Gamespot's & IGN's Audience

Why is Audience important?

Knowing your audience is important to know how to develop your website. It provides the owner to get their message out more effecivley if they know their intended audience. The entire design of a website can be determined simply by knowing what your aduience is looking for and what they like.

What are the users of these sites, or the targeted audience?

Both the websites are geared for gamers. They both display different aspects of the gaming industry and allow the users to find more information about specific games. The targeted audience are gamers that use any game console. Even the advertisements that are located on their websites, are for games. Below, one can see the advertisements that are geared towards their audiences. It shows ads of games that users may be interested in. For example if the user is perusing through the ps3 section then it will gear it towards ps3 games. An example can be seen below for both websites.

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What do users want to accomplish from visiting the website?

The user that use both websites both have a common purpose and that is to find out more about upcoming games, gaming news, or games that are out. There is a lot of content for users from screenshots, trailers, wallpapers, reviews, previews and uch more. It is generally open to the public along with most of their content but both offer a subscription service. The subscription service is offered for the dedicated users that want more content available to them, content that is exclusively for them. Both are almost mirror images of each other in terms of the content they offer. They each offer the same service and the same subscription plan. There are not many differences in their audience or their services. Both compete over the same audience.

What skills do users need?

The website does not require much from the users, most of the navigation is through the navigation bar on the left or the top of the page. There are also the main headlines which is a flash module, which the user simply just needs to click on to navigate to the most recent articles. There are things such as downloading content and browsing through a gallery of images. These skills are not very technical but simply clicking on a link to proceed to another image or to download a trailer.