ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how broadcasters gain information about audience sizes, and why this information is significant to them. An important matter to bear in mind when reading this chapter is that numerical, quantitative information does not reveal answers to the questions about why and how people watch television. But since the measurement of audiences in terms of numbers of viewers is crucial to the economics and organisation of television, this chapter discusses ways of studying this. The Dutch television theorist Ien Ang (1991, 1996) has analysed the practices of audience measurement, and shown that broadcasters have an insistent desire to find ways of measuring audiences. But audience measurement techniques set limits to the kind of conclusions that can be drawn from them. Audience measurement:
n is statistical n is based on samples of viewers, and n results in generalisations about what viewers find pleasurable.
