There is a wealth of detail in the 156-page annual report from the BBC, together with the 56-page report by its supervising body, the BBC Trust. As someone who spent 16 years as a BBC journalist, and as one of the founding members of the BBC News website in 1997, I have a keen interest in how the corporation is doing.

Neither document devotes much space to the BBC News website. This is to be expected from an organisation that sees itself primarily as a broadcaster. After all, according to the report, TV accounts for £7.54 of the £10.96 monthly license fee.

By comparison, the BBC’s more than 240 websites cost only 49 pence per month. In absolute figures, the BBC spent £2,319 million on TV, £563 million on radio and £116 million on bbc.co.uk (excluding the costly BBC Jam project).

When you consider how the BBC’s web audience is growing, this is remarkable value for money. Visitors to the range of bbc.co.uk properties rose significantly over the past 12 months, from 12.9 million to 15.6 million regular monthly users. Page impressions now average more than three billion per month.

Growth of news

As the BBC report acknowledges, News remains one of the most popular areas online, along with sports. The new site accounted for 334.9 million of the 740.8 million weekly page impressions at bbc.co.uk.

It was a good year for the news website, despite some budget cuts. Weekly users by 27% year-on-year, to just over 12 million UK and international visitors. Monthly page impressions passed the 1 billion mark in January and the site won the international Webby award for best News website and the People’s Vote in the same category.

The BBC’s investment in user-generated content is paying off, as the public response to the events of last week in the UK demonstrated.

The Have Your Say section of the news website gets 12,000 e-mails every day. The number jumps on big news days, even if the news is the weather – for example, when snow fell in February, viewers sent in 12,000 photos.

Reaching the public

All these figures are somewhat meaningless unless they are put in context. The average 15-minute weekly reach for news on the flagship TV channel BBC One is 24 million adults, or 51% of the adult population. By comparison, the average weekly unique users of news online is 5.6 million people, or 10% of the UK population.

Tto make sense of these figures, we need to consider how many people can access these services. TV effectively reaches virtually all of the UK. By comparison, there are 27.8 million people online in the UK, out of which 15.6 million visit bbc.co.uk every month. So in a given month, the BBC reaches 56% of those able to access its online services.

Taken as a whole, the figures for bbc.co.uk reveal that the international audience online exceeds that in the UK. There are 14.8 million weekly unique UK visitors, versus 28.3 million international users. No doubt, these figures will help BBC Worldwide make its case for advertising on the international sites of the BBC, despite opposition from many staff and the BBC’s commercial rivals.

The companion report by the BBC Trust recognises the public value of the news website. It says: “The BBC spotted the public service potential of the internet at a very early stage and was instrumental in establishing it in the UK as a medium for high-quality news and information.”

The Trust goes on to add that: “News is by far the most popular part of bbc.co.uk and we note that the BBC’s online news offering continues to develop and innovate in order to serve the public better.”

No BBC Jam tomorrow

One interesting tidbit in the report is the cost of BBC Jam, the BBC’s online interactive learning service for schoolkids, launched in 2006. The short-lived project was suspended in March 2007 after complaints from the commercial sector.

In its two years of life, the BBC spent a total of 79.8 million. This breaks down as £37.7 million in 2007 and £42.1 million in 2006. This compares to a total spend on bbc.co.uk of £116 million in 2007 and £108.8 million in 2006.

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