Dot.com boomer

BBC.com has apparently moved into profit "two whole years ahead of target".  An excited Luke Bradley-Jones, Executive Vice-President and Managing Director, is very pleased, in this blog post.

As Chris Patten said yesterday of John Smith (£888k pa)  at BBC Worldwide, how hard can it be to make money out of such a successful brand ?  Nonetheless the news about BBC.com will be welcomed in the beleagured BBC Global Division, where management are expecting, in the end, that there will be some 100 compulsory redundancies in BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring.

What we need to see, and quick, is a little more transparency and detail about how this profit is being used. Luke says "So what does this mean for the BBC and BBC Worldwide? Well it means that as well as paying BBC News a multimillion pound rights payment for us to run the BBC.com business, and jointly funding new product developments such as smartphone apps, we can really move ahead this year to start delivering profits on top of what we already give to the BBC. We’re also directly funding journalists in key international territories such as the US and Asia that contribute online content that is then carried on the BBC’s UK website – so that’s great for the licence fee payer too".

So exactly how much is the rights payment to News ? (Reuters, Sky and others will be interested) And who manages the "directly-funded journalists" ? (World Service staff might like to know) And we still wait for the words and rationale that will enshrine the World Service and Monitoring when they become fully-licence fee funded in 2014......