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The concept of 'audience' is central to research and practice in science communication. When asked by a scientist for help communicating their work, who among us has not responded with the time honoured question 'who is your audience?' Yet what we mean when we talk about audience is not always clear: implied and ambiguous, rather than explicit and precise. This article explores this ambiguity, drawing on a systematic review of 1360 science communication research articles and a survey of 45 science communication educators. We report 10 different conceptualisations, in three groups. Being conceptualisations include 'Demographic', 'Knowledge', 'Values' and 'Embodied'; Doing conceptualisations include 'Interaction' and 'Dynamic'. In Qualifiers , we found 'Diverse', 'Potential', 'Plural' and 'General' conceptualisations. These data allow tracking of how we have conceptualised audience over time, an understanding of the groups systematically under-serviced, and a pathway to a richer discussion of this key concept for our field., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Recent research has identified anti-vaccination propaganda in the so-called Russian Troll Tweets strongly associated with the 2016 US Presidential election. This study builds on this: hypothesising that if vaccination content was found in the sample, the Russia Tweets would be likely to contain other science content, and perhaps, similar pseudo or anti-science messages. As well as vaccination, climate change, genetically modified organisms, Ebola, flat Earth beliefs (flat Earthism) and Zika were found in the Russia tweets. Genetically modified organisms and flat Earthism appear to have been camouflage content - tweeted at similar rates to other Twitter users - while climate change, Ebola, Zika and vaccination appear to have been emphasised beyond the background rate for strategic disinformation purposes.

YouTube has become the second most popular web search engine (see Alexa.com ) and the primary website for individuals and organisations to freely distribute video content. Popularity statistics indicate that Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics-related content is of significant interest to YouTube audiences, yet analysis of the 391 most popular science, engineering and mathematics-themed channels reveals a conspicuous absence of female communicators, with the hosts of just 32 of these channels presenting as female. To help understand potential causes of this gap, analysis was conducted on popularity indicators and audience sentiments of 450 videos from 90 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics-related channels. Female hosted channels were found to accumulate more comments per view, and significantly higher proportions of appearance, hostile, critical/negative and sexist/sexual commentary.

YouTube has become one of the largest websites on the Internet. Among its many genres, both professional and amateur science communicators compete for audience attention. This article provides the first overview of science communication on YouTube and examines content factors that affect the popularity of science communication videos on the site. A content analysis of 390 videos from 39 YouTube channels was conducted. Although professionally generated content is superior in number, user-generated content was significantly more popular. Furthermore, videos that had consistent science communicators were more popular than those without a regular communicator. This study represents an important first step to understand content factors, which increases the channel and video popularity of science communication on YouTube., (© The Author(s) 2015.)