How audiences discover, form habits, binge, lurk, share, and leave. And where organisations can intervene.
Unit B: How do they behave?
The previous seven lectures built a picture of who the audience is. Now we ask: how does someone become your audience, how do you keep them, and how do you know when they are about to leave?
The audience journey is the shape of behaviour over time. It connects everything we have studied into a single movement.
By the end of today
What you will walk out knowing
01
Map the audience journey
Trace the full arc from discovery through habit, participation, advocacy, and churn, naming the key behaviours and drop-off risks at each stage.
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02
Explain discovery modes
Distinguish algorithmic discovery, social discovery, search, and word-of-mouth and explain which media sectors rely most on each.
Reveal
03
Apply the participation pyramid
Use the 90-9-1 pattern to explain why lurkers are an audience, not a problem, and what different participation levels contribute.
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04
Connect to retention metrics
Explain what churn, CAC, and LTV mean from an audience perspective, not just a business one, and map them onto real audience behaviours.
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The core concept
The audience journey
An audience journey maps the stages a person moves through in their relationship with a media organisation, platform, or creator, from the moment they first encounter it to the moment they leave.
Not a funnel. Audiences do not move in a tidy straight line downward. They loop, stall, accelerate, and regress. Some never leave the first stage. Some skip several.
Not linear time. Discovery can happen years after a text was made. Habit can form in a week. Advocacy can precede deep engagement if a friend's recommendation is strong enough.
Visible in data. Every stage produces measurable signals: search impressions, first clicks, session length, return visit frequency, share rate, comment rate, subscription, churn.
Shaped by context. A mobile commuter's journey on a news app differs from a binge-watcher's journey on an OTT platform differs from a game player's journey on a live-service title.
A Hoichoi subscriber in Dhaka who discovered a show through a friend's WhatsApp message, watched three episodes that night, and shared a clip to her own group has already passed through three journey stages in 24 hours.
Click each stage
Click each stage
The six-stage audience journey
🔎
Discovery
▶
First engagement
🔄
Habit
💬
Participation
🔗
Advocacy
✕
Churn
Click a stage above
Select any node to see what happens at that point of the journey and what signals organisations can watch for.
Stage 1
Discovery: how audiences find things
01
Algorithmic discovery
The platform recommends without being asked. TikTok's For You, Netflix rows, Spotify's Discover Weekly. The audience does not search; content arrives. 80% of Netflix viewing is algorithmically recommended. Producers must optimise for algorithmic signals, not just quality.
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02
Social discovery
A person in your network shares, recommends, or reacts to something. Word-of-mouth has always existed. WhatsApp forwards drive enormous traffic to Bangladeshi news sites. The recommendation carries the endorsement of a trusted contact.
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03
Search discovery
The audience has a question or a known text in mind. Google, YouTube search, in-platform search. This is intent-driven: the audience is actively looking. SEO and metadata determine whether they find you or someone else.
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04
Serendipitous discovery
Browsing, grazing, channel-surfing in its modern form. The audience is open but undirected. The Nightingale handbook's "hunting and gathering" metaphor: sometimes you hunt, sometimes you stumble.
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Stages 2 and 3
First engagement, habit, and the binge
The first session is everything. Research consistently shows that session length and content completion in the first visit strongly predict whether someone returns. A poor first experience rarely gets a second chance.
Habit requires a cue. Return visits need a trigger: a notification, a scheduled programme, a daily newsletter, a friend asking "have you seen the new episode?" Without external cues, habit formation slows dramatically.
Interest maximisation and binge. Once habit is established, audiences shift between variety-seeking (exploring) and interest maximisation (consuming intensively within a preference). Binge-watching is interest maximisation at its extreme.
The autoplay nudge. OTT platforms reduced episode-level churn by 80% by adding autoplay countdowns. A single design change converted casual viewers into habitual ones. The audience journey is shaped by platform design at every stage.
In Bangladesh: Chorki and Bongo compete for the crucial first-to-third-episode window. A subscriber who watches three episodes of their first drama is far more likely to pay for a second month than one who watched only one.
Click each layer
Click each layer
The participation pyramid
Online communities follow a consistent pattern: roughly 90% lurk, 9% contribute occasionally, 1% create most content. Click each layer.
Creators (1%)
Write articles, make videos, edit wikis, moderate forums, run Discord servers. They produce what everyone else consumes. A community of one million users has roughly 10,000 people doing all the creative work.
Contributors (9%)
Comment, rate, react, share, upvote. They do not produce content but they amplify, curate, and signal quality. Their engagement data is what algorithms use to decide what to surface.
Lurkers (90%)
Consume without visibly participating. Their watch-time, scroll-depth, and session-length data drives platform economics. They are the silent majority that sustains the entire system.
Stage 4
Sharing, advocacy, and the loop back to discovery
Sharing is the ultimate signal. An audience member who shares content to their own network is doing something qualitatively different from a like or a view. They are staking their social reputation on the recommendation.
Organic reach vs. paid reach. Shared content reaches networks that no advertising spend could reliably access. A WhatsApp forward carries the endorsement of a trusted contact. An advertisement carries none of that.
The advocacy paradox. The strongest advocates often have the most critical relationships with content. The fan who notices every flaw and argues every story decision is also the person who has shared the text a hundred times.
