However having spent ten years as a BBC journalist, any other decade as a contract content material manufacturer and educational, in addition to the previous 5 years as an Ofcom Content material Board member, my intuition now and then like that is to pause.
Target audience dimension in a fragmented media panorama is advanced. Any individual operating within the business is aware of that figures like the ones contained on this newest record from Barb – the unbiased UK frame that measures and offers target market knowledge for TV and video – have lengthy been handled with warning. They seize one thing significant, however now not the entire image.
It’s vital to be clear about how Barb arrives at its numbers. Viewing is captured thru two major strategies: people-based knowledge from the Barb panel; and device-based census knowledge for on-line TV viewing. Each are well-established approaches, however each are proxies. They depend on same old assumptions about consideration and behavior in an international the place persons are more and more observing throughout a couple of platforms on the similar time.
One tv or “a view” doesn’t essentially imply one viewer. A clip taking part in on a 2d display screen doesn’t imply it’s being actively engaged with. And in an atmosphere of continuous selection, humans don’t at all times consider what they’ve noticed, let on my own the place they’ve noticed it. The sheer quantity of content material way consideration is incessantly fleeting and fragmented. All of this issues after we interpret the hot headlines like this.
Reasonably than framing this tale as YouTube as opposed to the BBC, a extra productive manner could be to take a look at what’s taking place in observe. Audiences are nonetheless observing the BBC content material by means of YouTube. The true activity now’s to grasp which BBC content material is travelling, the way it’s being encountered and what that suggests for public carrier price when context and branding are not assured.
Massive volumes of BBC output flow into broadly on YouTube: drama clips, comedy moments, documentary sequences, tune performances, youngsters’s favourites, archive photos and cultural highlights. Ceaselessly re-edited or fed on in fragments, this content material reaches audiences some distance past the BBC’s personal services and products.
When that occurs, YouTube will get the credit score for succeed in and scale. The BBC’s function as commissioner, curator and public carrier establishment can quietly recede into the background. In that sense, this second is also much less about YouTube overtaking the BBC, and extra about the place BBC content material now lives, and the way it’s skilled, remembered and understood.
This shift hasn’t took place in a single day. Ofcom’s 2025 Media International locations record has been pointing on this course for years. Audiences persistently say they price top of the range UK content material and depended on manufacturers, but they more and more stumble upon that content material by means of platforms slightly than broadcasters. Discovery is pushed through algorithms, now not schedules; viewing is on call for, now not appointment-based. Context turns into non-compulsory.
BBC chatshow host Graham Norton’s absolute best bits are broadly considered on YouTube.
YouTube, against this, is an open ecosystem. It hosts outstanding creativity and storytelling along statement, parody, response content material and subject material that lacks context or responsibility. The platform doesn’t distinguish between public carrier content material and the entirety else: that’s all the way down to audience.
Goal, succeed in and intent
From my time at Ofcom, something has been persistently transparent: audiences don’t lack intelligence or interest. What they incessantly lack is context (and infrequently reminiscence). When content material is encountered in fragments, throughout platforms, combined with numerous different movies, it turns into more difficult to recognise what you’ve watched, the place it got here from, or what values formed it.
Public carrier broadcasting hasn’t ever simply been about succeed in. It’s been about intent. BBC content material is designed to entertain, train, replicate the United Kingdom again to itself and supply shared cultural reference issues. When that content material is fed on in isolation, one clip amongst many, a few of that public carrier price dangers being diluted, even if the content material itself stays robust.
In that context, it’s rarely sudden that this debate coincides with reviews, together with from Reuters, that the BBC is transferring in opposition to a proper content material partnership with YouTube. In some ways, that merely recognizes a truth audiences have already created.
So after I take a look at those newest Barb figures, I don’t see a easy tale of decline or defeat. I see a sign – imperfect, partial, however nonetheless helpful – pointing to a deeper transformation in how public carrier content material circulates in a platform-led international.
The extra vital query isn’t whether or not YouTube has overwhelmed the BBC, it’s whether or not we’re paying shut sufficient consideration to which BBC content material is flourishing on YouTube, how audiences are encountering it, and whether or not its public carrier price stays visual as soon as the acquainted bins fall away.
As a result of in a media setting outlined through abundance, distraction and imperfect dimension, public carrier values don’t disappear. They only want extra assist to be noticed and understood.
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