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[...] there is much wasted watching by irrelevant viewers. Specification and fractionation of the audience leads to a form of concentrated viewing by the audience in which there is (from the point of view of advertisers) little wasted watching. Because that advertising time can be sold at a higher …

Let's begin with the advertising-supported commercial media as part of the whole economy. How do they make a profit? A short answer would be that the media speed up the selling of commodities, their circulation from production to consumption. Hence, they speed the realization of value (the conversi…

[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a me…

[...] the ratings industry per se and the more specific form of producing ratings for national television are open and competitive--and just happen to have a single more important firm. This lends the status quo within the ratings industry an aura of naturalness; the industry appears to "simply exi…

In broadcasting studies, the situation has been somewhat different with industry organization taking precedence over textual analysis. notions of internal production constraints, external commercial constraints, and of professionalism form the basis for explaining why cultural products reproduce he…