“Counting” Informal Media Industries

This article encourages a critical look at the obsession with counting in media industries research, an impulse shared by academics and media-industry capitalists. Rather than being neutrally inquisitive, this impulse hopes to translate the world into a language that is palatable to the external glance, to investment, and to corporatization. How can we explain an industry's importance without relying on fuzzy numbers and manipulated statistics created for the purpose of such explanation? How can we temper our reliance on adulterated quantitative measurement to support qualitative media industries research? I offer specific methodological suggestions for media industries researchers, including valuing specific qualitative assessments of industrial importance, an interrogation of all cited numbers. These are aimed at those researching media industries, encompassing a great deal of informality. However, as most global media industries incorporate a degree of informality in their production and distribution, these suggestions can be of use across industrial contexts.