BBC Online - part two

Following on from the first post about what the BBC has been doing, here are my thoughts on the strategy behind it.

Understanding the scale of the BBC's strategy online is a daunting task. The BBC is not only the owner of a large pile of content, but it is also able to do anything online which its competitors can do, in that sense being an AOL Time Warner done right. This is of course the source of the controversy surrounding the BBC's online activities and how these are, or are not, funded by the licence fee. It is unlikely that the BBC has only one strategy. Yahoo does not (Hollywood content and  user-generated content), Google does not (search and ecommerce), Amazon does not (Amazon and A9) and so on. The Internet changes too quickly for there to be one over-riding strategy that will last unchanged. And the BBC is subject to regulatory pressures which means it needs to have a flexible approach to its plans.

This said, a pattern is emerging. The BBC is beginning to leverage, in some ways clumsily, in other ways brilliantly, the aspects of the internet that make it into a development platform, namely user-generated content, and content APIs.

The BBC's position on the world online stage

The BBC is building a development platform for content. This is a common theme among a few leading Internet companies. eBay uses its listings as a platform, Amazon uses its catalogue, Yahoo its services, Google its services. It comes back to Steve Ballmer's rant about "developers, developers, developers". That is at the core of web 2.0 and it makes any company able to leverage that phenomenon much bigger than it could be on its own. Google Maps, to take one example, has spawned more services than Google could have developed on its own in the same time. What is unusual is that the BBC is not part of the clique that includes the likes of eBay and Google. It is a broadcaster, a type not known for openness online, and as far as I can think of, is the only non-US company with such a strategy (admittedly I do not know much about what Asian companies are offering in the way of web platforms).

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 succesful, 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.

Building web-scale reach

So how can the BBC bridge this gap between a moderately succesful web presence and a world-class offline brand? It cannot do so by advertising or the usual means of improving its website. It is too late for that, it does not address the problems of competing against strong local players in other countries, and it would beg the question of why now, when in ten years the BBC has only got as far as it has. Additionally, the BBC cannot develop a lot of the services that other broadcasters such as Channel 4 have opted for, because of the sensitive area of what is allowed by its license fee status. Instead, the answer is to buy into the concept of leveraged expansion that is web 2.0. There is a lot of hype around web 2.0, there is bound to be, and I don't like the name of the phenomenon (there is probably a better term) but at its core, web 2.0 is a powerful concept.

The BBC is opting to provide widespread access to its content as part of a platform strategy. To grow, the BBC needs radically different ways of attracting users. Previous attempts to bring users to its websites have worked to a point and are unlikely to provide much further growth. In the major markets, internet population growth is slowing and if the BBC has not progressed any further already, it will not do so now. Instead, the BBC is letting users pull their own content. There were over a million downloads of its recent Beethoven podcasts. There are a number of caveats (the novelty of the initiative, the small size of the files compared to video, the big draw that is Beethoven) but that is still a great success.

The BBC hopes that by releasing as much content as it can, it will:

1. Encourage development of services and content sites based on BBC content, that extend the company's reach online. This also helps solve's the BBC's major problem of being scrutinized keenly for any excessive spending (for example, at the controversy over its planned £220 million increase in online spend, compared to what is being spent by News Corp, eBay or various other large players ... fine, the timing of the announcement was poor, but nonetheless ... ).
2. Secure user buy-in, creating a distributed marketing network. Users will promote BBC content, and ways of accessing it, directly (when cool uses of content appear, they will spread virally, much as Google Maps mash-ups spread) and indirectly (for example, BBC News applets on websites will raise brand visibility, a similar effect to that achieved by Amazon with its Associates programme). Such buy-in will help the BBC take on the strong local players in markets that it has so far failed to enter. It will also provide the BBC with greater global coverage and move it closer towards the goal of being a leading global destination online. This also has the advantage of bringing the BBC into a fairy godmother role with users, which will do it no harm when the charter comes up for renewal.

The tools of the strategy: RSS

The BBC, in particular the BBC News website, has been pushing RSS hard for some time now. I was  a little surprised to find that the BBC's most popular feed has 692 Bloglines subscribers against 707 for CNN - I find both these numbers difficult to believe. BBC News promotes RSS on every page, sometimes more than once. BBC News takes the trouble to explain RSS clearly, and uses blogs frequently and effectively, not as a stand-alone technology but as an integral part of its news coverage. BBC Radio is pushing podcasts hard. Even the BBC sites devoted to television content, which have usually lagged behing the News and Radio properties in their sophistication, arecoming on board.

The tools of the strategy: Backstage

The BBC's content development platform is being spearheaded by BBC backstage. These are familiar tactics from Yahoo and Google, from Amazon and eBay, but not so from any old-world company, and certainly not from broadcast content companies. And unlike most portals, the BBC has great content of its own. Most portals are sophisticated copy-and-paste operations.

The BBC is doing some amazing things, but at its core it remains a traditional content company. This does not mean that its thinking is staid or closed (it isn't) but there are issues over partner content, digital rights and the century-old concept of attracting viewers that mean the whole web 2.0 thing is not quite as rosy as it would first seem. The Guardian's Lloyd Shepherd rightly points out:

You can’t redistribute BBC content; only the BBC can do that. And Backstage is an ideal way to encourage distribution of BBC content around the world (a fundamental tenet of the BBC’s public service charter) but click on a link and you’re back on a BBC page to look at the full content. The simple fact is that the BBC is not distributing full-text content by RSS; only headlines and snippets (this is even true of Backstage’s own RSS feeds). As the BBC itself has said, it expects 10 per cent of its website traffic to be coming from RSS by the end of this year. In other words, RSS is justa another effective way of building audience and traffic, and Backstage is a very good way of getting BBC RSS feeds out into wider communities.

Projects using BBC Backstage APIs include sports teams, traffic cameras, slow typed news, news applet, RSS ticker, missing words and mood news.

The tools of the strategy: iMP

Additionally, the BBC's interactive Media Player should not be underestimated as a sign of just how far ahead of other broadcasters the BBC is in its thinking. An iTunes for video content? Most broadcasters would either have a heart attack or be way slower at developing such a system. If the BBC could make of this the success that it made of online radio, it would score a major coup and time spent on BBC properties by users would shoot through the roof. Not forgetting that the BBC has a long track record of syndicating its video content around the world.

This is a basic outline of the BBC's strategy online: I will revisit the subject regularly and elaborate on how the strategy looks from out here. There are also interesting related questions to explore: the BBC's poor track record at creating online community, the differences between the BBC and the Guardian's strategies, the importance to the BBC with so many properties of understanding its users, the role of the BBC in the UK against its role internationally... the BBC's online strategy is certainly a fascinating subject.

Comments

[Mark McLaren]

I came to you through Richard MacManus's Read/WriteWeb blog. Thank you for your excellent post.

My understanding of Web 2.0 is limited but growing. Can you recommend favorite sources where I can learn more about "content APIs" you refer to when you say "aspects of the internet that make it into a development platform, namely user-generated content, and content APIs" above?

Many thanks,

[James MacAonghus]

All I meant was the APIs that feed content into other applications. They are not a uniquely defined set of APIs. Mostly they are what goes into map mashups, such as the many based on Google Maps.