Image via Wikipedia The latest data from Nielsen Online on monthly US visitors to the top news and information sites makes for depressing reading for the BBC. The number of unique visitors to BBCNews.com has fallen by more than a million in a year.  The site had 5,253,000 readers in July 2008, compared to 6,408,000 July last year. The drop comes at a time when the BBC has been ramping

More details have emerged on the reasons behind Toronto Life’s decision to scrap its blogs. Publisher Sharon McAuley said the magazine was rethinking its approach as the blogs had failed to attract enough audience to justify their costs and that advertising revenue was lower than expected. Commercial realities of the softening advertising market led to this reassessment, explained McAuley: I think the whole industry is grappling a little bit with

Bring together a bunch of journalists and the talk will inevitably come round to the state of the industry, how the young don’t buy newspapers, how no one wants to pay for news anymore and the like. This is a familiar litany of complaints but it overlooks a fundamental issue in the business of journalism. News has always been pretty much free to consumers. As Chris Anderson points out in

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 November. During my time at the BBC News website, international readers would often remark that one of the things they liked about the site was the lack of ads. The BBC is going to often an option to avoid the ads. Director

The BBC announced plans to put pre-roll ads on its broadband news video a few months back. For a few weeks, all the ads were for other BBC programmes. But now, the first commercial ads have appeared on the video. A commercial for Delta Airlines is on video about Bush’s comments on the Armenian genocide bill and on video of a school shooting in the US, as well as several