The year 2020 delivered the record-breaking revenues in the amount of almost five billion crowns to Seznam.cz

The total revenues of the company Seznam.cz amounted to CZK 4.946 billion last year, i.e. the year-on-year growth by 5.5 percent. In 2020, EBIT of the Czech internet No. 1 was almost CZK 1.6 billion, almost CZK 180 million more compared to 2019. As for the home page traffic, Seznam.cz was doing well and the service Zboží.cz also significantly grew compared to the market. Mapy.cz launched the traffic navigation including the complete traffic information and Vyhledávání grew by six percent year-on-year.

“Same as many other companies Seznam.cz was also afraid of what would come in March last year. However, the pandemic year brought the huge interest of users in up-to-date and reliable information which they were able to find on our homepage. It was reflected in the homepage traffic and it increased consumption of not only our own news content but also of articles of our partners in the feed. Thanks to the commitment of our sales team we managed to respond to changes in the amount and composition of advertising investments of our clients and it enabled us to fulfil ambitiously set financial plan,” Pavel Zima, Co-CEO of the company Seznam.cz comments the successful year and he reminds that during the pandemics, Seznam gave out over one hundred million crowns within the action We Will Not Give Up On You  (Nenecháme vás v tom) and helped thus to restart the advertising business of selected advertisers.    

One of the essential changes resulting from the coronavirus crisis was the transfer of users and their activities into the online environment. “No wonder that our service Zboží.cz increased its visits year-on-year, namely to three million real users in a month and compared to the previous year its net revenues grew even faster than the entire e-commerce market, namely by 35%,” adds Zima and states that it is an opportunity for Seznam.cz to deploy the entire e-commerce sphere to a separate product division: “We are currently seeking its director and we have big ambitions. In cooperation with one thousand e-shops we want to become the shopping platform competing with big global players in the Czech Republic.”

In addition to content and e-commerce services, the application Mapy.cz was also doing well, it was involved in the fight against the coronavirus pandemics and possibility to share location delivered about half a million brand new users to the application. It included also current traffic information into its navigation. Vyhledávání was neither idle, it recorded 6% growth of visits year-on-year. In the autumn, Seznam.cz launched the new discussion module in its content services. “Thanks to the module we have over 800,000 people in discussions every day. Three months after the start we easily exceeded the level of 50,000 contributions a day and we continue growing. We belong to one of the most used local discussion platforms and we are even bigger that the Czech Twitter,” comments Pavel Zima. 

Technological challenges and support of partner content monetization

This year, Seznam.cz will focus on extension of video- and audio-content in its services. In addition to its own production, it wants to be the monetization platform for video-producers (in the form of the videoportal www.stream.cz) as well as for podcast producers. Seznam.cz prepares for them a brand new distribution channel. It will enable authors of written articles to publish their texts on the homepage and similarly as to other publishers in feed it will offer them the share of earnings from advertising displayed in their content.

The Czech internet No. 1 will strengthen in the technological area as well. At the beginning of the year, it introduced the biggest change in the technology during the last 10 years in the natural search – search by using meaning vectors. Seznam.cz currently prepares itself for limitation of using third parties’ cookies when it offers the possibility to log in via Seznam Účet not only with regard to its own services but also to the whole domestic market. The company enabled the Partners to access the web vyvojari.seznam.cz where Seznam’s technological solutions are available free and it prepares significant improvements of selected services and their functions. For example, Seznam Browser (Prohlížeč) will be provided the new translator and Sport.cz will be fundamentally redesigned. In addition, Seznam.cz prepares construction of its second own data centre called Nagoja which should be built in Benátky nad Jizerou within two years.