Purposes of Research

RAJAR stands for Radio Joint Audience Research, BARD stands for Broadcasters' Audience Research Board.

RAJAR works for the BBC and licensed commercial stations and BARB works for BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, BSkyB and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), Both RAJAR and BARB are contracted out by different companies to gather data and that is how they get funded.

Both BARB and RAJAR have paying individuals who have agreed to be part of the program, BARB has approximately 11,500 individuals and RAJAR has approximately 100,000 individuals who are paying to be a part of the program and who provide the data.

Their data is crucial to media producers because thanks to their data the media producers know what people want to watch so that they don't have to bother making something people won't like. RAJAR's and BARB's data is very important to many different companies who work in the media industry and it is not just about tv shows.

What the data provides might be good and it might also be bad, depending on how you look at it, on one hand you've got the majority of the people watching what they want and the producers of whatever it is get payed well and become successful, on the other hand you've got people that aren't the majority and perhaps don't want the same things as everyone else, so they won't get the product they want, but it also makes it hard for indie producers to make a start and it can also be hard for tv shows that somewhat differ from the norm. 

Both BARB and RAJAR are definitely doing quantitate research, they monitor how long someone watches a  show, what show is being watched, what room it is being watched in, all the date then is collected overnight and published as overnight ratings, there is a lot of math and a lot of numbers that are very important to this reasearch and without them all this research wouldn't work.