BBC Online takes advertising on EastEnders site. Shock, horror! According to some politicians, it signals the end of the licence fee, for others it's another betrayal of the civilised society by Roland Rat's dad.
At one level it's all nonsense, of course. The sums involved are tiny, and the BBC, far from being the domineering force that it is in TV and radio, has a strong, but not overwhelming audience on the web. Its weekly reach of UK surfers stands at around 20%, dwarfed by portals such as Yahoo and commercial sites such as Amazon.
On the other hand, there are important forces at work here. For a director-general of the BBC to open the curtains slightly and let us peek into the debates bubbling in the open-plan offices of the third floor of Broadcasting House is a bit like watching the first chip fall from the Berlin Wall. One has to hope it presages an era of openness from the corporation about the way forward for the BBC when analogue is finally switched off.
Although the launch of BBC Online was a bit of a kick, bollock and scramble affair (I should know, the team running it reported to me, and my already grey hair was shot white by the end), it quickly established itself as a presence in the market. It came in top among the European content sites, and the news site was widely admired around the world. Mind you, we were spending more than anyone else in Europe on content, and we had the massive cross-promotion power of our networks. It would have been a disastrous result if we had not taken a strong position.
The strategic backdrop to the launch throws some light on the importance of Greg Dyke's rethink on online advertising. In 96/97, the BBC was deeply worried about the implications of the internet, particularly as it emerged as a platform that could support interactive TV and audio downloads. We had endless arguments, for example, about the transition between watching Gardeners' World on TV, clicking through to the GW interactive public service site and then on to a GW commercial site. Any sane commercial broadcaster would have the ads and the commercial fulfilment one flick of a button away, but many of us argued for a protective cordon sanitaire, that would insulate licence-funded services from commercial ones. It wasn't that we were afraid of grubby little ads: most of the people involved in the debate understood that the licence fee was not enough to fund our aspirations, and we were afraid of jeopardising the £2bn a year we received from the public.
Also, as ever, corporate politics played their part. The public-sector wing launched a jihad on Worldwide's sites, forcing it away from content and into commerce. Not that there was anything wrong with any of this. Peering into the future, beyond the period when scheduled networks would roam the earth, we simply did not see how the BBC could survive as a licence-funded broadcaster if we had given away the birthright on the web. If you could watch streamed or downloaded GW on a website supported by ads, why couldn't you on TV? What's the difference?
As it happens, I think I was wrong to be such an adamant supporter of a total licence-fee solution to online. It wasn't just the wall of irrational VC money pouring in to support MBA wet dreams that made me change my mind in '98: I couldn't in the end believe that online was like broadcasting. The market failure arguments did not hold, there is nothing that the BBC is doing online that someone else can't or won't do; the barriers to entry are not as excruciating as they are in TV and radio. Also, given that 80% of the population did not use the service and possibly never would, there was a basic issue of social justice. Should pensioners be forced to pay for well-heeled webbies? This was a classic example of taking from the poor and giving to the rich and, as such, was deeply problematic.
The solution, it seemed to me then, as it does now, is to move the vast bulk of BBC Online into an accountable commercial business, and to keep a beady eye on the volume and type of cross-promotion to prevent unfair advantage. And therein lies the problem. If you are a specialist car website, how happy are you going to be that at the end of Top Gear the url flashes up and the presenter tells the viewer to speed to a commercially funded TG site? Aren't you going to be thinking, "I want a bit of that?" Or, "Hello Mr OFT, this bully is kicking sand in my face."
The government wrestled with a similar issue once before, with the Sadler committee of inquiry into advertising BBC magazines, and concluded that the BBC should not be allowed moving image advertising to support its mags, and all references should be editorially justified. It's not beyond the wit of either civil servant or BBC mandarin to draw up a similar guidelines. The real issue is not whether the GW site or EastEnders should be allowed to dip their beaks into the tiny but growing online advertising market, but how the BBC should be funded when analogue is switched off.
David Docherty is head of broadband content at Telewest
