Introduction

With the rise and rapid spread of the Internet and other digital communication technologies, mass media have been supplemented and to a certain amount substituted by interactive and often personalized media. The Internet itself—approached here not only as a technological platform but also as a set of socially and culturally defined practices—has undergone a transformation from a medium primarily focused on Web-based storage and delivery of information to a medium allowing user-generated content (Drotner and Schrøder 2010) and integrating mass (one-to-many), interpersonal (one-to-one) and network (many-to-many) communication (Jensen 2010). O'Reilly (2005) has termed this a shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Similarly, Jenkins (2006) has noticed a shift toward media convergence and participatory culture: Technologies are integrated even more smoothly, and services are accessed by even wider populations in order to create and share content (see also Delwiche and Henderson 2013). Bruns (2008) has suggested the term “produsage” to address the fusion of production and consumption in the different types of user-generated content. Although these statements mostly address Internet transformations, it should be noted that it is the whole media and communication ecology that is under change, including the “traditional” media and their audiences (e.g., Evans 2011; Krotz and Hepp 2012; Lundby 2009; Rudin 2011). In light of the ongoing socio-technological developments that create (and are created by) changing audience practices, new challenges emerge for audience research, and they are most notably apparent in the need for appropriate research methodologies.