With Music and Toasts, Opera Officially Launches News Hub

With Music and Toasts, Opera Officially Launches News Hub

For the official launch of its new online media platform in Nigeria, Opera, the Norwegian browser developer and leader on AI driven digital content,  hosted influencers and media personalities to an exclusive event at Radisson Blu in Ikeja recently. The guests were serenaded with cool music vibes and treated to an array of cocktails and finger foods.

The setting was engulfed in an infectious aura of camaraderie as guests engaged and networked with one another. One could tell from the smiles on their faces that they were excited about the launch of the online platform in Nigeria, not necessarily because of the opportunity to tell their stories but also for the pecuniary gains.

Called Opera News Hub, the digital content company hopes to become a leader in the online publishing sector in the country which is already saturated. To achieve this, the company decided to offer writers an opportunity to write and earn from it.

Its initial plan when it first came into the country was to be a news aggregator through its Opera News app which currently is one of the most downloaded news apps in Nigeria.  It embarked on an ambitious mission to partner with 1000 quality blogs to enhance its services. Unfortunately, it could only find about 100 blogs that meet its requirements. Further research revealed that Nigeria is thriving with brilliant writers but with a small reach. The company also discovered the booming influencer culture in the country.

 

With these findings, Opera decided to create  Opera News Hub, offering authors and bloggers an opportunity to  produce their original online content and share it with the fast-growing Opera user base of more than 350 million users worldwide and over 120 million users in African countries.

 

“With Opera News Hub, we are enabling thousands of Nigerian authors and bloggers to explore their creativity in a collaborative online media platform based on generated content,” said Scot Eritemu, Product Manager for Opera News. “Opera News Hub also guarantees premium content placement across the Opera mobile apps, allowing them to be discovered by a large international audience of over 350 million Opera users.”

According to the company, the online platform connects  seamlessly with other Opera mobile applications like the popular Opera Mini browser and the standalone news app Opera News. This means that content creators who choose to distribute original content in Opera News Hub, will have a unique opportunity to reach a new international audience, increase their number of followers on social media channels, and run their own online publication across the various Opera mobile products.

The move is one of the ways the web innovator  is leading the digital transformation of Africa. Last year, it announced its Africa First strategy, wherein the company committed to launch its new products and services in Africa before anywhere else in the world. This strategy was set up with the ambition of contributing to the growth of the African digital economy and speed up internet adoption across the continent.

“The inclusion of Opera News Hub into Opera’s product portfolio is part of Opera’s strategy to expand its products beyond mobile apps. Opera News Hub joins the recently announced online content and marketing platforms Opera Ads, OLeads and OList. With these digital content and marketing platforms, African businesses and content creators now have better opportunities to interact with their audiences and grow in popularity by expanding their online presence,” the company said in a statement.

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