BBC fanboy Martin Belam posts an impassioned argument on one of his blogs about why the BBC shouldn’t take ads.

He gives five reasons: some sensible, some spurious. For example, he makes the obvious point that “not everyone who lives outside the UK is a non-Licence Fee payer”, and by inference, that there should be no ads on the site at all just in case I might see an ad when I’m on holiday. It’s a curious argument. If I were out of the UK, I’d find it difficult to be able to get any BBC output without advertising: from the BBC World Service programmes on WBUR Boston with its commercial messages from sponsors, to BBC World television with their long ad breaks, or subscription channels BBC America, BBC Prime, etc; and the amount of UK ex-pats or holidaymakers is, I’d wager, less than 1% of all accesses to the BBC website from abroad.

The other arguments are “people won’t like it”, and “it causes problems with cross-promotion”; but the most important point, and the one I’ve heard time and again around this issue, is the point of editorial impartiality: the worry that the BBC will not be able to be totally impartial while taking commercial money.

This is an argument mostly propagated by people with no understanding of the commercial world: whether those inside the BBC public service, or those in government or education. Any serious journalistic operation - the New York Times, for example - has clear and well-established guidelines to avoid any pressure from advertisers. Indeed, having worked in commercial broadcasting all my life, any newsroom I’ve been near has always bridled at the inference that they would ever kow-tow to any advertiser’s wishes. Anyone making this point is being insulting to the great journalists at the BBC. Can you really see John Humphrys being told what to do by an advertiser? No? Good, me neither.

It’s not really as if the BBC is entirely separate from advertisers anyway. Their last coverage of the Boat Race a few years ago had the presenter in a Gartmore Fund Management jacket, interviewing people in front of a Gartmore Fund Management logo, and credited Gartmore Fund Management in logos and audio credits - all on a publicly-funded channel. This year’s Proms in the Park coverage on the last day of the Proms were sponsored by an outside company, who again got a credit in the spoken introductions, the only lit signage in all the venues for the benefit of the TV cameras, and a mention in the end-of-programme credits. If the BBC will collapse because it’s talking to commercial companies, then it has surely collapsed already.

Perhaps the only sensible point is the one that Martin makes that, in essence, the tax-payer has paid for all this already, and it would be unfair against commercial companies to have to compete against this massive, state-funded, investment. Indeed, it could even be claimed to be against EU policy, where governments cannot bankroll private companies who are in competition with other EU companies.

The real threat from the BBC taking advertising for non-UK visitors to its site is to people like Guardian Unlimited, who’ll see a significant amount of advertisers’ budget being diverted from their sites to the BBC’s.

I’m not against the BBC earning money from non-UK operations; and to me, it makes sense for them to be doing so online. My concern is that competition should be fair. Taking a massive operation funded by the UK Government and its people and slapping ads on it will have significant effects on the commercial sector. Perhaps its spoils should be shared with those commercial companies it damages with its international expansion.

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