Subscribers to Canal Sport no longer have access since Friday to the digital content of the Team, the latter having stopped its partnership with the encrypted channel, which is no longer sufficiently profitable, despite the loss of 200,000 digital subscribers, explained its director general, Laurent Prud’homme, at Les Échos on Friday.
“After discussion with Canal, we have decided to end the inclusion of L’Équipe’s digital content in the Canal Sport offer,” said the manager of the sports media group, returning to a decision reported at the end of July by the encrypted channel to its customers. “This distribution system by inclusion was justified when we were a simple sports information site,” said Laurent Prud’homme. But “we have become a real digital platform with varied content” and “the revenue per subscriber that we were getting from this agreement was no longer enough to monetize our investments in this value-added content”, he assured.
By making such a choice, the team loses some 200,000 digital subscribers and therefore sees its fleet drop to 150,000, according to figures reported by Les Echos and confirmed by the sports media group to AFP. But “we are moving towards a strategy of value and no longer volume”, justifies Laurent Prud’homme. The group, which has already withdrawn from the Cafeyn digital kiosk at the end of August 2022, does not abandon third-party distribution. The Team thus remains “distributed in the Bouygues Telecom sports pack (since mid-2022) and could be distributed tomorrow by other operators”, specify the Echoes.
With operating income up in 2022 (6.4 million euros compared to 4.1 million euros in 2021), the media group intends to take advantage of the year particularly rich in sporting events that will inaugurate, from the next week, the Rugby World Cup organized in France. Sales of the newspaper l’Équipe exceeded 215,000 copies per day in 2022, up 0.6% compared to 2021, according to the Alliance for Press and Media Figures (ACPM). The group also claims 2.5 million unique visitors per day for its digital platform.
