Measuring Media

Before you consider the benefits and challenges of measuring media, you have to first consider the audience that is being targeted and the desired outcomes of the content. Is the goal to simply broadcast something to the widest possible audience or speak to specific groups or individuals? Once it has reached your audience, do you want them to be passive consumers or engage with your content in some way? Is there some kind of monetization or other related benefit to gain? These questions are vital to considering what to measure and why. Pay-to-play or subscription services need to be able to understand how many paying customers they have and how big the pool is to gain as many additional customers as they can. Free or ad supported services instead may put the focus on engagement with content to understand what drives deeper utilization and stickiness. There is room for platforms to take advantage of the information that users have voluntarily given to them and use it for surveillance or other ethically dubious reasons. It’s up to both individual users to understand privacy polices of services they use and for some kind of government or independent oversight to help keep companies responsible and held accountable for abuses.