Novinky.cz wants to take over the list. The merger will harm the Czech media market
If the Office for the Protection of Economic Competition (ÚOHS) does not block the media transaction of the year, Seznam will become the strongest media player with an overview. The Seznam Zprávy and Novinky.cz websites are currently the two most visited news media, with over 4.5 million real users visiting both servers every month last year.
At the same time, it may not be the last media transaction that Seznam will make in the near future. “The reason for the creation of the independent company Seznam Zprávy, as, under which both Seznam Zprávy and the lifestyle online websites Proženy.cz and Garáž.cz fall, was the effort to unify our publishing and publishing activities or future acquisitions in the media business under a new legal entity,” she replied to the question of the E15 newspaper, Seznam spokesperson Aneta Kapuciánová.
According to Kapuciánská, the media business of the year had no practical impact on the newsroom. “Colleagues from the mentioned newsrooms are not moving anywhere, they still work primarily from our headquarters in Prague,” she said.
The second thing, however, will be the influence on the media market. Seznam.cz is currently the most powerful platform, thanks to its home page it keeps several smaller websites alive because it ensures solid traffic. At the same time, the Novinky.cz and Seznam Zprávy servers are able to regularly determine the direction and topic of public debate, just as printed dailies were previously able to do.
The ÚOHS should therefore consider whether the full connection of these two news media is desirable for the market, especially due to the specific position of Seznam, which is de facto dual. After all, this is also proven by the current debate regarding the copyright directive, when Seznam concerns both the side of the technological platforms, which should pay the media for their content, and the side of the media.
However, the Czech regulator is not in the habit of blocking many transactions, but this is not the only way it can approach the assessment of a merger. For example, the authority could order the sale of only a part of the company so that Seznam does not reach a dominant position after the transaction is completed. It could also be possible to limit the connection between the home pages of Seznam.cz and the Novinky.cz and Seznam Zprávy media projects, which have a prominent position in this regard.
If this were to happen, it would be a problem for both servers, because in both cases, according to the analysis tool Similar Web, only a third of their readers go directly to their pages, two thirds click through to them via the home page of Seznam.
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However, a scenario in which both servers would lose a prominent place is rather highly unlikely, as well as a domestic regulator opposing the transaction. Thus, nothing prevents the list from dominating the media space. What will especially small independent servers lose out on. Seznam has long held the position that its reporting will never be paid for.
Which means, in short, that media projects trying to survive through various forms of subscription will have a hard time convincing readers to pay for their content when everything is on the List. In the Czech Republic, there will probably never be successful and profitable projects like in Slovakia, where there are two news media (Denník N and denník Sme), and the number of subscribers to the online version is around seventy thousand. There is no similarly dominant and high-quality period of the Czech List.
The list does its job well, there is no dispute about that, but as a result, it can lead to the fact that the Czech media market will become more and more obsolete. As a result, concentration does not benefit anyone. On the other hand, the Czech publishing houses are somewhat to blame for this, there was no Seznam on the market for a long time, and yet the domestic media are encouraged to adapt to modern times and convince readers of their importance.
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