Why a paid BBC website can hit whiners
All louder there are calls for the BBC to make access to its sites paid. And all of them, as a rule, are distributed by commercial companies, competitors of the BBC, which have a hard time during the current crisis. James Murdoch’s caustic speech in Edinburgh (with exaggeration, and sometimes simply inaccurate) is one example. Now, Don Five, the CEO of Five TV channel (Dawn Airey), is thinking out loud whether the old BBC shouldn’t be started to charge for everything except a couple of free TV channels. However, the belief that the introduction of payment somehow equalizes all players in the market and will save the situation is wrong.
For a start, she ignores the fact that the BBC is already charging for access to its sites. This fee is included in the price of the annual television license, which is equal to £ 142.50 ($ 233). (Every owner of a television receiver in Britain is obliged to buy a license to use it every year. This money goes to the state budget, and from there it is sent to maintain the BBC and related purposes. - comment of translator). And commercial competitors, meanwhile, distribute their content for free, receiving revenue from advertising. So their calls sound somewhat populistically.
No, we are talking now about explicit coercion to pay, that is, about a separate fee for accessing the BBC Online or BBC News sites. But even if you argue contrary to how competitors seem to argue, even if you make access paid for the period of economic decline, the subsequent cancellation of the fee is unlikely to eliminate the above-mentioned sites from the market.
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On the contrary, they will, at a minimum, come under the auspices of BBC Worldwide (a subsidiary of BBC, which is allowed to make money. - Approx. Translator) . And the next day, the owners of competing sites will wake up with the realization that the most popular news site in Britain can now also be earned.
This is unlikely to result in the introduction of paid access. BBC Worldwide does not even charge for accessing most of its content abroad. So why will it introduce this model for the sake of it, if the competitors themselves, who demand it, cannot really do it? More likely, it will be much more cunning if it starts to show advertisements to domestic visitors on the BBC.co.uk website, as it does now for foreign visitors.
Then all current critics will demand to remove advertising from the site, to make it free, in order to reclaim advertising budgets. So what do they really want?
For a start, she ignores the fact that the BBC is already charging for access to its sites. This fee is included in the price of the annual television license, which is equal to £ 142.50 ($ 233). (Every owner of a television receiver in Britain is obliged to buy a license to use it every year. This money goes to the state budget, and from there it is sent to maintain the BBC and related purposes. - comment of translator). And commercial competitors, meanwhile, distribute their content for free, receiving revenue from advertising. So their calls sound somewhat populistically.
No, we are talking now about explicit coercion to pay, that is, about a separate fee for accessing the BBC Online or BBC News sites. But even if you argue contrary to how competitors seem to argue, even if you make access paid for the period of economic decline, the subsequent cancellation of the fee is unlikely to eliminate the above-mentioned sites from the market.
')
On the contrary, they will, at a minimum, come under the auspices of BBC Worldwide (a subsidiary of BBC, which is allowed to make money. - Approx. Translator) . And the next day, the owners of competing sites will wake up with the realization that the most popular news site in Britain can now also be earned.
This is unlikely to result in the introduction of paid access. BBC Worldwide does not even charge for accessing most of its content abroad. So why will it introduce this model for the sake of it, if the competitors themselves, who demand it, cannot really do it? More likely, it will be much more cunning if it starts to show advertisements to domestic visitors on the BBC.co.uk website, as it does now for foreign visitors.
Then all current critics will demand to remove advertising from the site, to make it free, in order to reclaim advertising budgets. So what do they really want?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/287612/
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