Time for the BBC to start charging for its website
I see that News International is to start charging for web content from the next fiscal year. It will be interesting to see if it works.
I’ve always thought that information from news gathering organisations like New International or the Guardian group ought to be paid for. As newspapers circulations decrease so hits on their website increase. And the information ought to be paid for.
Much of the information on the web is suspect. If I know that information on Wikipedia, for instance, is often wrong, how does it appear to experts in the subject?
The problem of course is the BBC. Regular readers of this blog (and there must be one, surely?) will know that the corporation is often a target. Their sports coverage is often hopelessly inadequate and their habit of foisting upon us former sportsmen and women without worthwhile opinion or presentation skills irritates me.
But I agree with public service broadcasting. I see nothing wrong with the licence fee. I might think that some of their programmes are less than useless and that their executives ought to be rewarded less – if they want to serve the public they should be prepared to take less than the commercial rate: after all they don’t run the risks of people in the private sector – but on the whole it is worth it.
Until it comes to the BBC website. It’s brilliant, of course. But it’s free to anyone with a computer. If you want to watch TV and get the BBC’s output you need to buy a licence. But you don’t need a licence to access the website. So we licence payers are potentially subsidising people without licences. Of course we are doing that by subsidising people who watch TV without a licence. But those people can be caught and charged and fined.
You can go on accessing the BBC’s brilliant website without penalty and that’s the rub. They don’t charge for it because we licence payers are paying for it. In 2008 (according to the Guardian, which I paid for) they spent £110 million on it, £36 million over budget.
No wonder other commercial news gathering organisations have been wary of charging for their expensively gathered content.
I believe the BBC’s website should pay for itself, either through advertising or subscription or be taken off the web. Then those organisations who spend a lot of money on gathering news can charge for their content without being unfairly hamstrung.