Google pays out 27 million euros to European media projects
In the first round of funding, Google will distribute 27 million euros from its media innovation fund to projects in 23 European countries. Google CEO Sundar Pichai made the announcement on Wednesday in Paris.
Google's campaign is part of the "Digital News Initiative" (DNI), for which the internet company has set up a total funding pot of 150 million euros. Swiss projects are being supported with just under 1.8 million euros. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung was the first Swiss partner to announce its participation in the DNI almost a year ago. For the first round of DNI funding, Google launched the separate display of news pages in Google Search on Wednesday, which load particularly quickly on a smartphone as so-called Accelerated Mobile Pages. With the open technical standard, which is intended to ensure a fourfold loading speed, Google is competing against the "Instant Articles" of competitor Facebook, among others.
At the start of the project, media from six European countries released their pages, which were optimized as Accelerated Mobile Pages for mobile offers. As AMP is an open standard, it is not only media sites that can use this process. For example, there is an extension for the popular WordPress system that can be used to automatically generate AMP pages. In Paris, Pichai also announced the "Project Shield" initiative to protect news websites and online presences of smaller organizations in particular against so-called DDoS attacks. The abbreviation DDoS stands for "Distributed Denial of Service". It describes a process in which web servers are flooded with countless data requests from a wide variety of sources in a coordinated action until they are brought to their knees. In the past, media websites have also been attacked with DDoS when they have published critical reports. (SDA)
