European blogging empire scores €58m in annual revenues

6 Apr 2011

A scientific approach to media production has resulted in Populis – Europe’s answer to AOL and Demand Media – achieving revenues of €58m for the past year after producing 35,000 articles and attracting more than 26m unique monthly visitors.

Populis has a major international operation in Dublin, where it has 58 staff and has space to grow this to 80 people.

More than tripling multilingual content production in the last two years across its high-profile media brands, which include Excite Europe, Better Deals, Nanopublishing, Blogosfere and Blogo, the company today produces more than 35,000 articles and videos each month across 550 fully owned and operated websites in eight languages.

Formerly known as GoAdv, Populis has now produced 1m articles and videos, and every month tracks on average more than 16m keywords with its scientific approach to media production.

Investments in social integration are contributing to the growing audience and an innovative social media strategy is greatly increasing natural content distribution with a high level of user engagement on platforms including Facebook and Twitter.

European and South American content market consolidation

“In a year that’s already seen an IPO in the US from Demand Media and a high-profile acquisition by AOL of The Huffington Post, Populis is positioning itself as the key content on demand player in a consolidating European and South American market, starting the year with the acquisition of Blogo,” said Luca Ascani, co-founder and chairman of Populis.

“The Populis model is a scientific approach to content production with a winning combination of content on demand and premium web properties. The company is now ready to scale in new markets and 2011 will be another exciting year of growth for us with more strategic acquisitions and increased organic growth.”

Profitable since day one, the now 125-strong international team is continuing its acquisition strategy throughout 2011, starting the year by adding one of Europe and South America’s largest blog networks, Blogo, to its portfolio.

Populis is a pan-European company with a team of more than 125 working across offices in Ireland and Italy, active in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, US, Australia, Russia and Brazil.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com