Innovation, the News Industry and the Future of Journalism in Africa

ISIS NYONG’O, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

DAR ES SALAAM, 29TH SEPTEMBER 2010

Google Confidential and Proprietary Responding to Trends We See

Google Confidential and Proprietary People consume from a wide variety of media

Average hours per week spent consuming media sources

Mediascope Europe -- EIAA Search engines help people find news

• Unprecedented access to an enormous variety of editorial voices

• Search engines drive 35%-45% of traffic to major U.S. newspaper websites, according to comScore

• The majority of traffic comes from elsewhere: the newspaper home page, blogs, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Our aim: partnership with news publishers

• Through digital distribution, publishers and search engines each can help readers find content they wish to see

• New opportunities for audience, reader engagement and revenue

• Google wants to collaborate on technology and ideas How we help news publishers today

• sends news sites ~1 billion clicks per month More Readers • Google, iGoogle and other properties add ~3 billion more

• AdSense, returning $5+ billion More Revenue a year to publishers of all kinds

• and Earth More User Engagement • YouTube platform • Google News guiding principles

• We don’t want to create or own content, we want to help readers find it

• We wish to remain independent

• We value breadth and diversity

• We believe in fair and unbiased ranking Google News and How it Works

News Crawler: Googlebot-News News Sites

Robots Exclusion Protocol & News Articles News Hundreds of signals help us rank stories, articles

Story importance Article ranking • Originality • Editorial interest • Freshness • Local relevance • Quality/expertise of source • Localness of source • Freshness • Citations

Publisher Help provides detailed information, advice and troubleshooti ng for news publishers Click straight to various publishers’ sites to read Search for specific different perspectives news topics

Compiled and updated automatically Get links to all the other perspectives

Personalization makes Change settings to localized it easy to follow topics/ version (12 African versions) regions or create your own Looking Forward

Google Confidential and Proprietary A changing environment, with opportunities

Newspapers are impacted by multiple factors: • Declining circulation, 24-hour cable TV news, migration of classifieds to free services, explosion of vertical sites, emergence of citizen journalism, etc.

Many potential solutions for moving forward:

• Technology companies and publishers can work together to identify successful business opportunities, increase readership and generate more revenue Growth levers: traffic, engagement, revenue Fast Flip: making the web speedier

• Bring print experience of flipping through pages to the web

• Feature content from dozens of top publishing partners

• Drive traffic, boost reader engagement, share ad revenue

• Learn and improve Living Stories: dynamic, unified news coverage

• New, experimental way to consume news online

• Developed in partnership with the New York Times and the Washington Post

• Intended for coverage of an ongoing news event: – Available all in one place – Easy to explore – Smarter for readers

• Code is open-source, and we’re exploring tools for any news organization AdSense: helping content creators make money

Text ads Bring the science of search to the art of display Conclusions…Navigating the Transition to the Digital World

Google Confidential and Proprietary