BBC Online - Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, gave a speech in Edinburgh recently. One thing he said:

Everything we know about online world suggests that it's the big brands – the Ebays, the Amazons, the Microsofts – that punch through. And the BBC is one of the big brands. In content terms one of the biggest on-line brands in the world and by far the biggest British one. And that's before we begin to direct the full creative and marketing energy of the organisation in this direction.

This ties in with my previous post on the BBC:

Companies with a strong online presence need to work out where they fit in, on the world scale of online business, and whether they are happy with this position. For example, using :

1. Leading global brand - Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.
2. Second-tier global brand - News Corp, BBC, Bertelsmann.
3. Leading national brand - Naver, Baidu, T-Online, Terra.
4. Second-tier national brand - Thus, WH Smith, Thomas Cook.

This is a broad categorization (more granularity would be needed to fit websites like Alibaba, Yell and CNN for example), but you see the BBC's problem. Online, it is a second-tier global brand, which is unacceptable. The parent company is unrivalled in the breadth of content that it offers, particularly with an international focus. The BBC is a world-class brand with instant recognition in most countries (whether liked or not). Yet its online efforts have not been so successful, even taking into account the much shorter timeframe during which they have operated. BBC Online is one of the few foreign companies to break into the top 100 US websites (others being News Corp, Bertelsmann and HSBC). On the other hand, the BBC is not the UK's top website (which it could be) and it only ranks 71st in the US, and could perform much better in other international markets.

It is also interesting, in the context of the primary importance for the BBC of getting its charter renewed, what is the very first answer that Mark Thompson provides to why the BBC should still get the charter - it's the internet:

But my take on the question is a different one. I accept the premise that if the BBC remains nothing more than a traditional TV and radio broadcaster then we probably won't deserve or get licence fee funding beyond 2016. As I've tried to make as clear as I can over the past year, however, that is very definitely not our plan.

Already our digital services reach millions of licence-payers every day. The July reach for bbc.co.uk was 13.3 million UK adults – that's 54% of the entire UK internet universe. And the percentage is a lot higher in broadband homes and offices.

That is a clear indicator of how fundamental the internet is to the BBC. It is not just another activity. Mark Thompson also points out how the BBC has had its hand forced into the controversial position of straddling between public and commercial roles online:

Even the idea – an article of faith as recently as a year or so ago – that there needs to be a vast cordon sanitaire between the public service zone and pages or areas where commercial transactions can take place flies now, I believe, in the face of the way the public actually use the new media.

Of course the user needs to know where they are. Of course boundaries need to be clear. And of course when the BBC points users, say, towards opportunities to buy, the choice of commercial providers is fair and open. There are, in other words, big challenges in both navigation and labelling.

But the idea that, in the age of the i-pod, the public would not welcome the opportunity to actually buy a download of a piece of music they have heard on a BBC site – and to be able to buy in a simple and clear way without having to go through 29 pages of health warnings – seems to me ridiculous.

Yes, Mark is biased and the BBC will not stop in its search for justifications that let it keep the charter and develop a commercial presence online, but the point is nonetheless valid. Other highlights:

In addition in July, by the way, there were 60 million requests for video footage from bbc.co.uk, up 31% on the previous month. The bombings obviously playing a significant part in the rise. Three of the top five requests were for clips generated from our audiences on video phones.

We recently started an experiment premiering some BBC THREE programmes on broadband. As Jana [Bennett - BBC Director of Television] said yesterday, we hope to have at least one of our main TV channels streaming on broadband within a year.

We have a lot of work to do on search, navigation and branding – not just on our own by the way but working with partners like Google and Autonomy – but using MyBBCPlayer alongside our linear services should make it easier for audiences to find the content they want whenever and wherever they want.

PS Wait a minute, surely it cannot be but there seems to be no RSS feed on the BBC press office website...