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After questioning whether the concept of “audience” is applicable to the Internet, this article provides a critical analysis of Internet audience studies, which are based on a combination of informatics tools, statistics, and marketing. It analyzes the different methodologies used to measure audiences (user centric and site centric devices), as well as online surveys. These devices are mainly used as strategic tools for advertising and electronic commerce. While Internet audience studies raise ethical issues about the protection of users’ privacy, they merely build empirical models that do not allow us to grasp the social uses of Internet.