ProSiebenSat.1 Group Acquires Majority Interest in Webnews.de
Munich, October 13, 2008. The ProSiebenSat.1 Group has acquired a majority interest in Webnews.de, a news platform that pools professional news from various online media with user-generated content. The Group has acquired 67.6 percent of the platform, with the option to acquire all of the portal at a later date. The remainder is held by Holtzbrinck Ventures. The investment has been approved by Germanys Federal Cartel Office. The acquisition strengthens the ProSiebenSat.1 Groups news operations, and expands its editorial news service into the fast-growing social news segment.
Sites like Digg.com in the USA have shown impressively how successful social news portals can be. Digg.com is now reaching more than 15 million unique users worldwide, and operates in the USA head-to-head with such established news sites as the online outpost of the New York Times, explains Dr. Marcus Englert, Member of the ProSiebenSat.1 Executive Board for New Media and Diversification. Were certain that in Webnews we can translate Digg.coms success into German and European terms. We plan to internationalize the portal in 2009.
Webnews.de draws on countless partner sites, from major news portals like Spiegel Online to blogs to specialized news sites like Wirtschaftswoche.de. But on Webnews, only the active community decides which stories to link, and which ones will be read by hundreds of thousands of people on the sites home page. Additionally, the Eyewitness zone gives each user a chance to write their own articles and present them to a broad public. It will also be possible to upload video reports starting in 2009.
Webnews was founded in Cologne by Stefan Vosskötter and Thorsten Lüttger in November 2006. Its goal has always been to establish a news platform that enables users to interact in new ways with news on the Web.
About the ProSiebenSat.1 Group
With 26 free TV networks, 24 pay TV networks, and 22 radio networks in 13 European countries, the ProSiebenSat.1 Group is one of the continents leading media corporations. Free TV, financed through advertising, is the Groups core business. Its station brands Sat.1, ProSieben, kabel eins and N24 make it the largest commercial free TV corporation in Germany. The Group operates the TV stations Veronica, Net 5 and SBS 6 in the Netherlands, VT 4 and Vijf TV in Belgium, Kanal 5 and Kanal 9 in Sweden, TV Norge and FEM in Norway, Kanal 4, Kanal 5 and SBS Net in Denmark, TV2 in Hungary, and Prima TV and Kiss TV in Romania. Its C More/Canal+ service has made ProSiebenSat.1 the market leader in premium pay TV in Northern Europe. Additionally, with 9Live, the Group owns the leading provider of call TV. Maxdome Germanys largest video-on-demand platform and innovative Internet services like MyVideo are among the activities with which the Group has increasingly been diversifying its sources of revenue. In June 2007, the ProSiebenSat.1 Group acquired the SBS Broadcasting Group, and it now has some 6,000 employees across Europe. The company, which is listed in the MDAX, is headquartered in Munich.