How to Use captive audience in a Sentence

captive audience

noun
  • Like United, Waymo has a captive audience.
    — Rakesh Agrawal, PC Magazine, 28 June 2026
  • The passengers are quite literally a captive audience.
    — Brendan Menapace, SPIN, 4 May 2026
  • In contrast to Cricket, who skates along with no end plan, Olympia is a committed careerist, an artist who insists on a captive audience to justify her work.
    — Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times, 8 June 2026
  • Regardless of how well these patches work, there’s a captive audience of people struggling to maintain focus, and searching for accessible solutions.
    — Helena Kudiabor, SELF, 13 Mar. 2026
  • Another instructor took advantage of the captive audience to share his political beliefs, with great volume and conviction, to the mostly preteen students.
    — The Editors, Outdoor Life, 30 Oct. 2025
  • The 37 second video, intended to be shown to a captive audience of travelers waiting in line for security screening, injects politics into air travel in a way never seen before.
    — Alexandra Skores, CNN Money, 15 Oct. 2025
  • The exemplar of how controversy can turn sports agnostics into a captive audience is the ladies’ singles figure skating finals at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics.
    — Anthony Crupi, Sportico.com, 20 Feb. 2026
  • Immediately after Tengbjerg had urged us to respect everyone’s time, a European man told the captive audience about a revolutionary fat-burning treatment, Vacuslim 48, which involved what looked like shrink-wrap.
    — Sarah Larson, New Yorker, 8 Sep. 2025
  • Wild Tunes connects shelters like Anti-Cruelty with volunteer musicians of all backgrounds and levels of experience, including 10-year-old Ben Govertsen, who plays the cello for a captive audience of cats.
    — Noel Brennan, CBS News, 25 Nov. 2025
  • For the month of February, Heattech also has a big presence at Milan’s Central Station, another big travel hub that connects skiers to the French, Swiss and Italian Alps — a captive audience if there ever was one.
    — Samantha Conti, Footwear News, 11 Feb. 2026
  • Airport sponsorships could be appealing to marketers because airports hold a captive audience of relatively high-income consumers, said Joseph Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University.
    — Talia Soglin, Chicago Tribune, 14 Jan. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'captive audience.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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