Scrapping of the BBC food recipe website

What is wrong with the BBC? There are many I love what they do and I love many of the programs they make, but seriously, they need to get their act together. The proposal to scrap the BBC Food Recipe website is quite frankly insane. I'm not a great one for cooking from recipes. I occasionally look at it if there is a specific dish to be done, which I want to do right. However, there is a huge army of people who love it.

I had never given it much thought previously, but I thought I'd look at the last page I viewed on it. This was the page for chocolate cake recipies.

BBC Food website

  In light of its impending closure, I was amazed to see that there is no paid advertising on the site. Of all the parts of the BBC empire to monetize, surely the recipe page is a prime candidate. Supermarkets, cook book publishers and suppliers all would bit your hand off to advertise on the site. The BBC could simply do what I do and put google adwords on the page and restrict the content to food related products.

Alternatively they could do a sponsorship deal with a major company such as Sainsburys/Tescos. I am a firm believer in a advert free BBC. It removes commercial pressures from program schedules. The website is different. You don't have to clicl on an ad if you don't want to. There is loads of "white space" that could feature an ad bar without compromising the offering. It should be quite simple to make the site self sustaining.

The adwords on my blog generates enough money to pay for my internet subscription. It doesn't make a huge difference to my household income, but it means I can take the family for a nice curry on occasion, courtesy of my lovely readers. If this little blog with 1,000 odd hits a day can generate that much, how much would the BBC food site generate for the corporation?

I know many will say it is the thin end of the advertising wedge, but websites are completely different beasts. If we have the choice between click thru ads on the BBC site or no recipes, surely its a no brainer? We all have to move with the times and it seems bonkers to pass up such an obvious revenue stream. It say plenty about the lack of commercial acumen of the corporation that such a proposal has not been mooted.

One strange aspect to this is that I don't really understand why the BBC need to remove the website. If it is because there is huge traffic and they pay high bandwidth charges, this supports the monetisation argument. If it is simply because they don't want the cost of updating it, it would be cheaper simply to stop updating it and leave the 11,000 existing recipes in place. 

If you don't want to see the BBC recipe website scrapped, then sign the petition here

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/130621