Cabin fever
Skyrock.com’s Sale Hampered By Crunch, Confident Will Survive ‘Dark Days’
French teen blog platform Skyrock.com still hasn’t found a buyer after putting itself up for sale in June, and the CEO admits the current economic situation may hamper the plan. Pierre Bellanger told me: “We haven’t changed our mind about the pertinence of an industrial integration. It will occur certainly, but maybe delayed by the present period of freeze.”
Still, the CEO, whose company is 70 percent owned by Axa Private Equity, remains confident the current financial instability will lead to a shake-out in the social media space, one it will survive: “The dark days we are heading for will enlighten the profitability of our economic model and will concentrate the market to a handful of players among, which we are. We want to use that period to grow and reinforce ourselves particularly in mobile telephony, where we are already strong.”
The interactive business was started by Bellanger’s Orbus holding company as an adjunct to its popular youth radio station of the same name. The Skyblogs platform, as it was called on its 2002 creation, has become easily France’s most popular social networking destination, far ahead of nearest rivals Facebook and MySpace, and Bellanger had hoped to divest the online arm to finance it for international expansion outside its native market, adding to its 13 localisations. Bellanger in June told us Skyrock was talking with telcos, hoping to emulate Cyworld’s sale to SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) in Korea, but nothing has yet come to fruition.
Skyrock’s problem, if it has one, is that, while its French credentials gave it a critical advantage at home, other territories already have bigger social media brands, like MySpace, that not only are doing country localisations but also are going mobile - demonstrating the USP may prove hard. Bellanger: “We have all the reasons to believe that the present crisis will be the baptism of fire for the social networks and that the remaining ones will see their real value much more taken into account, just as the internet companies after the 2000-2002 turmoil.”
Related
EconWomen, Oct. 29, 2008 Edison Ballroom New York City Our panels are jam-packed with top women’s media executives. Register: http://econwomen.eventbrite.com
Related posts: Canada time