Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/03/03/aunty_gets_into_bed/

Aunty gets into bed with Great Stan of Software

BBC ports site content to MSN

By Sean Fleming

Posted in On-Prem, 3rd March 1999 11:34 GMT

MSN and the BBC's Beeb Web site have teamed up in the BBC's first commercial deal involving site content. Thirteen sections from the Beeb site will be ported to MSN initially, including Top Gear, Top of the Pops, Comedy Zone, Holiday, Radio Times, Tomorrow’s World+ and Good Homes. This number will expand to around 20 in the near future Jonathan Turpin, Commercial Director of Beeb @ the BBC, said he was in negotiation with other portals and hoped that within the next three months a number of other similar deals would be announced. "The make up MSN is a key part of this deal," he said. "It allows us to take all aspects of our content over to their site. It's size is also very important too. We hope it will make our content available to a wider audience." MSN UK director Judy Gibbons estimates the portal gets in the region of 30 million page impressions per month. "In January we were getting around 1.45 million unique visitors to our site, which we think is in the region of 20 per cent of the available UK Internet audience," she said Although neither party was willing to discuss the financial terms of the deal, some US content providers are believed to have parted with substantial sums of money in order to be carried on MSN. The BBC claims it is rated No 8 in Web-related advertising sales, and hopes the MSN deal will boost the number of visitors its site gets, which in turn will do no harm to its advertising revenues. Turpin said that in January the Beeb.com site was getting in the region of six million page impressions per month. ®