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AOL & MSN Should Be Very Scared: The BBC Is Coming
Amongst all of the coverage of the BBC’s plans to cut thousands of jobs and sell off Television Centre, one point seems to have slipped through with almost no mention. And that is, as The Telegraph puts it, the decision to:
[Sell] Advertising for the first time on the BBC’s website.
Now I’m assuming that this news has raised barely a murmur from the commentators because it is simply the confirmation of a plan announced last year, which is to sell ads on a version of the BBC site which is shown to visitors from outside the UK. But even so, it’s still pretty momentous, especially when you consider the news from some of the major commercial portals over the last few days.
The BBC site apparently attracts over 40 million foreign visitors every year, which is a significant number (if not on the scale of sites such as Wikipedia, although it does put it at 42 in Alexa’s list of the 500 most popular sites globally). But 40 million visitors is certainly enough to seriously disrupt the advertising models of major commercial portals such as AOL & MSN.
Only this week, AOL announced that it would be getting rid of 2,000 jobs, which is almost as many as the BBC plans to lose. And today The Guardian reported that Microsoft Online Services division had posted a loss of $732 million this year. The Silicon Alley Insider went on to work out that this meant that:
MSN is losing nearly $0.50 for every $1 of advertising it sells.
The reason for the problems at both of these internet giants is simply that their models were built on the idea that people would happily take all of their content from one place; the walled garden that gave AOL the cash to ‘buy’ Time-Warner. It’s also the model that Facebook uses (although its moves to allow search engines to index certain pages suggests a gentle move away from that) and is, as Danny Sullivan recently pointed out, one that people could soon get bored with (ironically, Danny originally wrote that comment via his Facebook profile which meant that you couldn’t read it unless you were registered).
As people spread their loyalties even wider in the increasingly disparate online world, one can only imagine that these problems will become even harder for the big portals to solve. And the BBC’s 40 million visitors, all taking up valuable ad impressions, are unlikely to make that any easier.
And that’s not the only sign of the BBC potentially re-gaining dominance in an increasingly disparate digital world.
The latest Ofcom report (August 2007) published interesting figures around the development of DAB digital radio – cited as one of the two fastest growing digital platforms in the average family home (the other being 3G mobile). Patterns of consumption however, tells a diferent story.
Despite the range and number of platforms ever-growing – 389 stations available at last count, June 2007 – the actual overall audience is decreasing. Listening hours over the last year are down by 0.5% on average across the UK population.
Yet somehow, within this decreasing audience, the BBC have managed to achieve an increase of the market share – by 0.6% in the same time period.
Perhaps this is an indication that, in a world where we are being offered complete control of our own media consumption, and faced with individual choice at every turn, we are actually returning to those traditional sources we know and trust? Only in their new format – tradigital, if you like.
Maybe people can only enjoy spreading their loyalties so far before looking for a sense of authority to guide them through their increasingly disparate digital world.
The BBC is indeed coming.
- 18 October @ 3:39 pmWell-written piece.
Quality always outs in the end and that’s why the BBC websites do well.
There are so many people who consider themselves news commentators and analysts who barely know how to script a sentence of the English language. Their egos may get a boost from writing blog commentaries where they mouth off about the world, but their audience is 0.0000000001% of the professional journalists that the BBC employs.
- 18 October @ 4:08 pm[...] Ciaran Norris over at Altogether Digital highlighted the potential problems for the other portals and news sites. The BBC site apparently attracts over 40 million foreign visitors every year, which is a significant number… certainly enough to seriously disrupt the advertising models of major commercial portals such as AOL & MSN. [...]
- 19 October @ 2:19 pm