How do Media professionals "Know" their audience?

The idea of a relationship between the media and the audience is hard to understand. There are many different ways that the media can study and learn how to connect and get the attention of an audience. With each passing year the audience is starting to block out the advertising and the media. There are two ways of identifying production research. One is in terms of constraints, professional ideologies and work practice. The second is an attempt to combine an understanding of the former concerns with in depth analysis of specific media text. The media has many ways of researching what people like and dislike. They have learned how to use the new technology so that it can benefit them, for example they sometimes will have different devices entered into T.V.'s so that they can know what different programs people are watching. They start case study's that may or may not answer what kind of information or pictures people respond to. The internet is the easiest way for the media to study their audience, they can view blogs and have different websites monitor who and when, people visit there. Another way for the media to study the audience is production resaerch. Production research aims to understand more about the media production and the media professional.
The most interesting way that media study's the audience through the internet, is called cookies. Cookies is a program in all internet browsers that keeps track of every website a person enters. The media can study everyone is a certain area just by looking at there computer cookies. Every time a person visits a website cookies makes a thumb print of the site in the browser, and becomes saved in their computer.