Nighty Night on the BBC Homepage

Throughout the course of this year we have been trying out some different things on the BBC homepage, from full-screen promotions to special treatments to external web links. This week the homepage carried a promotion for something rather more adult than the norm.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's very funny. Dare you brave the dark and bizarre world of Nighty Night?

On Tuesday night the page promoted the BBC Three comedy "Nighty Night".

Our normal editorial policy is that everything available from the homepage should be suitable for a family audience. Nighty Night certainly isn't. It is one of the first times that the BBC's homepage activity has started to push at the boundary of the television "watershed". The TV show is scheduled well after the 9pm watershed, by contrast the online version of the episodes are available to watch 24/7.

It has been decided to only promote the show either on the homepage or the TV portal page in the evening, so the first homepage promotion ran from 9pm to 4am.

As is usual in these cases now we put up a special feedback page, with a link from the homepage, asking for the audience response.

As you may have noticed, we promoted the BBC Three comedy Nighty Night on the bbc.co.uk Homepage on Tuesday 27th September. Nighty Night is a post-watershed programme which is available to watch online via a video player on the BBC Three website. We decided therefore to run the promotion during the hours of 9pm and 4am only. Additional safeguards warning users of the nature of the material they could expect to see included clear labelling on the BBC Three website and on the video player itself ("Warning: adult comedy containing sexual scenes and strong language. Not suitable for children.")

The BBC Online guidelines* state:

* Any material on the BBC Homepage must be suitable for a general audience including children.
* The first click from the BBC Homepage should not normally lead straight to a page which includes material which is unsuitable for a general audience.

We'd like to hear your views on the approach taken with the Nighty Night promotion with respect to these guidelines.

It was only on the page during the night time promotion so we got very little response, all of which was favourable to us promoting more adult types of content. It is interesting because I'm fairly certain that if we had asked for feedback during the day on "should we promote more adult-themed content on the homepage" the results would have been very different.

I'm also sure the whole episode will have bemused the third of our homepage audience who live outside the UK - not only wasn't it after the watershed for many of them, but they couldn't see the episode anyway.

Posted by Martin Belam, September 29, 2005    
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