Television & New Media 2016, Vol. 17(3) 254–271 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1527476415597480 tvn.sagepub.com Article Reconfiguring the Audience Commodity: The Institutionalization of Social TV Analytics as Market Information Regime Allie Kosterich 1 and Philip M. Napoli 1 Abstract Changes in the ways that audiences use television, and the ways in which such usage can be measured, raise the possibility of a transformation of the audience commodity, and the currency that fuels the audience marketplace. Specifically, it appears at this point that social media analytics are beginning to play a role in how television program success is measured, and in how advertising dollars are allocated across programs. Essentially, then, the emergence of social TV analytics represents the possibility of a new market information regime taking hold in the audience marketplace. Working from an institutional theoretical framework, this article uses trade materials as a window into industry dynamics and discourses in an effort to provide an account of the recent emergence and usage of social TV analytics in the U.S. television industry and thus explore the process of institutionalization of a new market information regime. Keywords audience, social TV analytics, market information regimes, metrics, currency, institutionalization, institutional theory Audience attention has long served as the currency that fuels the television industry (Napoli 2011). Through the process of measuring this attention, audiences become effectively commodified in the audience marketplace (Meehan 1984). These processes of measurement, and the economic, social, and cultural implications of how this 1 Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Corresponding Author: Allie Kosterich, Department of Communication, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington St., New Brunswick, NJ 07030, USA. Email: allie.kosterich@rutgers.edu 597480TVN XX X 10.1177/1527476415597480Television & New MediaKosterich and Napoli research-article 2015 by guest on January 29, 2016 tvn.sagepub.com Downloaded from