Three Nigeria media organisations, Ripples Nigeria, Stears News Limited and Legit.ng are among 22 successful recipients for the Google News Initiative’s second Middle East, Turkey and Africa Innovation Challenge.
The recipients were selected from 329 applications from 35 countries who responded to an open call for applications in February after a rigorous review, a round of interviews and a final jury selection process.
“Today, we’re announcing $2.1 million in funding to projects and initiatives in 14 different countries. Recipients include startups and online-only media platforms alongside some of the bigger names in news across the region, and cover topics ranging from audience development to virtual reality storytelling,” Google said in a statement on Tuesday.
Priority was given to projects that reflect and demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the news industry.
” It’s a number one task to put readers first and inform them about matters they care about,” Akinrujomu stated.
Details of the projects of the Nigerian organisations are as follows:
Stears News Limited, publishers of Stears Business
Summary: If the future of sustainable media is direct reader revenue, then African publishers are still poorly equipped with the billing infrastructure required to collect regular payments from readers. This product is a subscription management service offering for the media industry, which allows publishers, bloggers and creatives to open up new revenue streams for themselves. As media pivots towards direct reader revenue, we are building a plug-and-play subscription platform that makes revenue collection easy. The project is crucial for the publishing industry to take charge of its own technology needs, by ensuring solutions are built by publishers, for publishers.
Solution: A primary pain point for African publishers is the lack of technology infrastructure that makes it easy, fast and efficient to enable recurring revenue from readers, contributors or members. Off the shelf billing solutions, widely available in international markets, are not built with African users or publishers in mind.
Building an easy to use subscription management service that enables African publishers to monetise their audiences without technical expertise. At its core, it will integrate recurring payment workflows for publishers to manage, track and organise readers using multiple payment providers.
Summary: Eco-Nai+ is Nigeria’s first digital geo-journalism platform providing access to interactive geo-data through web and mobile applications. It will host environmental data such as drought, rainfall and erosion, while carefully tracking and marking changes to environmental phenomena to establish the incidence of climate change.
Eco-Nai+ will rely on a range of data sources including: verified user-generated data (from members of impacted communities), data from official sources, own-generated data and from reliable open source geo-data platforms like Google Earth.
The project has a broad range of targets including journalists, environmentalists, farmers, researchers, public policy formulators and at-risk residents.
Solution: Project Eco-Nai+ is seeking to solve two major related problems. The first being the shared global challenge of climate change, and the second being inadequate local response to climate change due to disparities in knowledge of the crisis and capacity to contribute to solutions.
In Nigeria, we are on the negative end of the disparities. There is very limited appreciation of the crisis of climate change in communities, and a wide-ranging lack of capacity to aggregate, interpret and deploy data on the environment. Eco-Nai+ is designed to solve these problems through broadening access to environmental data for both residents and workers as well as professionals such as journalists, environmentalists, researchers and policy formulators.
Summary: ReCo improves user experience by making content recommendations based on the users’ preferences on the home page and within articles. ReCo shows highly relevant content and, as a result, metrics like page views and session duration will increase. In the long run, readers’ loyalty will also boost with demand for certain topics being met.
Solution: Digital publishers are competing for users’ attention with social media, news aggregators and streaming services that have advanced personalization features.
Knowing the audience and suggesting content of their interest, gives a competitive advantage and grows their interest in news content overall.
It’s a number one task to put readers first and inform them about matters they care about. ReCo increases metrics including time on page, session duration, depth, page views, etc. and grows a loyal audience.
Responding to the selection of his company, Samuel Ibemere, Editor-in-Chief of Ripples Nigeria, said “We are excited about our emergence as one of the recipients of the GNI Innovation Challenge funding in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa. It is a huge honour!”
“As a platform long committed to innovation, we are especially excited to be winning such a highly reputed international award on innovation. We have always believed that the news ecosystem can only transition to the next phase of its development through innovation and technology. To this cause, we have committed enormous resources towards the disruption of the media space in Africa,” Ibemere stated.
