Google defines audience as a group of your users who share the same attributes. The group of users who are interested in news are the audience for a news website.
The story isn’t as simple as that. News audiences can have various interests in the broad term called News. Quite like, an audience from India could have a great deal of interest in what is happening in India. More specifically, some might prefer to know the just about the lives and turmoil of Hindi movie stars. Even if entertainment is entertainment, this audience can be the life-blood of many a news websites, especially mainstream media websites.
Analytics becomes increasingly more complex as one realises that the audience can be audiences. Some might be just sports enthusiasts, but, for example, the audience from India would largely be interested in news from India, but many of them would still be interested in world news. Or, a good many are interested in news from the cities or states they originally belonged to if they are internal migrants. Non-resident Indians might share the interest of resident Indians in cricket, but prefer news only about the State of origin.
With the advent of the mobile age, and cheap data plans, audience have begun to the day taking the broad view from their favourite news sources of platforms. They’d keep coming back, of course, for breaking news, but would otherwise move onto to their mobiles to read during the commute to the office. Along this news “consumption” journey, they might save good editorial and Oped pieces to be read later at night. Some of them would prefer to catch up on some sporting event or with friends on their preferred social media platform.
The slicing and dicing of audiences makings analytics not just about looking at aggregate figures flashing on giants screens telling you what story is being read the most at this instance or for the past half an hour. The numbers at the end of the day might paint a very different picture from the slice of time one looked up at the analytics screen.
The picture painted above might not be even a fraction of what goes on with audiences, or the scenario might already be dated. Thus, it is important for journalists to have a fair bit of understanding about analytics to better understand audiences.