As global technology giants like Google and Facebook transition from helping people navigate the web to become content providers in their own right, at least one smaller competitor is keeping pace – the Czech firm Seznam.

Playing with the big boys is nothing new for the Prague-based tech company, which is notable for being one of the last Western search companies to compete head-to-head with Google in its own market, maintaining a majority market share in the Czech Republic until at least 2011 (domestic search engines still top Google in Russia, China and South Korea, but nowhere else). Twenty years after its founding, Seznam (which means “list” in Czech) now looks a full-fledged media company, launching an in-house news service in October, hiring away top journalists from legacy media and bolstering an already formidable stable of offerings beyond search. 

“The whole digital industry all around the world has realised is that it is not the technology that matters, but the content,” Seznam’s deputy CEO Michal Feix tells bne IntelliNews. “This is what you hear no matter whether you are: here, in Asia or Silicon Valley.”   

With revenues of CZK3.4bn (€126mn) in 2015, up 9% from the year before, and CZK1.25bn in pre-tax profit, that strategy is clearly winning out. Earlier this year, Seznam’s board bought back a 30% stake from the American company Tiger Holding Four and Japan’s Miura International. Along with the 70% share held by founder Ivo Lukacovic, the company is now entirely Czech owned and it’s this local focus that Seznam uses to beat the multinationals at home, Feix says. “We look for all those small but very important differences where our competition will never have a chance,” he adds.

In practice, this means staying competitive with Google on basic searches, but also transitioning toward services that cater to Czechs. The Seznam maps app is updated more frequently than Google’s and also includes detailed information for the country’s myriad hiking trails. Even before the new news operation launched, online programming and streaming classic films targeted Czech language audiences. 

Still, in 2016 most online business is all about collecting and utilising data. Indeed 40% of Seznam’s revenues still come from online ad sales, which relies on matching advertisements with likely customers using data. Like Google, Seznam counts on keeping users inside a self-contained ecosystem – with entertainment, maps, email service and news – to gobble up data, and then sell them stuff.

Novinky news

While Seznam may use its local expertise to differentiate itself from Google and Facebook in the service sector, they leverage technological supremacy to challenge established Czech media outlets with their new Seznam Zpravý (Seznam News) venture. Though Seznam already oversaw the country’s most popular online news site, Novinky.cz, the launch of the new news operation is a leap in ambition. “We don’t want to create a copy of an agency news service,” editor-in-chief Jakub Unger says.

Seznam Zpravý features a constant – a la Facebook – news stream, featured documentary reports and a nightly news broadcast. The push for live streaming on location video reporting forced Seznam to overhaul its so-called “content delivery network”, as well as tweak delivery systems to better deliver content to a variety of mobile devices and to users on networks with varying connection speeds. This tech advantage, as well as a readymade audience in the hundreds of thousands, looks set to shake up a staid media landscape.

In another parallel with Facebook, Seznam has moved to partner with existing media to funnel content into its news feed. Whereby Facebook has teamed up with American media like The New York Times and NBC News, or European brands like the BBC and Bild to post “instant articles”, Seznam is looking for something similar with the Czech edition of Forbes and the monthly magazine Reporter. That shift comes as an increasing number of people get their news directly from sites like Facebook with, for example, a recent study from the Pew Research Center finding that half of Americans get their political news from Facebook during the course of a week, about the same number as television.

Though such numbers look less conclusive on the Czech market, the trend is the same and Seznam has similar ambitions for the future. But Feix worries that regulatory hurdles posed by Brussels, on data privacy for example, will hinder the development of his and other European firms. In fact, Seznam for the most part sides with Google – a top competitor – as the California-based titan faces three separate anti-trust investigations in Brussels. “It’s not a question of accidentally supporting someone who is on the same side of the industry, but rather that our vision for doing things is the same,” Feix says. “Our problem is with Europe, not the United States.”

Amid European plans for a Digital Single Market, which is meant to create common rules across the 28-member states and contribute €415bn to the economy each year according to the European Commission, Feix remains skeptical of an approach that puts a new Brussels-centric regulatory framework in place before there is a sense of what a more liberalised market might look like. 

“If you start with your phone in the morning, how many applications do you use in the first three hours that are European?” Feix asks. “The US is playing in the first league and we are still the second division.”