Audience Fragmentation Quotes

I worked at CBS in the late '90s, and I remember sitting in meetings with both advertisers and digerati, and everyone was saying, 'Network TV is dead.'

It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.

Obviously with the Internet and increased access to other means of watching shows, the audience has dispersed and is all over the place and that is a challenge.

The Internet is an audience of one, a million times over.

Technology is changing, so the viewership is getting broken up. My kids watch everything downloaded; they have no idea what the numbers or the names of the channels mean, except 'FX makes the show that I see on my computer.'

When television came out, there was concern it would kill radio.

I think that the problem with network television is that they cling to the whole business model like they are clinging to the side of a cliff.

Even good shows can fail to find an audience because they're drowned out by the noise and the sheer volume of everything that is being made. It's one of the downsides of there being, as I've argued, too many shows.

I think the idea that television has evolved to this place of real thematic richness and the fact that you no longer have to get 10 million people to watch your show in order to propagate its survival are the best things that have ever happened to storytelling in this medium.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

There used to be three networks, and now there are 40 million networks. There's a lot more competition out there, too. We would bring in 27 million people. Now, they're lucky if they have 17. I looked at the ratings, for the first time in 25 years, just to see, and there were 130 shows on. There used to be maybe 30.

Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest best-sellers, just as cable siphons audience from the major networks, and just as the Web pulls viewers from TV.

The rise of digital technology put marketers in a bind. No longer a captive audience, consumers were splitting their time across devices, social networks and websites.

The separation of audience into tribes preferring to reinforce their own views with media of similar ideological stripe makes true debate impossible.