Interactive Advertising Bureau
17 April 2020

IAB Europe Member Google Offers Support for Publishers During COVID-19

In our recent blog post, IAB Europe wrote about the need to support European Journalism during COVID-19.  Every day, people are visiting their trusted news sites for the latest facts and information about COVID-19. Journalists are working around the clock to deliver. This spur in heightened traffic should be delivering the financial results to reward trusted journalism. Alas, in many cases, the opposite is happening. In the case of the UK, newspapers face losing £50m in digital revenues as advertisers use “blacklist” technology to block ads from appearing next to all stories that mention the coronavirus pandemic.

Premium and local European publishers, who are the backbone of the National IABs, offer a rich range of information sources for citizens, further supporting our democratic society.  They need to be rewarded for that. Advertisers, agencies, and the ad tech companies that support them need to lean in and support quality journalism now more than ever.

Today, Google announced the fee relief programme they have put in place to support their news partners during COVID-19. News publishers that use Google Ad Manager to support their digital businesses with advertising will have their  ad serving fees waived on Ad Manager for five months. Over the coming days, Google will notify their news partners that meet the requirements about the details of the program, and what they can expect to see in their account statements.

This builds on The Google News Initiative work which this week launched the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, to deliver aid to thousands of small and local news publishers globally.

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