Despite the fact that the question of the audience and its responses to media images of human suffering and humanitarian campaigns has been the most persistent concern within humanitarian communication, audience research within the field has been mostly scarce. This chapter provides a review of the relevant empirical studies. It argues that, despite their limited number, these studies have provided rich insights into audience engagement with humanitarian news and campaigns that move beyond normative assumptions and pessimistic narratives about audience apathy and compassion fatigue. They also illustrate the tension between easily achieved fleeting audience engagement and harder-to-sustain public reflective commitment, which has long preoccupied humanitarian communication. These complexities, the chapter argues, are better understood, if we move beyond normative categories and think about audiences as embedded in their specific sociocultural contexts. Such a move would further entail taking into account evolving media technologies and their affordances, as well as a rethinking of the audience as the privileged Western spectator. Most of all, it would require, further, multi-disciplinary and multi-method research into the audiences of humanitarian communication.