Dyke plays down BBC Online ad plans

Dyke, who is in the process of overhauling the Beeb's entire operation to increase efficiency and cut costs, maintains the plans, which were first reported in today's Financial Times, are just one of many money-making schemes under consideration.

In a statement, the former Pearson group chairman and chief executive said: "It [the idea of taking ads on BBC Online] is a notion - and no more at present - that's being bounced around.

"The BBC has been charged with maximising revenues - we've been given tough targets of internal savings and generating commercial revenues of some 1bn over the next seven years, as part of its licence fee settlement. You'd expect the BBC to explore all options to bring more public service programmes to viewers and listeners - some may come to fruition, some may not."

The move, which would be the first time the BBC had taken advertising from third parties on any of its non-commercial operations, is likely to be greeted with severe resistance from competitors, who already claim the Corporation is exploiting its public interest charter to squeeze out web rivals.

Earlier this year, the BBC spun off a separate division Beeb Ventures to run its web-based commercial arms, including e-tail portal Beeb.com, which already takes advertising from third party companies.

However, rival ITN has complained to the Office of Fair Trading that the BBC has exploited its charter of providing new services that are in the public interest to develop web operations in competition with commercial companies.

The Corporation recently halted free trials with mobile phone operators to provide BBC news content, but maintains it will only trial web services to make new technological developments available to licence fee payers.

**www.beeb.com**

**www.bbc.co.uk**

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