Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

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[EDIT: The comment below is misguided. The BBC nowadays does indeed show ads, as several people pointed out. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I have the ads blocked, and can recommend others install uBlock Origin as well.]

For the record, BBC news site has never had any ads. The content is fully paid for and financed by the British public through TV licensing fees. And they go the extra mile to not even appear promoting any products or companies in their reporting ("other companies doing X exist".)

OTOH, they do have a ton of trackers and other spy technology on their site. My uBlock Origin shows six blocked tracking domains. So even though BBC is not profiting from dislaying ads to visitors, they are still gifting their behaviour data to American tracking companies for free.

I open up bbc.com and I am immediately shown several ads. I have a banner ad for Geico shown across the top of the page.

BBC is made up of several entities and only some of them are publicly funded. Other parts, such as the BBC world news and several of the BBC’s online sites, are indeed for-profit companies that run ads [1]:

> Unlike the BBC's domestic channels, BBC World News is owned and operated by BBC Global News Ltd., part of the BBC's commercial group of companies, and is funded by subscription and advertising revenues, and not by the United Kingdom television licence.

And even the ones that are publicly funded still show ads to visitors from outside the UK [2]:

>We've introduced advertising to visitors outside of the UK because the new revenue created will allow us to further improve our journalism, our programmes and our website in the years ahead.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_World_News

2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/faq/

Thank you, I stand corrected.

I am pretty sure it didn't use to be like this. BBC was one of the few sites that didn't show ads even without ad blocker.

The BBC website absolutely does serve ads outside the UK, it's serving them right now:

https://imgur.com/a/acF8BqB

They show ads to visitors from outside the uk

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