SHARE
COPY LINK

MEDIA

Reaching expats in Europe simplified with new ad network

English-speaking professionals in other European countries form a growing and valuable market. Reach:Europe, launched today by The Local, helps advertisers reach nearly 6 million of these high-earning consumers with one phone call.

Reach:Europe is a network of 31 of the best English-language news and community sites for foreign professionals and expats across the continent. These sites cater to a cosmopolitan market in which English is the common language and where average earnings are well above the western European average. Now, the Reach:Europe network allows media buyers to reach all 31 sites in one hit.

Reach:Europe covers all the major hubs for English-speaking professionals in Europe, including Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Russia.

“We found increasingly that media buyers were asking us if we could deliver audiences in countries outside our core markets of Germany, Sweden and Switzerland,” says Robin Reznik, international operations manager at The Local.

Reach:Europe’s sites are high-quality media outlets, most of which focus on original reporting of national news and current affairs. Among the sites in the network are France24, DutchNews and the Moscow Times.

English speaking professionals in Europe form a forgotten demographic that delivers huge volumes of business. 55 percent of expatriates living in Germany earn more than $60,000 per year. In the Netherlands and France that figure is 53%, according to HSBC.

Over half of those planning to move to these countries say that learning the local language is one of their biggest worries. Reach:Europe’s sites provide a vital connection to their new country in a language they understand.

Reach:Europe’s readers are big consumers of an array of goods and services, particularly travel, banking and insurance, healthcare and consumer goods. Their nomadic nature means they are often brand virgins, without cemented brand preferences. This makes them particularly responsive to online advertising.

“Joining forces with counterparts in other countries enables us to satisfy advertisers and increase the visibility of this incredibly valuable demographic,” says Reznik.

BUSINESS

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat

Google announced Wednesday the reopening of its news service in Spain next year after the country amended a law that imposed fees on aggregators such as the US tech giant for using publishers’ content.

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat
Google argues its news site drives readers to Spanish newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue.Photo: Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP

The service closed in Spain in December 2014 after legislation passed requiring web platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay publishers to reproduce content from other websites, including links to their articles that describe a story’s content.

But on Tuesday the Spanish government approved a European Union copyright law that allows third-party online news platforms to negotiate directly with content providers regarding fees.

This means Google no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers.

Writing in a company blog post on Wednesday, Google Spain country manager Fuencisla Clemares welcomed the government move and announced that as a result “Google News will soon be available once again in Spain”.

“The new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets — big and small — to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content,” she added.

“Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.”

News outlets struggling with dwindling print subscriptions have long seethed at the failure of Google particularly to pay them a cut of the millions it makes from ads displayed alongside news stories.

Google argues its news site drives readers to newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue and find new subscribers.

SHOW COMMENTS