Doors closing

There's a bit of head scratching going on in the BBC Online community, after Tone travelled north to talk about their next chapter. They gathered round the atrium in MediaCityUK, for a message that had two themes - closing some doors for good, and making the ones most people use bigger.

The Director General noted that, despite big reach figures, BBC Online has stopped growing them much; so he's asking for a re-set, a re-focus, which, in W1A-speak, seems to mean 'doing less better'.

According to the DG's stats, six key components of the BBC's online offer drive 90% of traffic. They are News, Weather, Sport, the Homepage, the iPlayer and iPlayer Radio, now being reinvented as BBC Sounds. Then Bitesize and Children's get good but smaller figures, as you might expect, with a much younger audience. So those eight 'brands' will stay.

All the other homepages are apparently toast. And only high-performing, innovative content from below them will survive, which will, somehow, nest under the Big Eight.

This seems to be bad news for those running homepages in the Second Division - BBC3, Music, Arts, Tomorrow's World, Taster, Make It Digital, Earth - even Food. 'Local' has already gone; BBC Ideas looks a little lost in all this. Radio stuff that doesn't make it into the BBC Sounds navigation could struggle.

There are also tough new growth targets - to drive weekly reach amongst under 35s up from 55% to 90% by 2022.  Presumably the impact on existing jobs will become clearer in the weeks ahead.