Billions

The BBC is still recruiting plenty of advertising expertise - with the latest role a "Senior Digital Ad Operations Executive, APAC, responsible for the delivery of direct and programmatic campaigns from APAC markets - including but not limited to manage creative submission, ad specs questions, creative quality control, ad trafficking, ad compliance, provide [sic] screengrabs, troubleshooting, reporting and optimisation."

The come-on for the job repeats a now-seemingly standard claim: "Over half the global online audience watch or view the BBC on a monthly basis, attracting audiences with vastly differing characteristics".   Mmmm.  One website which collates these things claims the world has 4.3bn internet users. The International Telecommunications Union, part of the UN, estimates that at the end of 2018, 51.2 per cent of the global population, or 3.9 billion people, were using the Internet.  Eitherway, it reads as if BBC reaches half of them every month - close to 2 billion. That's a tad up on the BBC's most recent Global Audience Measure, from June 2018, when Auntie claimed 378m weekly.  And way ahead of Lord Hall's 2020 target of 500m.