Record audience figures for BBC’s global news services

New figures released by the BBC show the broadcaster’s global news services reach 256m people each week, marking its biggest ever audience.

The Global Audience Estimate (GAE) measures the combined reach of the BBC’s international services – BBC World Service, BBC World News and bbc.com/news – across the world. The World Service alone now has a record weekly audience of 192m people.

World Service TV audiences for Persian and Arabic have also grown rapidly, with a total of 41.5m viewers, compared to 28.7m last year.

Peter Horrocks, Director of Global News, said: “This is a milestone for the BBC, with more than a quarter of a billion people tuning in to radio, TV and digital services every week. Today’s figures shows there is a growing worldwide audience for impartial, trustworthy journalism. This is an enormous achievement and cements our position as one of Britain’s most successful and influential global brands.

“The BBC World Service is emerging from a difficult period of funding cuts and the closure of services. Today’s record audience figures come despite this, thanks to the quality of our journalism and the decisions we have made to invest in new offers, such as TV programmes in a number of our languages. The international media market is more competitive than ever and we’ve had to innovate across the whole of our global news services to keep ourselves relevant to our audiences.”