BBC scrapping use of BBC.co.uk in favour of BBC.com

cloud · Jul 20, 2019

This may be useful/interesting to someone.

I just stumbled upon this FAQs question on http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/online/website-change

Interesting that the BBC appear to be scrapping the use of BBC.co.uk in favour of .COM.

A British "institution" will no longer bother to use the .UK. At one point they were being criticised for acquiring BBC.com for what was perceived then as an exorbitant amount and they didn't use it all for years.

I wonder whether this is a bad thing for .UK or not...?

cav · Jul 20, 2019

It is a shame; it helps to promote awareness of the UK brand but .co.uk and org.uk are well established in the minds of the public, so the impact will be minimal.

PhilGreg · Jul 20, 2019

Jiblob said:
This may be useful/interesting to someone.

deleted

cloud · Jul 20, 2019

cav said:
It is a shame; it helps to promote awareness of the UK brand but .co.uk and org.uk are well established in the minds of the public, so the impact will be minimal.

Let's hope so. You don't want to be left in a situation where only SMEs use .UK. In that situation .UK may have had it's authority irreparably chipped away.

diablo · Jul 20, 2019

If the likes of ebay or amazon abandoned the .co.uk then I would be concerned, but I don't see this move by the BBC impacting the UK domain name space at all.

The licence fee model is dead as far as the BBC is concerned and it needs to be more outward looking if it is to survive going forward (hence Britbox for example) so moving to the .com makes sense both commercially and technically (no neeed to maintain two sites). It will still redirect the .co.uk to the .com so it's not a total abandonment.

jmcc · Jul 29, 2019

The BBC has a lot of old content that could easily be marketed globally. It may be that some of the plans are for a kind of monetised global streaming service. As a brand, bbc.co.uk is good. But the .com version allows it to go global. At least it isn't moving to a new gTLD.

Regards...jmcc