In November 2007 international readers of the BBC News website began seeing more advertising on it, and the comment thread on the BBC Editors blog became the record of how they took it.
The complaints collected here were about execution rather than principle. “I don’t mind ads on websites but hopefully your web designers can learn to place them in a way which is not so intrusive”, one reader wrote. Another doubted the BBC “would add any other feature to your carefully designed site the careless way that you seem to have chucked the ads in”. A third was blunter: “The ads completely dominate the page and totally distract from the content. They look simply ‘stuck on’ - as if a graphic designer wasn’t involved in the process.” A fourth accepted the commercial logic and objected to the craft: a necessary business decision still deserved the design people working on a better execution of it.
The reading offered here was sympathetic to the newsroom rather than the commercial department: plenty of people inside the BBC would have shared the readers’ view, and would have preferred to redesign the pages around the advertising instead of fitting it into a layout built without it.