Media Term Thursday #27
/Uses and Gratifications Theory
This suggests that audiences have power over their media consumption due to them being active participants who will only seek out and consume those media that they find useful and which gratify their needs. These needs, from entertainment, information, news, education, are many and varied and the media ‘supplier’ needs to follow the needs of the ‘consumer’ or they won’t ‘buy’ the product.
This is why ratings are important to media institutions – if a television program doesn’t rate or a movie doesn’t rate at the box office, the institution loses money. Therefore, media producers spent vast amounts of money on audience research, demographics and surveys to give the self-aware audience what they want.
