Skyrock.com is big news in Europe. With more than 39 million accounts globally, it's a force to be reckoned with. But unlike its higher profile American counterpart, Facebook, here is a youth-driven social media platform that's posting a profit at the same time.
In 2008, the Skyrock group generated €38m in revenue; half coming from its radio operations, and half from the internet; with an ebitda of approximately €7m (€5-6m generated by the internet). Its internet operations revenue is up 42% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period last year (the radio side is up 22%).
Yahoo! tried to buy it, but the deal unraveled when Microsoft made a run for the business. It might be still open to offers although the owners are in no rush to sell. And if you’re pulling numbers like Skyrock, there isn’t any rush.
Skyrock.com has 39 million accounts, more than 26 million blogs, 17 million profiles, and received more than 24 million unique visitors in June 2009.
Users have created more than 650 billion articles, loaded 580 million pictures and 37 million videos and in a typical month, like June 2009, viewed more than 7.7 million pages.
Skyrock is different to other sites. Its revenue model is based upon the principle of better control over both content and channel. Skyrock designs marketing campaigns for advertisers, which it runs through its platform. The campaigns usually include the creation of mini-sites that are operational for a limited time, and that include tailored content designed to create brand appeal to Skyrock users.
The Amazon equivalent of data mining, in the social media world, revolves around understanding who is friends with who. Links, relationships and affinities matter. If John Smith clicks on an ad, Skyrock will serve the same ad to all his friends. The result is a dramatic increase in the likelihood of click-through and this accelerates the spread of the advertiser’s message.
The revenue model, and the design of advertising placement within the platform, means that Skyrock shortens the time to get to the targeted number of responding contacts for the advertisers and enhances the relevancy of the ads for the reader, CEO Pierre Bellanger recently explained to Fiona Mackenzie, publisher of Australia’s Maverick Marketing blog that profiled the company’s achievement.
And when you control the content and the channel, and the teams needed to create and place the content, you can work with formidable speed. And alternative media channels may not be able to keep pace.
According to Bellanger, the key ingredient that makes Skyrock so appealing is that they never considered young people as young people, but rather as adults of young age.
“On Skyrock.com you are anonymous and make yourself known through your creations and expressions. So you can create an identity and have several, you can discover new friends – those who are publishing that resonate with your state of mind. You create an online network of affinity friends. Everything is open access and public, millions of people are there with fantastic creativity linking with each other.”
Read the full case study about How Skyrock Made Social Media Profitable, with information about its revenue and business model at http://fionamackenzie.com.au/
