What is your role at YouScribe?
As COO, my role mainly consists of supporting the international rollout of our offering. We currently have many ambitions and challenges to address in the territories where we are already present, but also in those where we wish to expand. Among these challenges are: how to establish a presence; with whom; with which partners; how to continue developing our content strategy with a dedicated team to build the best possible library that meets our readers' expectations…
We interviewed YouScribe founder Juan Pirlot de Corbion when you launched your activities in Africa in 2020. Now that we are in 2023, can you give us an overview of your activities and development on the continent?
The results are very positive since we started in 2019 by launching our activities in one, then two West African countries: Ivory Coast and Senegal, in partnership with Digital Virgo, which remains our main partner in our overall strategy as it acts as the link between YouScribe and telephone operators. We therefore launched our offering on the continent through this three-way partnership with Digital Virgo and Orange. Our offering quickly proved successful, particularly in Senegal, where we exceeded 100,000 subscribers in two months. Beyond the number of subscribers, we have overturned clichés, such as the idea that young people are abandoning reading in favor of video games. On the contrary, we observed a real appetite for reading. Our offering also responds to the challenge of making reading accessible to everyone in areas where books are expensive and not necessarily available.
Today, we are present in 11 countries and have exceeded one million subscribers. This proves to us that readers are indeed there. Our service is accessible via a suitable payment method, mobile payment, made possible thanks to our diverse range of operator partners. Our service is therefore built on a B2B2C model, but that's not all. We have also built our service on a B2B model aimed at the education sector, for example higher education institutions. Recently, we have been considering approaches described as "major donors." Major players in the public sector have a desire and a need to access educational and digital resources, but the funding is not necessarily available for this. That is why we are seeking to implement a solution that allows partners to bring our YouScribe solution to students who would not otherwise have access to it.
Since 2020, the catalog has also grown significantly. We are currently working with more than 2,000 publishers worldwide. These include French-, English-, and Arabic-language publishers to meet the diverse profiles and expectations of our readers. Since 2019, we have been building partnerships with African publishers, offering them the opportunity to benefit from this new distribution channel free of charge and to reap the rewards, as we pay back 60% of all our revenue. This 60% is distributed among the various publishers according to the number of pages read.
Subscribing is very simple. All you have to do is send a text message with a code for a daily subscription or for as long as you want. This subscription method facilitates the democratization of access to reading.
What challenges do you still face?
There are still many! There is a real challenge around our offering, which we need to adapt to different target audiences. How can we ensure that the right title reaches the right reader? How can we better promote our publishers' content? How can we facilitate this encounter between title and reader? There is work to be done in this area, and this may involve artificial intelligence, recommendations, or the creation of personalized content packages. Finally, on a global scale, we also need to address a structural challenge: how can we increase our presence on the African continent? How can we build YouScribe to be as close as possible to our readers, our partners, and our publishers? This will inevitably involve setting up subsidiaries and representative offices on the continent. We expect that, in the medium term, most of the YouScribe team will be based on the continent.
You have exceeded 1 million users. Which African countries are the most promising for your business? How are subscribers distributed across countries? What is their profile?
Two trends are emerging. On the one hand, in the Maghreb, Morocco remains the most promising and dynamic country. The profile of our subscribers in Morocco is both student and professional. On the other hand, Côte d'Ivoire is also a very promising and interesting country from an editorial point of view. There is a lot going on there and our business is developing very well in the country. It is also a territory where we have developed several partnerships with operators and where we are working hand in hand with the book industry to build a sustainable and attractive Ivorian offering.
What are your medium- and long-term ambitions?
We have many ambitions for the coming years, whether in terms of geographical expansion, enrichment, or the editorial content of our offering. We want to offer our services in many countries, both in French-speaking and English-speaking Africa, in partnership with Digital Virgo, to the general public and the education sector.
We also aim to strengthen and diversify our existing partnerships. For example, we recently collaborated with CANAL+ to make our offering available to all its subscribers.
Finally, we want to do everything we can to achieve our goal: to ensure that, thanks to YouScribe, every mobile phone can become a pocket library, accessible to everyone, at any time; an ideal digital library that is always at the service of our readers and publishers.