Company Seznam.cz reports the revenues of CZK 5.928 billion for the year 2022

Compared to 2021, revenues of the company Seznam.cz increased by 5.8% to almost CZK 5.93 billion. On contrary, the Czech internet leader’s pre-tax profits amounted to CZK 1.284 billion, i.e. 34.5% drop year-on-year. The decrease in profits was due not only to rising costs related to the current economic situation, but also to significant personnel investments, which were up by almost 8% compared to 2021, and a change in the company’s ownership structure due to the spin-off.

“Considering the market situation, I think we managed the last year above expectations. Although our profits declined due to the unfavourable economic situation and rising costs, we were able to grow in revenues. However, this year we expect our revenues to stagnate, precisely due to the impact of the energy crisis or the ongoing war conflict in Ukraine,” comments Pavel Zima, member of the Board of Directors of Seznam.cz. He adds that the decrease in profits is also due to the spin-off of a part of its assets to the newly created entity Seznam Zprávy, a.s., and nearly eight percent higher personnel costs.

Among product innovations, it is worth mentioning the launch of a new blogging platform Seznam Médium and a new version of the service Volnámísta.cz, which aggregates most of the available advertisements from direct employers into one place using advanced neural models and machine learning. Email.cz remains the Czech leader and is trying to strengthen this position by developing a business solution in the form of Email Profi. Last year, the anti-spam solution of the service was improved. Mapy.cz made further progress in navigation, resulting in the 24% increase in the number of navigations, and significantly boosted user engagement in the form of a large increase in user reviews. The homepage of Seznam.cz has significantly expanded the content formats in its service Newsfeed, which in addition to articles and videos also displays photo galleries, caricatures, podcasts and newly also user-generated content in the form of discussion posts and texts from Seznam Médium. New functions have also been added to the application Seznam.cz, where a podcast and email module has been deployed.

In e-commerce, Seznam.cz grew year-on-year, despite the market downturn. By the end of the year it recorded the 99% increase (compared YoY) in client investment in product advertising in Vyhledávání. The better relevance of Zboží advertising has increased the number of product ad impressions, thereby increasing traffic on client webs.

The social ecosystem of Seznam and the development of content services

While the market for content websites began to decline noticeably last year, Seznam.cz maintained its year-on-year traffic. The social ecosystem based on discussions contributed to it. Users contributed to it by the record number of posts – 18 million and by 200 million ratings during the year.

Listening to Seznam Zprávy audio recorded significant year-on-year growth by 152% compared to 2021. Podcast plays on the Seznam Zprávy website grew by 36% year-on-year, number of downloads in third-party applications grew by 255% and number of plays on Podcasty.cz grew by 944%. Televize Seznam also achieved record viewership during the Christmas holidays. The programme aired at the end of the year delivered it a record reach of 3.43 million viewers and the monthly share 1.92% (according to ATO-Nielsen Admosphere, December 2022, target group: 15-69 years, live+TS0-3). The number of video creators publishing on Stream.cz increased to over 300 and the monthly number of published videos exceeded 2,000. In terms of content, Stream.cz has focused more on offering movies and documentaries.

Expanded Board of Directors and new divisions

Seznam.cz expanded its board of directors in 2022 – Pavel Zima, Ondřej Procházka and Tomáš Kapalín were joined by Ondřej Krišica and Matěj Hušek. At the same time, organisational changes were made, which resulted in the creation of several new divisions – Domovské stránky, Videoslužby, Obsahové služby and sociální ekosystém, Reklamní systémy and Identity and User Profile. “The objective of the last-mentioned division is to build the best relevant knowledge of Czech users and distribute it to personalize Seznam’s services and advertising. We have developed a new way of targeting based on user behaviour similarity and invested significantly in the development of our own ID graph. We also completed the deployment of technology for monetizing unblocked space on all Seznam services which fact resulted in the 200% year-on-year increase in turnover from this space. In content recommendation, we switched from a linear logistic regression model to a neural network, which not only increased performance and quality metrics for us and our partners, but also opened up great opportunities for development that were not possible with the original model,” explains Ondřej Krišica, member of the Board of Directors of Seznam.cz.

Since the last year, Seznam.cz has been also operating in Slovakia, where it currently employs 22 people. The construction of the second data centre called Nagoja, which was opened in March this year, has also continued.