Audience Research Companies

Largely because of advertiser demand for reader, listener, and viewer information, print and electronic media spend millions of dollars each year obtaining those data. They rarely develop the data themselves as that is seen as an obvious conflict of interest. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, newspapers and some magazines routinely inflated their circulation information to impress and attract advertisers. Advertisers want audience figures they can trust and even verify, preferably from independent (nonmedia) sources.

Encouraged by advertisers, newspaper and magazine publishers founded the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) in 1914 as the world's first independent media audience measurement source. The ABC would create standard ways of measuring circulation that would allow ready comparison across publications. Fifteen years later, the nascent radio business took the same step, though here advertisers played a more overt role in forming the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB). Getting data on radio listeners was harder because tuning in was ephemeral—there was nothing physical (like copies of newspapers) to measure. Indeed, how best to research who was listening took years to resolve as different companies tried different methods, and many fundamental questions of sampling and measurement remain controversial to this day.

The audience research companies and services that developed to meet the needs of both advertisers and media have all been independent, meaning they are not owned by media companies or advertisers, the two chief clients for their products. Many of these firms (A. C. Nielsen is a prime example) provide extensive marketing research with media “ratings” merely being one part of their corporate mix. Each company faces the same central problem—how to conduct the best possible research at the lowest possible cost. Commercial audience research is the result of a compromise between these two conflicting goals. Determining the absolute numbers of readers or viewers for any given medium would cost far more than any client could afford. Instead, media audience research must rely on a “good enough” standard balancing the expense of obtaining and publishing the information with what customers are willing to pay for that information.

Described here are the more important organizations (most of them commercial companies), past and present, that have researched audiences [Page 136]for print, radio, television, and (eventually) newer news media. Each company tended to specialize in how it sampled and measured audiences (these methods are described elsewhere), and usually focused on print or electronic media.