About: Audience flow

Audience flow describes how people move through media offerings in a temporal sequence. Stable patterns of audience flow were first identified in the early twentieth century when radio broadcasters noticed the tendency of audiences to stay tuned to one program after another. By the 1950s, television audiences were demonstrating similar patterns of flow. Not long thereafter, social scientists began to quantify patterns of television audience flow and its determinants. Audience flow continues to characterize linear media consumption. Newer forms of nonlinear media evidence analogous patterns of “attention flow.”