British Conservatism and Seriousness Pay Off, BBC Says

Whenever I hear "British" - the word - being mentioned, I instantly imagine a Londoner wearing a black pot hat and a black trench coat, with an eyeglass looking superior and snorting with discontent. That seems to be a big seller for everything that's made by or certified by Brits, as the figures from comScore show.

Released earlier today, the figures point out that most of the traffic for BBC, for example, comes from abroad. That makes it a very serious source when it comes to news. Over half of the unique visitors in November (the month the data has been polled from) were from outside the island country's borders, out of the total of 43,703,000 only 18,897,000 targeting the BBC sites from within.

A ranking of Media Brands was put together by comScore and it has BBC topping the charts internally as well, with more than 10 million unique users accessing it ahead of the runner-up, British Sky Broadcasting. "In recent years, U.K. media companies have been able to acquire significant international audiences by leveraging their brands online," said Bob Ivins, EVP of European Markets in the press release that came with the data from comScore. "The Internet is a truly global medium, allowing consumers to easily access content from anywhere in the world. It is critical that publishers and advertisers understand their global franchise - not just their U.K. audiences."

BBC pretty much owns the online media companies with an increase of 5 percent over November 2006. Other companies have also had major percentage upping, such as the ITV Sites that saw a stunning 37 percent growth, from 5.6 million to 7.6 million, or Channel 4 who rose by 28 percent, from 4.1 mil to 5.23 mil over the same period of time. The difference between the sites mentioned and BBC's is that the latter's 5 percent is actually equal to the 37 percent of ITV, when the numbers are uttered in millions of unique visitors.