BBC News Site Facing Extinction?
Kieren McCarthy,
The Register,
Aug 31, 2003
The BBC website is once again a target as a British politician has once more questioned its value. But whatever its fate, the site is a useful benchmark for the value of online content. Read this summary from Seb Schmoller carefully: "the site gets nearly 700 million page impressions per month, has nearly 10 million UK users, and another 30 million users worldwide, and costs only around £10m/year to run." Now do the math: the cost works out to about 25 pence (about 50 cents Canadian) per user per year, or 0.1 pence (about 0.2 cents) per page view. Numbers like this support my long-held contention that online access should reduce the cost of content by a two-times order of magnitude. People who intend to charge money for content should take a long, hard look at this and adjust their business plans accordingly. Oh, and as for the BBC website: until the commercial media are prepared to offer content at these prices, we need the BBC, if only to show them that it can be done.
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