The BBC attracts a record weekly global audience of 241 million people to its international news services such as BBC World Service and the BBC World News television channel, according to independent surveys. This is up three million on last year’s overall audience estimate.
However, the multimedia BBC World Service lost 20 million shortwave radio listeners during the year, reflecting the increasing global decline of the medium. But during the year BBC World Service attracted around nine million new viewers to its television, online and mobile services; in addition to new listeners to BBC radio programmes through local FM and mediuwave radio partner stations in a number of countries.
BBC Global News Director, Peter Horrocks, said: “BBC Global News’s record audience demonstrates that people come to us for journalism that is challenging and asks difficult questions, yet respects different points of view and actively encourages debate. The figures also show the success of our multimedia strategy and investments for global audiences. But the continued dramatic decline in shortwave listening shows that those audiences are rapidly changing the way they access international news. Unless BBC World Service can accelerate its response to those changes, it will face a rapid deterioration of its impact as other technologies become more prominent in international media markets.”
BBC World Service
BBC World Service drew an overall weekly multimedia audience of 180 million across television, radio, online and mobiles. This is eight million down on last year. The audience losses were mainly due to a sharp overall decline in short wave radio listening during the year. Radio audience losses were particularly dramatic in Bangladesh (-7 million), India (-8.2m), and Nigeria (-2.9 m). However, there were significant radio audience gains in Tanzania (+1.4m), and the US (+ 600,000), mainly through BBC programmes being used on local FM and mediumwave radio partner stations.
The multimedia BBC Arabic service attracted an audience of 22 million a week, including 12 million watching BBC Arabic television. The BBC Persian multimedia news and information service was hampered by the jamming of its newly launched TV satellite service and the continued blocking of its online service by the Iranian authorities. However, in a hostile environment for research, the independent surveys indicated audiences of 3.4 million, including 3.1 million watching BBC Persian television in Iran. Together the channels contributed a 72% increase in the estimated audience of BBC World Service’s non-English television services.
BBC World Service continued to have strong impact in Afghanistan, where BBC audiences are 10 million; and in Iraq where the BBC reaches 4.5 million people each week. In Burma, the BBC now reaches 8.5 million listeners, up 1.4 million on the last survey.
BBC’s commercial international news services
BBC World News and bbc.com/news – the BBC commercial international television and online news services – attracted a combined global audience of 83 million.
BBC World News has a weekly audience of 71 million. The news, weather and sport sections of the BBC’s international commercial site, bbc.com, increased to more than 17.2 million unique users every week. It also attracted more than 1.1million unique users in February 2010 accessing mobile news, weather and sport content from BBC Global News every week. By April, this had increased to 1.5 million unique users every week. There has been an increase of 120% in page impressions in the last year. Mobile traffic to news pages alone on the bbc.com mobile site increased tenfold.
(Source: BBC World Service Publicity)
on May 24th, 2010 at 19:05
Fascinating. Those figures for shortwave are almost like freefall for the medium because the countries names are traditional strongholds for BBC WS. The figures for Arabic TV must be disappointing - Nigel Chapman was saying back in 2008 they wanted 100 million viewers within 5 years….long way to go. BBC Persian in contrast is doing well despite the jamming.
on May 24th, 2010 at 19:46
“However, the multimedia BBC World Service lost 20 million shortwave radio listeners during the year, reflecting the increasing global decline of the medium.”
I just wonder if they happened to cut back shortwave broadcasting hours during the year, too.
on May 25th, 2010 at 03:30
Looked at the interview again http://vimeo.com/7925219 and realise Chapman said the aim was 25 million viewers within 5 years, a quarter of the potential market, 40 million overall across all media. Still a challenge to double the present TV audience I guess. Timed to coincide with UK government\’s announcement on 55 million quid cut to the foreign office budget?
on May 27th, 2010 at 17:36
The bulk of the shortwave loss came in their Bengali and Hindi services, as the article noted. The A-10 HFCC listing shows 10 daily transmitter-hours for Bengali, 9 for Hindi. Unfortunately prior HFCC listings don’t list languages for the BBCWS — the A-10 version did. However, and to Mark’s point, I don’t believe these specific losses are directly derived from a reduction in transmitter hours. Elsewhere, though, that could indeed be the case as Europe-targeted SW broadcasts were eliminated altogether in the past year.