We get online news via various platforms and they includes: Reading online publications, watching videos shared on social media or massive video repositories.

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YouTube is certainly the largest online video platform with currently over 1.5 billion monthly active users. YouTube is being used by people to watch educational, informative content from their favourite channels as well as catching up with latest news online.

Google news

Google announced that it will be investing $25 million (Kshs 2.5 billion) in expanding the news ecosystem with a special focus on YouTube. Google improved Google News recently where it emphasized on authoritative results over such factors as freshness or relevancy.

Now YouTube has a new feature, Top News which is a ‘shelf’ that highlights videos from news sources in search results. Breaking News shelf will show videos from news organizations about an event directly on the YouTube homepage. This will make it easy for people to catch up with authoritative news from news sources on YouTube, which is great for the platform.

The $25 million investment will be focused on three areas:

  • Expertise where the Google News Initiative (GNI)Google News Initiative (GNI) will establish a working group with news organizations to develop new product features, tackle emerging challenges and improve the news experience on YouTube
  • Support where GNI will expand the team focused on supporting news publishers.
  • Innovation Funding where GNI will provide funding across approximately 20 global markets to support news organizations in building sustainable video operations.

Google says that Top news and Breaking News were launched in 17 countries which include South Africa Nigeria, US, UK, France, Italy, Japan, India, Mexico, Brazil and more.

“We remain committed to working with the journalism community to build a more sustainable video ecosystem for news organizations. We know there is a lot of work to do, but we’re eager to provide a better experience to users who come to YouTube every day to learn more about what is happening in the world from a diversity of sources,” says Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer a YouTube.

It is commendable that Google wants to make YouTube the to-go place for breaking news and top news and this is encroaching on Twitter’s territory where this happens quite naturally and organically.

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