CTC Media, a major Russian media company, yesterday announced the acquisition of a majority stake in CarambaTV, a producer of digital and transmedia content. CTC Media acquired a 51% stake for 148 million rubles (approximately $2.2 million at the current exchange rate).
The transaction included the Carambatv.ru and +100500 websites, which together attract over 2 million unique visitors each month with humorous video content. CarambaTV’s videos generate over 75 million views per month, including 20 million views of online content, the company claims.
“The acquisition of CarambaTV is the next logical step in our strategy to develop our digital and transmedia businesses. We see an opportunity for the additional monetization of our existing channels by consolidating traffic and exchanging content with CarambaTV,” stated CTC Media CEO Yuliana Slashcheva.
Major Russian companies have been showing more and more interest in video content and streaming recently, notes Rusbase.com. In 2014, Rostelecom acquired RuTube, Zoomby and Now.ru, and Yandex purchased “Kinopoisk”, which it is preparing to re-launch in 2015.
The fast-growing Russian video advertising market amounted to 1.9 billion rubles (approximately $55 million at that time’s exchange rate) in the first half of last year, reports Kommersant, citing figures from Gazprom Media Digital.
CTC Media manages four television channels in Russia (CTC, Domashny, Peretz and CTC Love) as well as Channel 31 in Kazakhstan and a TV company in Moldova with combined audience over 150 million viewers. The international version of CTC Channel is available in North America, Europe, Central Asia, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Middle East and Kyrgyzstan. The international version of Peretz is available in Belarus in Kyrgyzstan as well. CTC Media also owns several digital entertainment media assets including videomore.ru, domashniy.ru, ctc.ru and peretz.ru. CTC Media is publicly traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol CTCM.
