of likes per video would determine how the audience felt about the content. Audience analysis using big data is the next big thing in audience analysis and is crucial in predicting the audience's future behavior.
Conclusively, the audience in digital media can be analyzed in different ways. Most of these analytic techniques are based on the audiences' behavior. Some analytic methods are big data, audience power, gender, and social-demographic characteristics. These analytic techniques are essential in identifying the needs of the audience and how to engage them further.
References
Athique, A. (2018). The dynamics and potentials of big data for audience research. Media, Culture and Society, 4 0(1), 59-74.
Sullivan Chapter 9: Online, interactive audiences in a digital media world.
