Google Hosts 200 Nigerian, Kenyan Publishers

• Google Hosts 200 Nigerian, Kenyan Publishers

Google will this week host publishers’ summits in Nigeria and Kenya, where over 200 publishers from across the region will gather to explore an opportunity to better understand Google’s Publisher tools, as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by an online ecosystem growing rapidly in both size and complexity.

According to the company, the summits are the largest hosted by Google in Africa, to date.

Through its summits, and other initiatives, Google said it was empowering publishers to make money online and drive traffic to their sites.

“In this way, the company aims to give publishers the necessary support to help them monetise their content online, thereby creating opportunities for the industry to leverage technology in the digital world,” Google said in a statement.

The statement also read, “The summits, which address the different issues being faced by publishers and advertisers, are designed to provide a more complete picture of the online ecosystem and the opportunities that lie ahead in 2017 and beyond.

“Key focus areas include the changing consumption journeys of online consumers as well as the tools available to publishers to optimise their benefits.”

It added, “With Google having achieved its 2016 goal of training one million young people in Africa on digital skills within a year, there is even a greater need for high-interest published content for online marketing as these web enthusiasts start their own ventures or assist other web entrepreneurs with theirs.”

The Country Manager, Google Nigeria, Juliet Ehimuan-Chiazor, said, “Google’s relentless commitment to the growth and development of the people and businesses in Africa is given expression through summits like this as we deploy tools and initiatives to support businesses and individuals in Africa to grow.”

According to her, Google enables publishers to sell their content directly to consumers through Google Play Newsstand, which now features some 4 000+ newspapers, magazines and blogs.

“And its search and ads services help publishers make money online and drive traffic to their sites. Google shared more than $11bn with its publisher partners in 2016,” she added.

In October 2015, Google joined publishers, analytics and ad tech companies and others to announce the Accelerated Mobile Pages project to dramatically improve the mobile web for everyone.

“Google believes preserving a robust and independent press is important for the society. When excellent journalism succeeds, we all do better,” Ehimuan-Chiazor said.

“This is why Google helps journalists use technology for reporting and acts as a collaborator and convener to listen and learn from those in the industry,” she said.

Other initiatives driven by Google to assist publishers include the Google News Lab, which collaborates with reporters and entrepreneurs globally to help build the future of journalism, partner on projects, and build and adapt tools like Google Trends to help them in their work. In 2016, Google trained over 100,000 journalists directly.

In February 2016, it opened Operation Shield — a tool for news orgs and human rights groups to protect themselves from the DDoS attacks — to all news organisations.

“We boost content discovery and understanding through diversity tags like ‘opinion’, ‘highly cited’, ‘local’ and ‘fact check’ along with tools like ‘Editors’ Picks’ in Google News to allow editors to highlight original news content they believe represents their organisation’s best journalistic work,” Ehimuan-Chiazor said.