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One year into the BBC’s website revamp, traffic is booming
This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →
It’s been just over a year since the BBC relaunched its website and app in March 2024 — and the company has been rewarded for its efforts with a significant traffic boost.
The website update was part of the BBC’s ongoing efforts to become more accessible to a global audience, rather than its home market of the United Kingdom. It appears to have paid off, according to numbers shared by BBC Studios general manager and executive director of editorial content Ben Goldberger, who discussed the website relaunch during a talk at this week’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado.
The BBC’s website traffic in February 2025 increased by nearly 25 percent year-over-year, according to Goldberger, who said that the company has experienced double-digit year-over-year growth for the past seven months. In February, BBC.com saw its highest number of habitual visitors from North America for the past 18 months.
“This was our fourth consecutive month inside Comscore’s top 20 — and in November, which was a not-insignificant news month in this country, we were ahead of really well-established competitors, like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters and Politico,” Goldberger said, citing traffic data from Similarweb. “We are growing at a pretty remarkable scale, which has been really encouraging.”
Although Goldberger declined to attribute the BBC’s recent traffic numbers to the so-called “Trump Bump,” he said that the BBC is consciously taking advantage of its role as a global news agency to take advantage of readers’ growing interest in current events amid an increasingly polarizing political climate.
In addition to relaunching its website in the past year, the BBC has also increased its overall investment in the U.S. by more than doubling its Washington, D.C. newsroom, which currently employs dozens of journalists, according to a BBC Studios representative.
“I think that there is clearly greater engagement with the news in the Trump presidency, and at least from my lens, I think it is reflective of interest in the global consequences,” Goldberger said. “The BBC is uniquely well-positioned to tell the story of what happens in Washington and why it matters as it ricochets around the world.”
One goal of the BBC’s website update was to gain more access to U.S. advertisers’ marketing dollars, and to that end the revamped website included new ad inventory in the form of digital banners. Goldberger declined to say how the BBC’s advertising spend and overall revenue had trended since the March 2024 update, but said that the company had experienced “meaningful growth globally.”
“Though you rightly have emphasized that our presence in the U.S. is a core strategic priority, we are very much a global brand, and we’ve benefited from a lot of strong revenue growth in other regions,” he said. “EMEA and APAC remain critical to our core goals.”
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