In recent times the landscape of media has changed a significant amount and the ways in which media products are produced and distributed has also changed significantly. The main factor that I believe that has influenced this is the sudden increase in new media technology in the last decade. An example of a NMT that has shown its impact is Apple’s Newsstand, which since its launch in October 2011 has sold over 4 million digital copies on its mobile devices. The case studies that I have studied are Cosmopolitan and men’s health. They have used a variety of NMT’s which I will discuss later but also in recent times they have increased their target audience for example they now sell “cosmo on campus” and “cosmo for guys” which has increased demands for the companies leading them to make more money for the company.
In contemporary society it is arguable that NMT is a big factor of our lives with an average of 2.6 million minutes being spent on Facebook every day. With 6/10 of us having mobile phones on us at all times. This tells us that we are becoming more and more dependent on these new technological products. Companies such as hearst media have synergized with another conglomerate being apple and allow apple to sell their magazines on newsstand which allows more people to buy their magazines.
New media technology is also important to media companies as it allows them to fulfill the audience theories which helps them ultimately to gain more readership and maintain them for a long period of time for example cosmo do what they do well as they have for the past 38 years on average sell 400,000 copies each month. The NMTs help as they help the audience out for example Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is an audience theory that the magazine industry uses. As it says that humans need a sense of belonging and cosmo and heatst do this by converging with the web 2.0 and setting up accounts on twitter and Facebook where people can comment and discuss things with similar interest to make them feel apart of something bigger a community.
There have been development of hardware and software which has changed the way audiences access their content. For example developments such as smart phones and tablets means that they can get their information from these mobile devices and this satisfies the uses and gratification theory of inform and educate.
Another audience utopian theory is to bring the audience from loneliness to social networking which these magazines do through converging with web 2.0 and create websites such as "cosmo the one" which is a online dating website.
This is ways that media products are distributed and marketed to its audience and tells us how dependent we are on new media technology.
