Audience Profiling
Audience profiling is a technique
which is used when someone who is aiming to market a product has to find out
many different facts about who it’s aiming to target and what needs to be done
in order to reach that specific audience. To find out these things one must
take many factors into account; these factors can be things such as –gender,
age, race sexuality, education, occupation, annual income, disposable income etc,
even more definition of audience profiling can be things such as disposable
income, current lifestyle/ aspiration or desired lifestyle, culture, media
interests, buying habits and loyalty to brands. Insuring that the target
audience you’re trying to get across to is done right is the best effective way
to produce the best results you want for your product, for example if you’re
trying to sell a product which is mostly revolving around skating and rock
music you’re not going to want to target your audience mainly towards older
people are you? No you want to aim it towards teenagers and the sport genre
this is why it’s very important to plan out your target audience effectively
Demographics
IGN fits into the category “E” as most of its admins
are either students or unemployed, this gives them plenty of free time to
explore a wider range of different games, it also gives them a lot of free time
to also review the games after they’ve played them to share them with others
and let them know the mechanics of the game and target audience.
This method of audience profiling is mostly useful to
the media/ documentary creators more than the socio – economic research methods
due to the large range of variety of choice they have rather than the upper,
middle and working class that socio – economic method uses. For example let’s
say a media producer is trying to find the best target audience for a TV
audience associated around Landscape designing and construction/gardening the
landscape designer is about to create a design for a garden, and the
construction workers need to produce the work given by the landscape designers
and the gardeners also. Straight away you can how the TV producer has created
different target audiences for people interested in construction and landscape
designs and also gardening.
Socio-economic status
Basically IGN is mostly aimed towards the
middle SES to Higher SES but not so much towards the lower SES as they’re
mainly out of reach and do not know of such game review channels, it could also
be the case of not only that but just watching the reviews for pure
satisfaction as they aren't able to afford the gaming themselves, it’s also
said by others on comments that it’s mostly the children that play the games
but the parents mostly check on the reviews to see if it’s either suitable or
worth buying.
Psychographics
The psycho-graphics way of audience profiling is very
similar to demographics, the only difference is that they deal more on the side
of the audience’s behavior and personality rather than the work that is
produced. The way media producers help profile their audience is through
psycho-graphic charts similar to demographic charts but a more detailed version
that offers a more large variety of audiences to choose from than the
demographic method would.
A good example of how psycho-graphics work in order to
target their given audience is through a documentary where kids are leaving
their home and school to get placement in another school in another country
where they suffer from much difficult ethical and poverty issues, the producer
is aiming to choose the reformers group because it contains people who wish to
travel and want freedom of restrictions from others also known as being
independent, the producer can also aim it towards people who are seeking escape
or people who just need to be organized in the correct way to put them back on
their feet and show them what the real world is like.
For IGN it is mostly the “explorers” out of the
psycho-graphics category that suits it the most as it’s mainly aimed at younger
people such as students who are eager to try out new brands such as new games,
IGN is really helpful for these people as they can rely on other peoples
reviews and comments to guide them in the right direction to the games they
wish to experience.
How media organisations gather information and how
they use it to construct profiles of their audiences
The ways that media organisations gather information
is through the amount of attention a specific product receives and how they
break it down to a point where they can find what age and gender and occupation
those people who are viewing the product comes down to, an example of this and
evidence I found was on a website which showed some evidence that is aimed towards Boys and TV.
"Boys are less inclined to watch BBC1 than girls but their consumption of five is higher."
Sky one is a firm favorite of this audience, particularly the 13-14s where it watched by nearly 60% of them. Perhaps surprisingly, news channels are appealing to boys with 27% of 11-16 year olds tuning in. Music and kids channels are as equally important to boys as to girls and continue to form the crux of their viewing"
"Boys are less inclined to watch BBC1 than girls but their consumption of five is higher."
Sky one is a firm favorite of this audience, particularly the 13-14s where it watched by nearly 60% of them. Perhaps surprisingly, news channels are appealing to boys with 27% of 11-16 year olds tuning in. Music and kids channels are as equally important to boys as to girls and continue to form the crux of their viewing"
Geodemographics
Mostly the wide majority of people who are
tuning in watching IGN videos are mostly from Europe and America, this is
because the IGN review videos are spoken in English which makes sense as you’re
not going to be watching a game review video spoken in Egyptian if you don’t
even understand it so they won’t watch ours, most of the statistics also show
on one of IGNs video which contains over 1 million views that over half of that
many views were people from the united states and the rest spread across Europe
including the UK.
