After announcing a €5 million fundraising round in February 2022 to consolidate its development in Africa, YouScribe, a digital streaming library, has reached one million readers on the continent.
This is a record number of readers in the company's history, which has successfully diversified its offering and expanded internationally to capture new market opportunities. It has been a successful gamble for Youscribe, which has notably been able to leverage strategic partnerships with the Orange group, Digital Virgo (mobile payment and digital marketing), and CANAL+.
Created in 2011 in France, Youscribe is a digital library model that provides access to over a million books via mobile devices. Today, the startup has become the largest streaming library in France and is expanding rapidly across Africa.
Founded by Juan Pirlot de Corbion, Youscribe gives everyone, everywhere and at any time, access to reading, culture, and education through the digitization of books. Novels, essays, comics, and textbooks are now available on the platform on an unlimited basis, by subscription. The platform currently has 2 million registered members, including 1 million on the African continent.
According to its founder: "While France has an extraordinary offering, with 20,000 bookstores, large specialty stores, digital players, and a large number of libraries (one library for every 7,000 inhabitants on average), the same cannot be said for the African continent. We therefore decided to rethink our model to facilitate access to reading in Africa, where there is an average of one library per million inhabitants. So in 2017, we chose to take a new direction: to focus almost all of our development efforts on French-speaking African countries. We remain very active in France, but YouScribe is most useful in countries where there are no bookstores or libraries and where there is a high demand for access to books in the education and leisure sectors.
The €5 million investment made in early 2022 by Banque des Territoires on behalf of the French government as part of France 2030 has enabled YouScribe to accelerate its development and consolidate its consumer offering on the continent.
We have deployed two models: a B2C model where we sell access to individuals and B2B models through which we sell access to businesses. For individuals, we offer daily or weekly subscriptions (100 CFA francs per day and 500 CFA francs per week) and for B2B (businesses, schools, partners), we offer annual access. We pay 60% of our revenue to authors and rights holders.
Today, the startup is established in 11 African countries (Ivory Coast, Senegal, Morocco, Mali, South Africa, Cameroon, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Congo DRC, Madagascar, Guinea) and continues to embody its ambition to make reading accessible to as many people as possible and to raise the level of education on the African continent. Next steps? Benin, Togo, Nigeria, and also the Middle East.
Read also: Interview with Juan Pirlot de Corbion, founder of YOUSCRIBE