Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology
Among all the coverage of the BBC job cuts, there is also news on the issue of advertising on BBCNews.com.
Slipped into the bottom of the MediaGuardian story on the cuts is a small paragraph:
The BBC deputy director general, Mark Byford, also confirmed that the BBC Trust has given approval for advertisements on BBC.com
There was an air of inevitability about this. BBC Worldwide has been trying to push this through for more than a year, and BBC News were tempted by the prospect of additional funds. It means that international readers of the BBC News website will have to get used to ads surrounding the news. Pre-roll ads are already running on BBC News video.
UPDATE: The BBC Editors’ blog has a post explaing the rationale for the advertising. The ads will start appearing on high-traffic pages from next month. The comments make for interesting reading, with many unhappy about seeing the commercialisation of the news on the BBC.
The irony is that many people now use plugins like AdBlock Plus to strip out the ads.
This blog is run by Professor Alfred Hermida, an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator.
No Responses to Go-ahead for ads on BBCNews.com
BBCNews.com mulls subcription model « Reportr.net
October 29th, 2007 at 11:24 am
[...] onlineTags: advertising, subscription Earlier this month, the BBC got the go-ahead to put advertising on the BBCNews.com. This means that readers from outside the UK should start seeing the ads from [...]
BBC upbeat on web revenue « Reportr.net
November 30th, 2007 at 9:39 am
[...] to put ads on the international versions of BBC websites were approved in October and they started appearing in early [...]