Age
The target audience is mainly aimed towards
the age range of teenagers onwards to adults, this is because IGN contains
graphical scenes and violence included in most games which won’t even be
appropriate for children playing video games, however they’re different
categories based on different age ranges on their YouTube channel which is also
really good, But mostly the age range consists of the suitability of the old er
teenagers as it does contain bad language in game review commentaries.
Gender
The reviews are mainly male-based due to
the choice of games being reviewed such as Gears of War, Call of Duty and Grand
theft auto, statistics show that females are less likely to sit down and watch
game reviews unlike men as they seem to be less interested in them, it’s also
the graphics and color based scheme in the game reviews such as dark red with
eye catching in-game graphic screenshots which attract more males than females.
Statistics have also shown that the views on game reviews are viewed a lot more
than females.
Sexual orientation
The sexual orientation isn’t aimed towards
a specific orientation, it’s for everybody that being (Homosexual, Bi-sexual, Heterosexual)
games are played by all different people on the game reviews and commentated by
different people on screen, however this does not target a specific group just
gamers in general, some game play may consist of some sort of sexual
orientation but that’s the content included in the game not included by the
person reviewing.
Regional Identity UK/USA
The regional identity for the United
Kingdom associating with these game reviews is mostly that British people are
known to have no sense of humor, however for Americans they’re known to be
lethargic. This is why these game reviews are so beneficial for people of these
sort to be entertained by people with similar personalities as them as the game
reviews have plenty of humor as the commentators are very chatty and funny most
of the time.
Mainstream
The mainstream audience which is associated
with IGN are typically all the same as most gamers, however some may like other
reviews than others depending on the game that’s being reviewed as not
everybody likes the same game, but most of the time it’s either the mainstream
audience which have requested a certain game to be reviewed so the likely hood
of it is that a large majority of the audience which watch IGN all belong to
the same group or system as most others of their kind.
Quantitative audience research
IGN is the leading source for gaming news
on YouTube, with over an extraordinary 115,835 videos and over 7,568,012
million subscribers. The viewing figures are beyond reasonable for the amount
of subscribed members for a recently uploaded video; with also over a total
amount of views such on the channel up to 3,215,716,171 the daily network
statistics add up around over 200,000 views per day. IGN release over 10-15
videos every single day, these can range across game walkthroughs, trailers or
the latest game reviews which is why they’re known to be the #1 games media
company on the internet.
The statistics also show that their most
popular video upload which received over a astonishing 19,592,102 views titled
“Elder Scrolls V Skyrim: Official Gameplay trailer, however their most popular
review video known as Assassins Creed had received over a total of 13,242,742
views which was only released last year, whereas the Elder Scrolls were
released 2 years ago. So it’s safe to
say comparing all the other game review channels on YouTube IGN statistically
is the most viewed and high rated media game review company on the Internet.
(Links to IGN YouTube Channel and Skyrim
Official Gameplay Trailer)
This YouTube video is from a YouTube
channel called “AlphaOmegasin”, he talks about how he thinks that most of the
IGN reviews are “senseless” and biased and how they’ve been bought off and paid
for to advertised games trailers which have been given to them by other game
companies for a set price as want their game to be known out there, IGN is a
good source to advertise from as it’s one #1 game reviewers in the world.
Advertisements on their videos and on their websites also indicate that this is
how they achieve profit in doing what they’re doing.
·
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQJZhruGDc
(Do you Think IGN reviews are bought and paid for?)
Continuous numerous amounts of
feedback/comments are given to IGN reviews every couple of seconds on everyone
of their videos, as they’ve got such a large fan base with over 7 million
subscribers every video they upload allows YouTube members to comment about
their video, most of the time it’s about the game review and their opinions and
sometimes it’s off topic internet banter. All questions and statements are
posted upon the videos comments this allows users to communicate with a large
gaming community sharing all different opinions and gathering different sources
of information associating in the same subject area (Games). One comment for
example that I Took off a YouTube game review video posted by IGN titled
“Battlefield 4 beta game review” a comment posted “Why does the assault class
have a support role? What medic doesn’t come under support?” Obviously this is
a question to be answered by someone who knows something about the game, people
can find out a bunch of different things by just simply commenting on YouTube
videos and receiving information back off other people solving their questions.
YouTube Link to Battlefield 4 Beta
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