ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 focuses on the practitioner interviews and how audience engagement is leveraged for value on a macro-industrial level by screen organisations and on a micro-personal level by individuals. Practitioners discussed two ways in which audiences become ‘commodities’. The first saw them as an economic commodity in how engagement is filtered and transformed into numbers with economic value as views, likes, tweets and shares are given monetary equivalents. This process of monetisation allows large-scale industry organisations to remain financially viable and individual practitioners to leverage past work for future contracts and build their reputation. Such processes, however, are restrained by the rationalisation of metrics, which capture some visible aspects of engagement but ignore others. In contrast, engagement as a discursive commodity speaks to a more ambiguous sense of value, where particular meanings can be ascribed to audience experiences and then leveraged, either through brand value or on a very personal level in terms of practitioners’ sense of self-worth and professional achievement. Crucially, for these practitioners, both of engagement’s commodity functions were useful as way to balance the financial and creative concerns of their practice.
