BBC World Service audience drops by 14m in past year

The BBC World Service's global audience has dropped by 14 million in the past year, according to the broadcaster.

Overall audience for the year has been estimated at 166 million, down from 180 million last year.

However, it claims online the World Service's audience has risen by 40 per cent in the past 12 months.

In the BBC World Service annual report, published today, the broadcaster blamed the overall fall on the numerous service closures and changes which were implemented following cuts to its funding.

In January, the broadcaster warned that budget cuts at the World Service would ultimately cost the broadcaster more than 30 million listeners, as it announced the planned closure of five of its foreign language services.

The World Service was seeking savings of 16 per cent – around £67 million – over the next four years, following the government's spending review in October last year, which saw the World Service's Grant in Aid from the Foreign Office cut.

Funding is due to be taken over by the licence fee from 1 April 2014.

"The 2010 Spending Review settlement meant that cuts have been made to services, languages and platforms. Where services have closed, wholly or in part, or it is planned that they will do so shortly, their audiences have not been counted in this year's global estimate. This has resulted in a loss of 16.8 million weekly, mainly radio listeners.

"There have, however, been increases in some other countries, meaning that overall the global audience estimate for World Service has decreased by 14.1 million.

"Had audiences affected by service cuts not been removed, the overall audience estimate would have increased this year to around 184 million."

However, online the broadcaster claims to have yielded much stronger results, with figures said to indicate 10 million weekly unique users of World Service websites, up by 3 million in 2009/10.

According to the report, over the past year the reach of BBC World Service mobile sites increased 494 per cent to 453,000 unique users, which was said to be primarily driven by the Arab world.

"Total audio requests on BBC World Service sites increased 44 per cent to 18.5 million, and total video requests increased 56 per cent to 38.8 million, mainly due to high usage of Arabic content," the report added.

In February alone BBC Global News online (BBC World Service and bbc.com) reached 31 million weekly unique users in total, up by 6.6 million on the same period last year.

Significant decreases were felt by Afghanistan services, where overall listening to BBC radio was down 3.6 million and Pakistan services, with Urdu short wave audiences down from 5.1 million to 1.3 million since 2008.

"We've had to make considerable changes to the World Service over the past year due to the cut in our funding from the government and this was always going to result in a drop in our audience figures," Peter Horrocks, director of BBC Global News, said in the release.
 
"The World Service has been looking hard at the best way to provide impartial news and information to our audiences going forward, and it's encouraging to see improvement in key areas. The strong international journalism from the World Service, particularly during the Arab Spring, has been a key part of the significant increases for online, English radio and Arabic television.

"We are also pleased to see that we are doing so well in the UK with audiences accessing World Service through digital radio, freeview and live streaming online.

"We will continue to look for the best fit for the audience – online, radio, tv, mobile – wherever it suits them best."

Last month foreign secretary William Hague pledged an additional £2.2 million a year to the BBC World Service following concerns raised at the impact of the cuts facing the service.

At the same time the BBC Trust announced the reallocation of £9 million worth of existing World Service funding to editorial investment over three years.

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