Sad day for the BBC

I was rather dissapointed this evening when taking a short break to check out the BBC web site, (which is a regular haunt for me), I was very distracted by four advertisements on the front page!

I guess that they probably don't appear to a UK audience, and are there to supliment the costs of providing access to the BBCs' site for the rest of the foreign world.
The size, number and placement of the adverts was certainly rather intrusive. They don't seem to have paid any consideration as to what the adverts are for either; i.e. they don't seem to be tied into content, which would make them less irritating (and possibly more attractive) to the viewers. Maybe they only have a very limited number of advertisers with pockets deep enough for the fees? That can be the only possible explanation as to why they would have four gaudy animated ads for Airbuses's new A380 on the home page.

My one positive thought, was that maybe, possibly they were planning on using the advertising revenue to pay for the cost of delivering some video content outside of the UK: but that hope was quickly dashed with the, as usual, failed attempt to pull any video (news etc) off the site when browsing the "UK version".

I listen to the radio almost daily via the internet. Hopefully they aren't planning on pulling the plug on that too!