From aggregator to news producer, Baca plans to pump $10m into community site

Baca, a news reader app for Indonesia, no longer just aggregates news from other sources.

The startup launched its own “citizen journalism” site, Nulis. Baca plans to pump US$10 million into this endeavor, it announced today.

On Nulis, anyone can sign up as contributor and publish stories. There’s financial compensation based on revenue sharing, so what contributors earn depends on the click-through rate on ads associated with their content.

Baca is the Indonesian brand of a well-funded global company called News in Palm. It’s based in Hong Kong but operates apps in Indonesia and Brazil. The firm claims to have raised more than US$20 million in its series B round last year, from investors such as Bertelsman Asia Investment.

A chunk of the money now seems to be flowing into Nulis. The company encourages content creators to write up news and information, contribute funny images, humorous stories, and videos. Content published on Nulis will also be shared through Baca’s mobile app.

Two Chinese news apps rank highest in Indonesia

What Baca is trying to achieve with the launch of Nulis is similar to what UC News – a competing news app part of the Alibaba Group – does with its UC We Media program: outsource content production to the crowd.

UC News and Baca are both popular news apps in Indonesia. Baca ranks second behind UC News in the Indonesian Play Store, according to App Annie stats.

Other competitors are Babe and Kurio, both of which don’t yet have a community contribution component yet.

See: Alibaba’s UCWeb bets $30m on expanding its browser into a news channel in India, Indonesia

Keeping it clean

Baca earns through ads that are served alongside the content, so its goal is to attract as many eyeballs as possible.

The firm has been at the center of a controversy over advertising practices that make use of nudity or otherwise provocative imagery to attract readers.

Baca promised to increase its safeguards against indecent content. It will need to find a way to extend these to cover the wealth of community-generated content it plans to bring in through Nulis.

For now, this will be a manual process. “All articles submitted will be reviewed before publishing, articles with those “sensitive” contents will be rejected,” Baca’s country operations manager in Indonesia, Shella Elins Fiorentina, explains.

It’s not clear at this point whether Nulis’ review process also includes checking the accuracy of community-contributed news.

This post From aggregator to news producer, Baca plans to pump $10m into community site appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/baca-launches-nulis-with-usd10m
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