This site is about putting adverts on the BBC. Also subscriptions, also scrapping the licence fee. In a minute you can set the funding up whichever way you think it should work, and watch what it does.
First, four things.
Nobody is paying for this. I don't work for the BBC, and I'm not being paid by anyone who wants it gone.Every pound of that £5.3bn is already being spent somewhere. Mostly on ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky.
Licence fee: Television Licence Fee Trust Statement 2024/25, net revenue £3,843m · Advertising: Advertising Association / WARC, total TV 2024. £5.3bn is the widest definition, counting ad-funded streaming and FAST channels as well as broadcasters. The broadcaster-only figure is nearer £4.4bn; the larger number is used here because it is the harder one for this argument.
ITV told Parliament that letting the BBC sell advertising would pull money out of commercial television at scale.
ITV would do well out of a weaker BBC. They argued against it anyway.
ITV plc, written evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Their words: the BBC would "draw advertising revenue at scale away from commercial players", and public service broadcasting in aggregate would be diminished.
In 2003, commercial broadcasters stopped having to make children's television. So they stopped.
Nobody is predicting anything here. It already happened, it happened in Britain, and the numbers are Ofcom's.
Ofcom, written evidence to Parliament · commercial PSB commissioned children's hours, 2004 and 2016 · CITV's linear channel closed in 2023
Name the advertiser who wants that audience.
Forty-one languages. Three hundred million listeners a week. The licence fee covers £221m of the cost, the Foreign Office covers £137m.
House of Commons Library, CDP-2025-0132 · National Audit Office, The BBC World Service's savings programme
Set it up however you think it should work. Adverts, subscription, a household levy, or any mix of the three. The target is what the licence fee raised last year: £3,843m.
Nothing funded yet. Move a slider.
Advertisers pay to reach an audience. Subscribers pay for something they want. So a funding gap doesn't spread itself evenly across the BBC. It lands first on whatever nobody would pay to advertise against and nobody would subscribe for.
You already know what that looks like, because two of the four things above are examples of it. Nobody buys advertising against a Persian-language news service for listeners in Iran. And when commercial broadcasters were released from having to make children's television, their output fell by 85% inside twelve years.
That is the argument. Not that the BBC is worth the money, but that the way it is paid for is the reason it makes the things that no commercial case would ever justify.
This argues about money, because money is the argument being had. It doesn't make the case for what the BBC is actually for. Stephen Fry did that in 2008, at length and better than I could.
The BBC and the Future of BroadcastingTwo things worth knowing before you read it. The BBC asked him to write it, which he says so himself. And it is eighteen years old, so it predates the streaming era it is now being used to argue about. Read it as the case for the thing, made well, by someone with a stake in it. Not as evidence.
Every figure and assumption is listed here so you can attack it. If you think one is wrong, it probably is worth arguing about, and I would rather you argued with the assumption than with a black box.
Sourced figures.
What the model does not account for.
Yes, you can beat it. Take half of all UK television advertising and persuade 80% of households to volunteer £120 a year and the target is met. Both of those are in the model because excluding them would be rigging it. Whether you believe them is the actual question.