How small Black- and Latinx-owned print publications created digital advertising businesses through the Google News Initiative - Digiday

BIPOC-owned media companies may have collectively received an influx of RFPs and longer-term ad deals from advertisers that increased their multicultural marketing budgets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But those without programmatic capabilities or digital advertising rate cards were missing out.

Google saw an opportunity to help independent Black-owned and Latinx-owned media companies improve their digital advertising abilities to field the increase of advertising requests from companies, as well as compete for larger portions of those multicultural media budgets. And thus was born the Google News Initiative’s Ad Transformation Lab for Black and Latinx-owned news publishers, created in partnership with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the National Association of Hispanic Publications and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.

Over a six-month period, 28 Black-owned and Latinx-owned publications, including Blavity News and The Los Angeles Sentinel, underwent a digital transformation led by the Google News Initiative — for some monetizing their digital operations for the first time ever — to catch up to the rest of the publishing industry.

All of the media companies applied to the program and were selected based on a number of criteria, which includes proof of being Black or Latinx-owned or that the publication serves underrepresented communities, proof that scaling digital ad revenue is a priority for the business and...

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