Passive and Active Audiences

A passive audience is an audience that has no influence over the outcome of the programme. They cannot change it in any way and it is up to the writers to decide what happens and when. An example of this is Eastenders. The script is written six weeks in advance and will be shown whether the audience likes it or not. TV is traditionally seen as being passive.

An active audience is the opposite. An active audience can interact with the programme and tell them their views, and what they would like to see. They can influence the outcome of the whole show. An example of this is The X Factor. In this the audience interact by ringing up to vote for their favourite act, so the other ones get knocked out. This determines the whole show, as there is no way of knowing the outcome at the beginning. Mediums such as books and magazines almost force the reader into becoming an active audience.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both passive and active audiences. An advantage to having a passive audience is that production is made much easier, as there would be nobody telling them their views and ideas for the programme. The disadvantage to having a passive audience however, is that the audience is not as loyal. At lot more time and money needs to be invested into the narrative to ensure that people are going to watch it and be interested for it to continue.

An advantage to having an active audience is that the audience can choose what they want to see, meaning that they are more likely to watch it. The audience will also feel ownership towards the programme as they will have contributed to its outcome. This could be by voicing their views, voting for somebody or simply investing time watching it. The disadvantage to having an active audience is that the audience may have bad ideas, and may not know what is best for the programme. Audiences can also be very fickle, and may like their idea one week but hate it the next. This idea also limits the structure that the programme can have.


There are times when having an active audience is not always the best idea for the show. Members of the active audience may set out deliberately to change the initial concept, which has happened a couple of times on the X Factor. There is currently a Facebook campaign containing thousands of people who are voting for an incredibly untalented contestant called Wagner to win. And as they have have all been voting, he has escaped being in the bottom two for the past four weeks, even though he is clearly a joke act. What will also happen, is that the media will report on this strange campaign, therefore making it even more popular and it will gain more publicity and more people will join in. Thus the saying, "any publicity is good publicity". If this does happen, poor Wagner will actually stand a good chance of accidentally winning the competition. 

This is what happened when a different campaign, Rage Against the X Factor, set out to stop the winner of last years X Factor dominating the Christmas number one for the fifth year in a row.