Want to understand how and why the BBC is failing to reach younger audiences? Look no further than RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. Launched with much fanfare on October 3, the UK version of the hit US show has been confusingly dumped on BBC iPlayer in an attempt to get more young people to visit the platform.
But it’s actually on BBC Three, a TV channel that the BBC closed three years ago that’s now condemned to eke out an existence as a “rail” on BBC iPlayer. You can almost hear the collective, youthful shrug. Head to BBC iPlayer at 20:00 on a Thursday and you’ll be confronted by a large, unavoidable plea to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.
First up: watch it. It’s great. But as a cunning ploy to attract younger viewers, the BBC is dramatically out of step. And as a new Ofcom report into the BBC makes clear: it needs to act fast or it risks creating a “lost generation” of viewers who don’t want to pay the license fee. This isn’t just about the BBC struggling to reach young people, this is about the BBC one day in the distant future not making enough money to keep the lights on.
With regards to Drag Race, the broadcaster’s somewhat clumsy thought process makes sense to a degree: young people don’t watch linear TV. Ergo RuPaul’s Drag Race UK shouldn’t be on linear TV. So far so good. But, through some strange BBC machination, it’s still “broadcast” on BBC Three (a TV channel that doesn’t exist) on BBC iPlayer (a streaming platform that young people don’t use very much). It’s this ham-fisted approach to engaging with “the youth” that makes the BBC look like exactly what it is: a public service broadcaster being dramatically out-flanked by rivals unencumbered by nearly a century of bureaucracy and tradition.
And it shows. Since it shut down BBC Three in 2016, the channel’s reach among younger people has halved. In the UK, Netflix reaches two-thirds of 15 to 24 year olds each week, while YouTube reaches 42 per cent. BBC iPlayer, by comparison, reaches just 26 per cent, down from 28 per cent in 2017. What’s more, people aged between 16 and 34 years old are more likely to watch BBC shows on Amazon Prime and Netflix than they are on BBC iPlayer itself. According to Ofcom that age group spends on average 4.7 minutes per day watching BBC content on subscription services versus 2.5 minutes per day watching it on iPlayer. So what gives?
With the exception of BBC Three content, almost everything on BBC iPlayer has been commissioned with linear television front of mind. And that means it’s being commissioned for an older audience. The BBC’s streaming service is packed with big-budget crime thrillers and period dramas that draw in huge primetime audiences on BBC One (think Bodyguard or Line of Duty) but simply aren’t laser-targeted at younger viewers. Netflix, by contrast, isn’t constrained by having to spend huge sums of money on shows that need to appeal to older viewers. As a result, it can splash the cash on the likes of Stranger Things and El Camino.
The BBC is very much hamstrung by trying to be two things at once: a successful broadcaster of linear television and a competitor to Netflix and YouTube. Its rivals, on the other hand, are spending obscene quantities of money gobbling up an audience the BBC doesn’t really know how to reach. The fact that the BBC’s content is more popular when it’s on Netflix also speaks volumes. This is as much a technical problem as it is a content problem. Discovery on BBC iPlayer, the idea that you open it up and immediately find loads of great shows to watch, is well below par. Netflix, on the other hand, is an endless stream of shows with auto-play trailers and eye-catching graphics.
Here the BBC can and will up its game. It’s currently undertaking a complete redesign of BBC iPlayer, similar to its somewhat painful switch from BBC iPlayer Radio to BBC Sounds. Alongside this, the broadcaster is also renegotiating licensing deals for shows it commissions to make them available on iPlayer for longer.
But all of this barely scratches at the surface. As Ofcom’s report makes clear: the BBC needs to work harder to reach young people by making content that appeals to them, while also making it easier for people to find that content. Right now, it’s failing to meet both these challenges. The BBC can and likely will make it easier to find programming. What it’s likely to continue to struggle with is making that content appeal to a younger audience.
Which brings us back to RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. Such is the level of confusion at the BBC about how to appeal to “the youth” that it continues to dump all shows aimed at younger viewers in its bemusing BBC Three-branded bucket. Head to Netflix or YouTube and you’re not confronted with a jazzy “youth” button, but that is, in essence, what BBC Three is. It’s a youth club hidden at the back of a church hall. The thought process is dazzling: “I am youth, therefore I will go and watch content in an arbitrarily fenced-off youth-friendly content “rail” that’s named after a TV channel that was shuttered while I was still in primary school”. Or you could just go to Netflix and find something good to watch without jumping through the BBC’s mangled bureaucracy hoops.
But it’ll take a lot more than a much-needed iPlayer redesign to fix the BBC’s youth problem. Since it went online-only, BBC Three has become a confusing sludge of reality TV, edgy documentaries and cheap-to-produce comedy. Netflix, on the other hand, spends huge sums of money on cultural behemoths aimed squarely at a younger audience (take a bow Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Glow, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and others). The kicker? A lot of these shows are so good that, whisper it, ‘old people’ want to watch them too. And that, right there, is the BBC’s quandary: invest in shows that work both as primetime winners on BBC One that also draw in younger viewers on iPlayer.
It’s not an easy problem to solve, but if the BBC is to continue to fund itself from the license fee, it’s one it simply must solve.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
