This is the collection and analysis of information about the target audience for a particular media product of the media industry. Knowing what your target audience is and what they like is important. It is about investigating the amount of people and the background of the audience for a particular media product. Also the audience members who are aware of a particular media product and service. What members of the target audience think about particular products and services and their patterns of behaviour and the potential use of the products also needs to be investigated. There are many different methods of finding out this research such as: Interviews, questionnaires, Surveys, Discussion groups. All of these methods have many advantages and disadvantages, such as When interviewing people individually they tend to tell the truth because they are on there own. Also you may get to know and understand the participating audience, but it may take too much time to interview a amount of different people in the audience with different backgrounds. The interviewer may make the interviewee uncomfortable and it may make them go shy and not say much. An advantage of doing questionnaires are that they can be distributed on a wide scale. Also they can involve both closed and open questions, but some of the audience may skip questions or even answers falsely. Surveys are a good way to find out information because they have high reliability and get views from a diverse audience, but not all the audience will reply. Discussion groups are also a extremely good and well used method in the media industry, because they get a variety of different views on a certain subject. Also the audience in the group can be from different backgrounds and will have their own opinions. A downfall is that not everyone in the group may get involved, they either are shy and don't feel a need to speak and just listen to everyone else’s ideas or they may not get chance to express their opinions. 
Here is an example of audience research, the information tells media companies what magazines sell to certain people, the audience is grouped by gender, age, background, etc... If you wanted to produce a new magazine for a certain group 'E.G. woman 20+' you would look into information produced by other companies and see what magazines they buy and enjoy most. You would look at a variety of different examples of the magazines and get some ideas of what information and storys they like to read about so your magazine would be bought. class
