Why French media are losers in the Internet race

With the exception of the independent radio Skyrock and its Skyblogs which has the web in its core priorities (and thanks to that sold the company at a great valuation), French media do not heavily invest on the web and launch modest projects or just adapt their current content. No media mogul in France has decided to make it strategic the way Rupert Murdoch with MySpace has. Murdoch had acquired it for several hundreds millions of dollars and already made it up with the two billion dollars advertising deal they just had with Google. I wonder why they don't move and don't feel like they do not want but rather they do not know where to start on the one hand and how to make profitable moves on the other. The result is they don't move and if you don't move on the web, you're dead.

This is a question that David Targy, media and advertising specialist has addresses in a sector study, one of the most comprehensive of its kind in France, on the development strategies of French media on the Internet [fr] that Christophe Alix at Libération interviewed.

To sum up the key points of what I read, French media do almost nothing in the field and as a result have a modest online audience, therefore modest revenues. Why ? Because the online advertising market is too small in France and concentrated around Yahoo! and MSN. Some media brands such as Le Monde or Les Echos launched subscription based services but with tiny audiences as a result.

This is the entire problem, the web industry does not work the way media would like, it is not based on quick breakeven business plans. It is based on risk financed by venture capital and courageous acquisitions. That explains why french media are not doing anything, their bosses or stockholders such as billionaires Bernard Arnault or François Pinault are still recovering from their bubble 1.0 investments without looking at what's happening now.

The result is venture capital funds buying the only french media success Skyrock (and not them) and I bet it will finish in the hands of an American company soon. While funds and American companies are doing their shopping, the largest French media groups don't move at all or just put a little finger in the water with number one TV group TF1 investing only 10% in the little blog startup over-blog (why not buy them) and a few million dollars (over several years!) in the YouTube like WAT (should be 10 or 100 times that given their means).

Instead of building the engine of their future car, they are concentrating on its key-holder.

update: The Economist predicts the end of the newspapers in 2043: "Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold."

photo, Alexis, and Cyril, 15 and 16 years old.

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