Stakeholder-desired audiences: Fans’ audience data imaginaries and how they shape industry data practices

As the media industry employs big data to imagine audiences, audiences simultaneously seek to understand how their digital traces are being converted into audience data to inform the industry. We explore how fans map stakeholders in the Chinese idol industry, perceive stakeholders’ utilization and construction of audience data, and use those perceptions to guide their data-driven practices. We conducted a netnography of INTO1’s fandoms as a case study, expanding upon studies of platform audience behaviors, fan labor, and imaginaries. Previous studies have shown that fans generate audience data to influence profit-driven stakeholders’ cultural production, such as showing the size and purchasing power of the fanbase to networks and advertisers to prevent TV shows from being canceled. In China’s profit-driven yet state-regulated idol industry, we found that beyond traditional profit-driven (talent management agencies, media organizations, advertisers) and market information (measurement companies) stakeholders, fans also identify the State as a regulatory stakeholder and platforms as emerging cross-sector stakeholders. Based on a grounded theory approach to data analysis, we coined the concept of audience data imaginaries, which we define as audiences’ perception of multiple stakeholders’ utilization and construction of audience data in a cultural industry. We show how fans align data-driven practices with different stakeholders’ interests, serving as desirable market segments, promotion workers, and good citizens. Highlighting how fans map and perceive multiple stakeholders’ engagement with audience data, this concept offers a productive framework applicable to analyze fans’ data-driven practices in other contexts.