Last November, we announced the Google News Initiative (GNI) Asia Pacific Innovation Challenge, which goals to strengthen our support for digital innovation and recent business models in news organizations across the APAC region. Through our work and partnerships with publishers, it is obvious that reader revenue is vital to their financial stability. We wish to support the innovators on this space – those that have pioneering approaches that cover every part from providing digital currency to subscription-based membership models.
Within two months of opening the Innovation Challenge, we received 215 applications from 18 countries. We heard from news start-ups in Indonesia, online publishers in Mongolia and Nepal, and video and audio broadcasters in Australia. After rigorous evaluation, a series of interviews and an intensive jury selection process, we ultimately secured support for 23 projects in 14 countries for a complete of $3.2 million.
A creative approach to readers’ income
When we invited applications, we listed 4 criteria: impact, feasibility, innovation and inspiration. The winners performed a mixture of every. Several themes emerged from the findings we reviewed, including:
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Gamification for community-wide sharing: The last category concerned the gamification of the strategy of sharing and commenting on content. News organizations are experimenting with rewarding particularly engaged readers with badges or tokens that could be used to pay for access to events. Asahi Shimbun, a national news publisher in Japan, believes that readers will experiment with gamification through suggestions. Tipping is a typical technique to express gratitude or affection, so why not extend it to the world of journalism? They will award points to subscribers so that they can “suggest” stories and help expand the market to non-subscribers to do the identical.
20 other people received GNI-based support, all of which were equally impressive. Check them out here:
