[1eyedjack]

There is a storm brewing here in Blighty over the BBC proposal to axe its online repository of meal recipes (numbering about 11K) from its website, as a cost-saving measure.

Not that I personally have any significant interest in the content per se, but it did get me wondering just what the saving is that they expect to achieve.

Once the recipe is up there, it doesn't require much ongoing maintenance, and they will still be hosting a website whether it has this content or not. OK, I get that the cost to (and passed on by) the service provider is likely to be a function of the volume of content and volume of traffic.

If the volume of traffic is the dominant cost, then that simply proves that there is a high demand for the content, so I would say that it is short-sighted to cancel it.

If the volume of content is the dominant cost, then ..., well, how can that be? I am no expert in such matters but I would hazard a guess that the marginal cost of storing 11K recipes in the cloud within an existing website must be something in the region of what, £1.50 to £2.00 per month?

[StevenG]

The recipes seem to be authored, many by names I've heard of. Perhaps they have to pay royalties to these celebrity chefs.

[Zelandakh]

Many of the BBC recipes are also extremely good. Not that I am much of a chef but if someone here asks me for the recipe of a British dish, it is generally the first place I look.

[pigpenz]

Zelandakh, on 2016-May-17, 09:35, said:

Many of the BBC recipes are also extremely good. Not that I am much of a chef but if someone here asks me for the recipe of a British dish, it is generally the first place I look.

the cost can be related to how much traffic you generate to your site.
You can register a domain name and setup Windows if that is what you use to host a web page on a computer at your home, but if the traffic it generates is to great for the isp you use then you might have to pay for more bandwidth.

1.register a domain name cheap and setting up dns servers say with register.com is around $35 usa.
2.you can do your own web page for free and redirect dns server to your own computer if you choose for free
3.you can pay some to do it for you web authoring or hosting not free.

you can have as much content on your website you want if its your own computer, if not you pay for the amount of content you think you will need.

[barmar]

For a site like the BBC, with many thousands of news articles and videos, this tiny corner of the site is likely to be totally insignificant. They almost certainly have a flat rate for their bandwidth, and only have to pay unexpected charges when they get unexpected bursts of traffic.

But maybe this is just one piece of a larger "spring cleaning". Each of them by itself is just a drop in the bucket, but put them together and you have a pail.

[wank]

it's not about costs. it's about politics and economics in a wider sense. there is a view that as a publicly funded organisation, the BBC shouldn't be involved in areas which the private sector can manage as well, because this is interfering in the economy 9the bbc website sucks all the traffic away). the other side is that everyone loves the bbc and noone really thinks a competitor will do things as well.

[barmar]

wank, on 2016-May-17, 10:55, said:

it's not about costs.

That's what I would have thought (or simply "What the heck do recipes have to do with radio and TV broadcasting?"), except the OP explicitly says that this is what it's about. Unless that's just spin to avoid having to disclose the real reason.

It's not like their 11,000 recipes are really sucking much traffic away from other web sites. There are many other web sites that are devoted to cooking and probably have orders of magnitude more recipes and traffic than this part of the BBC site.

[billw55]

wank, on 2016-May-17, 10:55, said:

it's not about costs. it's about politics and economics in a wider sense. there is a view that as a publicly funded organisation, the BBC shouldn't be involved in areas which the private sector can manage as well, because this is interfering in the economy (the bbc website sucks all the traffic away).

Interesting, I would have thought this a much more American sort of complaint. Indeed, it is one we hear often on this side of the pond. I had the impression that England (and Europe generally) are more accepting of government involvement in things.

barmar, on 2016-May-17, 11:07, said:

Unless that's just spin to avoid having to disclose the real reason.

This seems likely. The cost saving line is not really plausible.

[1eyedjack]

I only reproduced what I heard, and that from memory. I may have got the cost motivation wrong.

[Zelandakh]

Out of interest, when did this rumour begin Jack? As you will know, the BBC recently finished a major funding negotiation with the government and may have been using the thread of axing popular services as a means of applying pressure. If the idea only began after the deal was announced that would obviously be something else entirely, as well as being surprising considering that the BBC got approximately everything it was asking for.

[gordontd]

Zelandakh, on 2016-May-18, 07:17, said:

Out of interest, when did this rumour begin Jack? As you will know, the BBC recently finished a major funding negotiation with the government and may have been using the thread of axing popular services as a means of applying pressure. If the idea only began after the deal was announced that would obviously be something else entirely, as well as being surprising considering that the BBC got approximately everything it was asking for.

It was in the (BBC) news yesterday.

[Zelandakh]

gordontd, on 2016-May-18, 08:22, said:

It was in the (BBC) news yesterday.

According to that link the recipes will still be available via a database search, just not on their own web pages. That seems reasonable to me providing the front end is well designed. The cost savings for all of the measures is given as 15 million pounds, although it does not specify what the other cuts are that make up that figure.

[paulg]

I suspect the incremental infrastructure cost is minimal. It's people that are really expensive and it's cutting all the food editors that will save real money.

[1eyedjack]

Zelandakh, on 2016-May-18, 08:57, said:

According to that link the recipes will still be available via a database search, just not on their own web pages.

That was a last minute climb-down in response to the furore

[helene_t]

It seems like an incredible stupid move. BBCGoodFoods requires almost zero maintenance and is quite popular so it could easily generate some revenue. Maybe they could just sell it off.

But maybe Steven is right about the royalties thing.

billw55 said:

I had the impression that England (and Europe generally) are more accepting of government involvement in things.

Depends whom you ask. If you ask people on the street then yes. If you ask the outsourcing industry that funds the right-wing parties then no.

[paulg]

helene_t, on 2016-May-19, 02:17, said:

It seems like an incredible stupid move. BBCGoodFoods requires almost zero maintenance ...

I think you are forgetting the risk analysis, security assessment, quality audits, continuous improvement program, and now the 'is it appropriate' metric that need to be maintained on a monthly basis just for this area of the website. Just because the raw data (aka recipes) might not change very often, I expect that there is a large team and management supporting it. Or perhaps I've been watching too much W1A.

[fromageGB]

Zelandakh, on 2016-May-18, 08:57, said:

The cost savings for all of the measures is given as 15 million pounds, although it does not specify what the other cuts are that make up that figure.

To get 15M you need to have this closure. Without it, the savings would be only 14,999,990 and that is nowhere near such a dramatic figure.

[barmar]

Zelandakh, on 2016-May-18, 08:57, said:

According to that link the recipes will still be available via a database search, just not on their own web pages. That seems reasonable to me providing the front end is well designed. The cost savings for all of the measures is given as 15 million pounds, although it does not specify what the other cuts are that make up that figure.

That supports my "spring cleaning" speculation. This may just be one of the most well known sections that they're cutting, so it got a (tiny) story about it.

Another possibility is that there was a team responsible for a bunch of sections like this, and they're being reassigned (or worse, sacked). Rather than redistribute responsibility to other groups, they're just getting rid of them since there's no one to oversee them.