It's fascinating to me that 100-year-old fonts can still be so expensive that it's cost-effective for an organization to commission their own (not to mention the costs of replacing everything) from scratch like this.
- 5,000 desktop licenses (BBC has 20k+ employees) - $200k (one-time). Note that desktop licenses often have limitations on use in logos, e.g., so this might not cover BBC's usage.
- 1.5B pageviews for the webfont - $1.7M (monthly). BBC gets 1.5B pageviews per month.
- App (50k), ePub (1k), and Server (4) licensing - $200k.
So full retail, Gill Sans would cost BBC $20M+ per year. I guarantee BBC isn't paying full retail, but you can get a sense from the size and scale of the spend why this might be a cost-effective solution.
I wonder if it would've been cheaper for them to commission a clean-room digital version of Gil Sans? From what I gather the font itself (published 1928) is out of copyright in the UK, so the main licensing issue is probably just the more-recent digital representations.