Annual Report 2

The BBC Annual Report, published today, is more of a brochure than ever before. I think the BBC is brilliant, but, as a critical friend, here comes a series of posts picking away at some of the gloss.

Whilst the BBC's total global audience for News has nudged up, from 345m to 347m, within that, the advertising-funded BBC World news channel is down, from 99m to 95m. BBC Global News, which includes the channel and bbc.com saw a £1m drop in advertising revenue, but returned £18m as "Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization". That's because they made £15m in 'substantial foreign exchange gains on the year-end valuation of hedged positions'.

In the language services, BBC Chinese's reach is up by nearly a third, whilst Urdu is down by same amount. BBC World Service now gets £1.08 of your licence fee, compared with 90p in the previous year.