BBC announces all time record global audience

The BBC's global reach increased by 11% year on year in 2020 to 468.2m people a week - the highest number ever.

BBC News accounts for 438.4m of the total with an annual increase of 13%. Digital platforms are key to the success, with an increase of 53% in BBC News users. A total of 151m users now access BBC News digitally according the annual Global Audience Measure which measures how many individuals the BBC reached weekly with its news and entertainment content in the year 2019/20.

Tony Hall, BBC Director-General, says: "We are without question one of Britain's strongest and best-known brands, synonymous with quality and accuracy worldwide. Our international news services rank first for trust and reliability and the World Service remains a beacon of democratic values. Independent research shows that there is an exceptionally high correlation between places where people are aware of the BBC and places where people think positively about the UK. More than that, the BBC helps UK trade. This has perhaps never been more important. The UK will forge a new relationship with the world in the decade ahead, built on an ambitious vision of 'Global Britain'. Success will mean drawing on all our considerable international assets, and that means unleashing the full global potential of the BBC."

In late March 2020, as the Covid-19 virus spread and trusted sources of information were in demand, BBC News recorded the highest reach of any international media organisation in the world with 310m people accessing coverage across 42 languages.

BBC global content is increasingly popular on global platforms like Youtube with a 129% increase in audiences to 47m a week - overtaking Facebook with a 31% increase to 43m. Twitter reach has doubled to 6m and Instagram also reaches 6m weekly.

Other highlights of the 2020 Global Audience Measure:

- BBC World News channel made significant gains to reach 112m - with growth in the Americas at 50%.  

- BBC World Service languages up 13% to 292.1m with a big uptick in digital engagement among audiences aged 15-24 who now make up a third of the total. BBC News Hindi is now the second most popular service with 25m - behind Arabic with 42m (+67%). BBC Chinese saw an increase of 141%, Russian is up 32% and BBC Mundo 40%. Other big percentage increases include Serbian (+327%), Yoruba (+166%) and Afaan Oromoo (+143%).

- BBC Studios increased reach by 5.8m to 49.1m up 13%.

- BBC World Service English audiences up by 8% to 97m. The Global News Podcast remains the BBC's most popular with audiences approaching 1m a week. Italy contributed 1.4m new listeners on DAB radio.

- BBC Media Action - the BBC's international charity that helps to strengthen governance, improve people's health and humanitarian response - saw an increase in audience of 4m to 18m.

New content funded by the UK government's World 2020 initiative attracted new audiences, with Sport Africa - including extensive Premier League coverage; Africa Eye with groundbreaking investigative journalism; and What's New for young African audiences performing particularly well.  

The top 10 countries by BBC News audience are:

India - 60,400,000

United States - 49,500,000

Nigeria - 37,200,000

Kenya - 14,600,000

Tanzania -14,000,000

Bangladesh - 11,900,000

Afghanistan - 11,400,000

Iran - 11,300,000

Canada - 9,700,000

Pakistan - 9,700,000

The Global Audience Measure is an annual update of how many people are consuming the BBC weekly for all services in all countries across all platforms (television, radio, website and social media). Key to this is de-duplication i.e. ensuring that a person who consumes multiple BBC services or platforms or on multiple devices is not counted many times in the top level totals, which means those totals are often not the sums of their constituent parts.

(Press Release)

BBC’s combined global audience revealed at 308 million

New figures unveiled today show the BBC has a weekly global audience of 308 million people. This represents the combined measured reach of international BBC content – both news and entertainment – for the year 2014/15 and is the first time this figure has ever been measured in this way.

 

In 2013 Tony Hall, Director General of the BBC, set a target of 500m for the BBC's global reach for 2022.

 

The figures – the BBC Global Audience Measure (GAM) – reveal that the BBC's weekly global news audience, which is measured each year, has increased by 18m people, or 7 per cent since last year, to a record-breaking 283 million. This means that one in every 16 adults around the world uses BBC News.

 

For the first time, television (148m) overtook radio (133m) as the most popular platform for BBC international news, and it is also the first time since the BBC tracked audiences for all three platforms – radio, TV and online (55m) – in English and 28 other languages – that they've all grown in the same year.

 

The BBC World Service's audience has increased by 10 per cent in its first year of licence fee funding and now stands at 210m, with the biggest boost coming from new World Service TV news bulletins in languages other than English.

 

The biggest growth for a single service comes for BBC World Service English, which has its highest-ever weekly reach with an audience of 52m, an increase of more than 25 per cent. The countries where the audience increases for World Service English have been highest are Nigeria, USA, Pakistan and Tanzania.

 

BBC Global News Ltd's audience has grown to 105 million with BBC World News TV's up by 12 per cent, and bbc.com/news growing by 16 per cent.

 

Fran Unsworth, Director of the BBC World Service Group, says: "These amazing figures demonstrate the importance and impact of the BBC around the world.

 

"In times of crisis and in countries lacking media freedom, people around the world turn to the BBC for trusted and accurate information. Thanks to our digital innovation we now have more ways than ever before of reaching our audience – from the WhatsApp Service we set up during the West Africa Ebola outbreak to our pop-up Thai news stream on Facebook following the military coup."

 

Tim Davie, Director, Global and CEO, BBC Worldwide, says: "Today's audience numbers show the global reach of the BBC to be strong and growing. The consumption of branded BBC services across TV, radio and digital platforms speaks to the international appetite for premium content across all the genres for which we are best known – primarily news, but increasingly for drama, factual and entertainment.

 

"Having a robust but prudent measurement system in place also helps increase our understanding of our audiences, enabling us to serve them to the very best of our ability in the future."

 

Other points of interest are:

 

The World Service Group is going from strength to strength in both developed and developing markets, with the single biggest audience for any country in the USA (30m), and with more than a third of the total audience on the African continent (100m), the biggest BBC audience ever seen on any continent.

Digital innovations from the World Service Group over the past year have included a new Africa livepage on the BBC website; the Thai 'pop up' news stream on Facebook; the emergency Ebola service on WhatsApp in West Africa; chat app news services on Line, Mxit, WeChat and WhatsApp; and the move of all 27 language service websites plus News to fully responsive design, which means they can easily be read on mobile phones of all sizes and standards.

 

The Global Audience Measure (GAM) measures the combined reach of the BBC's international news services – BBC World Service, BBC World News, bbc.com/news and BBC Media Action. It also includes the majority of BBC Worldwide's BBC-branded direct to consumer services, where measurable and obtainable. It excludes audience for BBC programmes made or sold by BBC Worldwide to third party broadcasters and other platforms.

 

The BBC's global news figures were previously measured by the Global Audience Estimate (GAE). This year, these news figures have been combined with BBC Worldwide measured audience figures for the first time.

 

The GAM shows combined figures, meaning if someone watches both BBC Worldwide content and BBC News, they are only counted once in the total figure. This year's figures have also been adjusted downwards to avoid double counting people who use multiple devices, eg both a tablet and a smartphone.

 

Today's figures include Facebook and YouTube reach for the first time (measuring engaged reach on Facebook which means counting people who interact with our news content.

 

World Service TV news content is now available in 12 languages.

 

(BBC Press Release)