Assessments of the audience of traditional mass media have existed for decades and have been
widely studied but the quantification of the Internet audience is a recent and barely known
phenomenon. An audience is an essential requirement for the existence of any mass media: first
there is no medium without an audience and second the audience has become a commodity
fundamental to the functioning of commercial media systems. It is the application of
measurement procedures that allows the audience to play this dual institutional role. The
Internet Audience is the first book to focus on the transformation of the Internet into a mass
communication medium thanks to the constitution of its audience through measurement. Starting
with a historical analysis of this transformation it goes on to analyze in detail the methods
used for the measurement of the Internet audience their limits and their possibilities. It
concludes with an inquiry into the logic and interests behind the creation of an online
audience measurement industry. The result is the first comprehensive look at the question of
not what the Internet audience does with the medium but rather what the medium does with its
audience.
