BARB

BARB - this stands for the broadcasting audience research board.  Anyone can use BARB and it shows you how many people tune in to different T.V programmes and radio stations.  This is useful as it enables the general public to see what programmes and stations are the most popular, and this therefore shows what interests the mass market.  This can then be broken down and analysed by watching one of these television shows and seeing why it would appeal to such a wide diverse range of people.  Also, the general public can see what programmes are popular, but only target a segment of the market therefore making these programmes popular to a a niche market and finding out why.

 

This message appears when you log onto the BARB website, suggesting that advertisers and media companies may often use this website to find out quantitative data by looking at the figures of the most popular channels.  By doing this, it means the companies can go to these channels when looking at where to complete advertisements so they target the market they are looking for, for that specific product or service.

This shows the BARB homepage where you can view all the programmes available.  To give examples of the accuracy of the data available, 'Educating Essex' received 2.05 million viewers, making it into the Channel 4 top 30 list for most popular shows.