Social discovery is the top channel for Bangladeshi news. Multiple studies show that Facebook referrals and WhatsApp forwards are the primary discovery mechanism for Bangladeshi digital news, not direct navigation or search.
The Daily Star and Prothom Alo receive the majority of their digital traffic through Facebook. The audience advocacy loop is the primary growth engine for Bangladeshi digital news.
Stage 5 · the one everyone fears
Churn: when the audience leaves
Why audiences churn. Content no longer matches expectation. Price-to-value perception shifts. A competitor offers a better deal. Life change reduces available time. Accumulated frustrations tip past a threshold.
The LTV relationship. Lifetime value = average revenue per user divided by churn rate. A 2% monthly churn means average subscriber lifetime is 50 months. A 5% churn means 20 months. Cutting churn in half doubles lifetime value without acquiring a single new subscriber.
Passive churn vs active churn. Passive churn: the subscription auto-renews but the subscriber forgets to watch. Active churn: the subscriber consciously cancels, often after a specific triggering event.
Early warning signals. Declining session frequency, declining session length, no sharing, skipping content they used to finish. AI churn prediction identifies these signals before the cancellation.
For Hoichoi: subscribers who stop watching for 14 days and have not shared anything are the highest-risk churn segment. A targeted re-engagement push at day 10 costs far less than a new subscriber acquisition campaign.
What-if slider
What-if slider
Move the variables, watch the journey change
Drag the sliders to see how churn and subscriber count interact to shape audience lifetime value.
Monthly churn rate 5%
Monthly revenue per subscriber (BDT) 149
0LTV (BDT)
0Avg. lifetime (months)
0Lost per 1,000 subs/month
Five sectors, one journey shape
The journey in practice
Every sector has the same six stages. The timing, the key drop-off point, and the advocacy mechanism differ.
01
News
Discovery: Facebook forward or Google search. Habit: a morning newsletter. The biggest drop-off is between discovery and second visit. Most news audiences never form a habit. Advocacy: sharing to WhatsApp.
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02
OTT
Discovery: recommendation engine or friend. First session: single episode. Habit: completion of the first series. Drop-off risk: between series when there is no obvious "next." Advocacy: social media reaction clips.
Reveal
03
Games
Discovery: influencer stream or app store. First session: the tutorial. Habit: daily login reward (engineered). Drop-off risk: first difficulty spike. Advocacy: sharing achievements or clips.
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04
Music
Discovery: TikTok virality, playlist, or friend. First stream: the song. Habit: the artist in the rotation. Drop-off risk: a single disappointing release. Advocacy: sharing the song in stories or messages.
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05
Creators
Discovery: algorithm surfaces a video. Habit: notification bell. Drop-off risk: content format or posting frequency change. Advocacy: comment, super-chat, or referral to another viewer.
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06
Bangladesh specifics
Facebook is the dominant discovery and advocacy channel for most digital content in Bangladesh. A strategy that ignores Facebook ignores most of the audience journey, even for OTT and music.
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Knowledge check
Knowledge check
A Bangladeshi OTT platform has 50,000 subscribers who watch regularly, 5,000 who comment and share, and 500 who create fan videos. This pattern is best described as:
B. The 90-9-1 pattern is not a failure state. Lurkers contribute watch-time and session data. Contributors amplify content through social signals. Creators produce the content the other 99% consume. All three layers are necessary.
Cutting monthly churn from 5% to 2.5% doubles a subscriber's average lifetime with the service, even if no other metric changes.True. Lifetime is approximately 1 divided by churn rate per period. At 5% monthly churn, average lifetime is 20 months. At 2.5%, it is 40 months.
In Bangladesh, most digital news audiences discover news through direct navigation to the news website rather than through social media referrals.False. Research consistently shows that Facebook referrals and WhatsApp forwards are the dominant discovery mechanisms for Bangladeshi digital news.
Your turn · 15–20 min
Activity: Audience Journey Map
Step 1
Choose a service
Pick one Bangladeshi digital service you know: a news site, an OTT platform, a creator channel, or a game. Map how a typical user most likely discovers it, what their first engagement looks like, and when habit typically forms.
Step 2
Find the drop-off
Identify the single biggest drop-off point in this service's audience journey. Explain why this drop-off happens and what signal would make it visible in data.
Step 3
Design an intervention
Propose one concrete change the organisation could make at the drop-off point to reduce it. Name the metric you would watch to know if the intervention worked.
Print the one-page worksheet. This is Brick 08 of your Bangladesh case study.
Today in five lines
Recap
01The audience journey has six stages: discovery, first engagement, habit, participation, advocacy, and churn, each with its own signals and risks.
02Discovery now operates through four channels: algorithmic, social, search, and serendipitous, each requiring a different producer strategy.
03The 90-9-1 participation pyramid is not a failure: all three layers contribute differently, and lurkers are not passive.
04Churn is the most consequential metric in a subscription audience: halving it doubles lifetime value without acquiring a single new subscriber.
05In Bangladesh, Facebook and WhatsApp dominate both discovery and advocacy, making them the critical intervention points for audience development.
Next class: Counting the Audience. We move into Unit C and ask how audiences are measured, who does the measuring, and whose count becomes the truth.
Digital Audience · Lecture 08
Every audience takes a journey.
This week’s reading
Reading list
NoteNo chapter in the course texts covers the audience-journey/funnel framework directly — this lecture is original synthesis.