Friday 19 October 2007

Ads on BBC website and fair trading

BBC Trust has given go-ahead to the launch of BBC.com, which means that international users of BBC website will see adverts on selected pages in the near future. The rationale behind this move is that adverts is the obvious way to ask international users, who don't pay license fee, to contribute to the cost of running the website.

Yeah, it could be unfair that international users enjoy BBC content without contrbuting one penny. But I think the rationale behind putting adverts on the BBC website is not really solid, and to some extent, could incur the issue of fair trading.

Basically, BBC is not a commercial organisation. Domestically, it "educates, entertains and informs" the British, but internationally, it promotes the values of UK around the world. One of its public service remits is to "bring the UK to the world". So the BBC international website is not just serving free lunch to international users. It is in the interest of UK, and therefore in the interest of the license fee payers at large. This is more important to those debates on whether it is fair for international users to access the BBC content without paying license fee.

On the other hand, putting adverts on the BBC website would damage the clean image of the BBC, which has been acclaimed as the flagship of public service broadcasting. When studying journalism at school, my British lecturer Morgan appeared very proud when talking about BBC, saying that it has no adverts at all, while expressing his contempt when talking about the comemrcial network CNN. Now, the adverts could increase the revenue for BBC, but the reputation has been hurt. Doing cost-benefit analysis, is BBC really money-wise?

My third point is that the adverts on BBC could lead to another issue: fair trading. Especiall in Europe, other commercial websites, also hungry for online advertisments, will complain that the BBC website will use public money to compete with them. This is in conflict with fair trading, a principle widely adopted in Europe. I remembered Royal Mail had been accused of recieved public funding to compete with other market players. This issue could be brought to the fore in the future.

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