BBC Three hopes to bring viewers to BBC amid licence fee plans
BBC Three boss discusses how the channel's return brings in a younger audience.
It was recently reported that the government plans to abolish the BBC licence fee in the coming years. In the wake of the news, Help and His Dark Materials writer Jack Thorne wrote a piece for RadioTimes.com on why we need the BBC and many public figures, including Hugh Grant and Sanjeev Bhaskar, have criticised the proposed move.
It's in this uncertain climate that BBC Three is set to make its return as an official channel, which viewers will be able to tune into via Freeview, Sky, Virgin and Freesat, and live on BBC iPlayer from Tuesday 1st February, with Drag Race UK Versus the World (pictured above) part of the relaunch.
During a chat with RadioTimes.com and other press, BBC Three boss Fiona Campbell spoke about how the channel plans to increase the BBC's under-35s audience, who may be more open to a Netflix-style subscription for the broadcaster instead of paying a licence fee.
"Another mechanism through which people discover your show is to tighten up people's relationship with the BBC and with iPlayer," Campbell explained. "So we have this thing that we talk about called activations and that is all about, 'does a show bring somebody into iPlayer that hasn't visited iPlayer in 12 weeks?', and BBC Three shows are very focused on making shows activate in that audience."
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She added: "We look at those also by under-35s so that is definitely a measure of success of bringing in that new audience that haven't been around for a while, and giving them more to consume and more to stick around with within the BBC family."
Campbell went on to discuss how it's a method proven to work, citing the success of shows like Drag Race UK and Meet the Khans.
"Drag Race is a massive activator, and The Khans did the same for us," she said. "The great thing about activations is you can see them by a region, so The Khans did really well in the North West and the Midlands, High did really well in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Drag Race is more pan UK but when you have a queen from a certain region it can totally light up that region.
"Some our shows skew really way above average for young BBC shows, and that is our role as well, to really produce shows that have majority under-35 audience, which is what we do."
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