Audience
How has your sense of the audience for your work shifted in response to these digital changes? While there is more interest in documentaries from the general public, is the reception the same as audiences of the past?
One major concern of filmmakers is that with wider audiences, it is hard to determine if audiences pay attention in the same ways they would in a theater. With films being more widely available to stream online, and with the proliferation of "New Media", documentaries that utilize the internet and often have forms of interactivity embedded within the film, audiences have the ability to participate in a documentary like never before. However, in a study of interactive documentaries and the levels of participation they displayed over time, the documentary being studied, New Life, had a bounce rate of "61.03% and the average session duration 03.29 min", despite the entire documentary being over thirty minutes long. Even though the site had "40,465 page views in an 80-month period", not all of those views resulted in watching the full documentary.
Podara, Anna, et al. “Digital Storytelling in Cultural Heritage: Audience Engagement in the Interactive Documentary New Life.” Sustainability, vol. 13, no. 3, Jan. 2021, p. 1193. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031193.