BBC director general Tony Hall has ruled out ever running online ads in the UK, saying it would harm other digital businesses that rely on ads.

During a special session of the public accounts committee, Labour MP Caroline Flint asked Hall “when it comes to an online formats, isn’t there a stream of advertising revenue in the future?”.

Hall replied by saying advertising in the UK would harm the country’s broader broadcasting and news ecosystem.

“We have a good ecology in this country, ITV and Channel 4 are doing public service broadcasting but funded by ads, and Sky has subscribers. That kind of works and I don’t think it is for us to get into the advertising market,” he said.



Pressed again by Flint, who said online ads had less “qualitative” impact on digital news and information than in TV or radio, he said it would be going back on promises to commercial providers.

“The problem is if we started taking advertising online, we would be doing something we said we won’t do,” he said. “There are others out there whose funding model – we are privileged to be funded by license fee – there are others who are trying to do other jobs in information and all sorts of other ways funded by advertising and I wouldn’t want to harm their market; and they sometimes think we do harm their market.”

Newspapers and other digital publishers have regularly complained that the BBC’s digital services compete for the attention of online audiences, depriving them of advertising revenue when spending on print ads is in decline.

Hall’s commitment comes just a week after the BBC caused an outcry with plans to close its BBC Food website and “mothball” thousands of recipes, before later saying the bulk of the content would be quickly moved to the BBC Good Food website, which is owned by commercial arm BBC Worldwide and runs ads.

Despite ruling out advertsing on BBC services in the UK, Hall said it was right to have them on output outside the UK, such as the World Service