BBC International Edition to Carry Advertising

Nate Elliott | October 25, 2007, 11:07 AM

Last week the BBC announced they'll accept advertising on their non-UK Web traffic. The Beeb, of course, can't run ads in the UK, where they already collect a licence fee on every household with a TV. But despite collecting I think 3 billion pounds in free money each year, the BBC still claims it's got a 2 billion pound shortfall, and they recently cut 2800 jobs. (This seems to be primarily the result of bad planning and silly, wasteful decisions. 18 million pounds last year to have Jonathan Ross lisp bad film reviews on Friday nights? Surely you're joking.)

Luckily for the BBC, most of their entertainment content is still excellent and their news content is still highly-trusted. Luckier still, the BBC gets plenty of traffic from outside the UK, and can now sell all of that space. I think we're about to find out what price premium advertisers truly place on high-quality content -- because it doesn't get much higher-quality than this.

The best part of the story is the BBC's competitors -- namely The Guardian, in the guise of the British Internet Publishers Alliance (BIPA) -- being upset by this decision. The Guardian also gets a decent chunk of its online traffic from outside the UK, so this move will bring them strong new competition. But BIPA claims it's not upset over the prospect of lost revenues, but rather that this move will undermine the BBC's "worldwide reputation for integrity and impartiality." How sweet of them to look out for the Beeb like that.

Finally, congratulations to DoubleClick for getting the adserving deal on the BBC international sites. I first heard about DoubleClick in 1996 when they made news for successfully introducing advertising to AltaVista, a hugely-respected site (at the time, anyway) that had never run ads before. (I later worked at DoubleClick from 1997 until 2001.) It looks like ten years later, DoubleClick is still keen on putting ads where they've never been before.

[Updated 26 Nov: Ian Betteridge at Technovia has a good analysis on the "why is the BBC facing a shortfall?" part of the discussion. I'm an advertising guy, so I'd say his view of the license fee issue and switchover cost issues is both more detailed and more authoritative than mine -- it's worth a read.]