Why Bloggers Should Care About Audience Fragmentation

Why Bloggers Should Care About Audience Fragmentation Media and audience fragmentation has been a source of worry for television and traditional media. There was a time when everyone in the nation sat down to watch the same shows at the same time. But now,  instead of a few television networks with a handful of programs that large swaths of the country would be watching together, there are now hundreds and hundreds of television channels and programs. And lets not forget that streaming services like Hulu or Netflix. The audience is now fragmented. Were not all on the same page, consuming the same content, understanding the same references. Theres more choice, and sub-groups are created based on their preferred choices. There is no longer one huge audience. There are many, many audiences.Audience fragmentation is generally heralded as a Bad Thing for traditional media. Is it bad for content marketing, too? Audience Fragmentation And Blogging When blogging started back in the mid-1990s, it was a bit like early television. There were a few blogs, and most tended to cover broad this is my life topics. There werent too many niche blogs (though there were a few). WordPress arrived on the scene in 2003, along with something else that changed the direction of blogging: AdSense. With the arrival of AdSense came the opportunity to make money through blogging instead of just using it to share an online journal.  By 2005, there were 32 million Americans reading blogs,  meta blogs (blogs that talked about blogging) were exploding in popularity, and people began to focus more keenly on how to make money blogging. By 2010, there were 152 million blogs. The ability to make money off of a blog necessarily led to niche blogs. After all, you could make more money through a tightly focused audience than a broad, general one with waxing and waning interest. Niche blogs, like cable networks and streaming video, led to fragmentation in blog readers.  Blog readers learned they could look for specific content that they had an interest in. Most werent reading general or personality-based blogs that didnt at least have an identifiable niche topic. Dont Panic About Audience Fragmentation Media analyst and blogger  David Brennan has a  less negative take  on audience fragmentation for traditional media. While Brennan acknowledges that there is no longer a few huge audience groups consuming the same media, he argues that fragmentation has allowed people who normally wouldnt watch television to start watching. Using two specific examples of people who might not have watched much television before, he concludes   that this particular audience has a passion which fragmentation-era broadcast TV can now satisfy; which has quietly resulted in significantly increased hours of viewing from the most unlikely audiences. In other words, audience fragmentation shattered the big generic audiences, but also brought in new media consumers who werent part of any audience at all. It helped  grow  media consumers.  Big general audiences tend to exclude the fringe audiences. Once fragmented, those fragments found each other, and the fringe audiences had a place to go. Instead of one way to reach one audience, there are now many ways to reach many audiences. If you wanted to, you could look at it as a sum zero game.