The World’s Greatest Blog

BBC paying for Google ads now?!

I know what you’re going to think “Rob, you’re always hammering the BBC, I actually quite like them! Their coverage of Glastonbury is boss, for a start (sic)!” – so before we get in to this, I will come out and say that I enjoy much of the BBC’s coverage, to the point where I don’t have a problem with paying for the license to enjoy their content on a television. However, because of the unique way the BBC is funded, there are several things that the BBC should not do with the license fee payer’s – and the UK taxpayer’s – money. One of those things, is paying for advertising.

As you can see from the image above, the BBC has paid to advertise it’s online coverage of the Glastonbury Festival 2009 using Google’s Adwords program. For those of you uninitiated in the world of online advertising (let’s face it, that’s 99% of the population!), those ads at the top and right hand side of Google’s search results (and those which feature in partner sites – such as many of our own!) labeled as “Sponsored results” are paid for by advertisers using ‘Google Adwords’.

These advertisers pay for every click, at a minimum cost of 5 cents (USD) per click.

So, it would appear that the BBC is spending the British taxpayer’s money on advertising its services with a foreign company (Google UK is registered outside of the UK, primarily due to our prohibitively expensive company tax, but that is an issue for another time!). This is not my main problem with their doing this, though, it is the fact that they are using our unique funding against us: we are also writing content about Glastonbury 2009. However, if we wish to advertise it, we have to use money which comes out of our profit. More than that, because the BBC are already there, we must out-bid them in order to claim the top spot they currently have.

The BBC should not be advertising in this way, it’s anti-competitive.

How many other BBC events are being advertised in this way? Is this what is making their web presence so ludicrously expensive?

Is Google Adwords a good use of BBC funding?