Media Outlets Stream Video To Young People As Billionaires Pile In

Having attracted the backing of another billionaire, which brings the number of billionaires who have supported the company to four, a young media company whose videos are focused on youth has posted another fast-paced video each week.

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In an interview with the Financial Times, Brut CEO Guillaume Lacroix discloses that French shipping tycoon Rodolphe Saade has become an investor in an operation whose name means raw, or unprocessed. Brut is a six-year-old startup.

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While on a trip to China, Saade told Trade Algo separately that he had acquired a 16% stake in the media company he is running while on a trip to France. He began amassing media assets in France in the last few months.

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The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported last year that the CMA CGM chief executive officer and his family have an estimated worth of $22.4 billion.

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The latest investment in Brut comes from Jameh Saade, younger son of News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, Xavier Niel, a French telecom billionaire, and Francois-Henri Pinault, owner of Gucci.

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Since Brut was founded in February 2012, they have raised a total of $153 million in funding.

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There are about 500 million unique viewers on the platform on a monthly basis, which makes it one of the most visited platforms, according to Lacroix. A recent funding round, which included digital asset start-up MoonPay, brought in about $43.7 million.

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The investment by Brut is just one of many examples of how ultrawealthy investors who made fortunes in other sectors have redirected their attention to investing in media companies, often in an attempt to gain more influence and prestige.

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It was a decade ago when Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, purchased the Washington Post, and it was more recently when Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff purchased Time magazine.

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It is noteworthy that in Europe, some of the most influential newspapers are controlled by families of the Aggnelli automobile group, including John Elkann of the Agnelli corporation, as well as the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and La Stampa, while luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault controls the influential French newspaper Les Echos and Le Parisien.

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As Arnault's outlets struggle to maintain editorial independence, Brut is planning to raise a substantial amount of funding.

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According to the journalist guild at Les Echos, the editor-in-chief's departure was likely due to the ownership's involvement and it was raised last month as a possible reason for it.

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According to Le Parisien's newspaper guild, the coverage of French President Emmanuel Macron's government's implementation of pension reform in the midst of the ongoing political crisis has been unfavorably biased towards him.

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Brut maintains a niche position as a news-related company that is mainly dependent on social media for the distribution of its content, rather than legacy publications.

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Located in what was once a dowdy street of the French capital, the company's headquarters are located within a refurbished former shopping mall.

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Our fundraising has validated the robustness of our business model because we are trying to build a global champion." Lacroix explained. "We are trying to build a global champion."

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Founded in 2013 by entrepreneur Lacroix and two French television executives with the stated values of protecting minorities, feminism, ecology, and education, the company promotes its own self-described "media for new generations."

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In France and India, Lacroix said that Brut has already reached its goal of being profitable for this year, and has already achieved it in those countries.

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The company has also grown into the U.S. and India, and it makes money by selling advertisements and through deals with retailers like Carrefour, which created the 'Brut Shop,' a web-based shopping site that allows consumers to make purchases online.

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Since the company began distributing short videos on social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, Brut has shifted to Snapchat and TikTok and launched its own app and website.

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There have been changes in many social media algorithms recently that have made it harder to reliably reach large audiences. Because of this, Brut had to adapt its business model in order to remain competitive.

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A pay-per-view section called 'BrutX' which has long-form documentaries will debut in 2021, as a competitor to Netflix's subscription service.

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Despite the fact that it was expected to have millions of subscribers, the service has only attracted less than 100,000 instead of the million that was expected.

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In the aftermath of the 2018 Yellow Vest protests and Macron's interviews, Brut gained more notoriety in France for its live coverage of the demonstrations and interviews.

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It was on this platform that the French president attempted to connect with young people in the year 2020, as well as in the two years after that during his presidential campaign.

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It has been tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers that have viewed Brut's TikTok page in recent weeks as he documents protests in France over pension reforms.

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The live coverage included a live coverage of police introducing themselves to demonstrators and the lighting of garbage piles in opposition to them.

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A large investment from Saade in Brut is a confirmation of Saade's intentions to acquire more media assets, which he signaled months ago.

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The significant stake he has acquired in French broadcaster M6 has come after he bought a 10% stake in the regional newspaper La Provence, located in Marseille, home to the city's container liner company strongly linked to his family.

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Saade, who was on a business delegation accompanying Macron on a state visit to China at the time, told a reporter that Brut offers quite a few good solutions and that is why the company decided to invest 16% in this media.

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In the Bloomberg wealth index, Niel has an estimated net worth of $7.7 billion, which can be attributed to his personal holding, NJJ, among the first investors in Brut.

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After resigning from News Corp.'s board in 2020, Murdoch’s investment in Brut is viewed as a pivot from News Corp.’s original strategy and news judgment that finally led to his resignation.

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His company Lupa Systems has been in the business for more than ten years and he is the founder and CEO of the company.

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There is an important reason for Lacroix to think that Brut can be a more independent company because of its ownership by some 20 investors.

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Brut media is totally independent from its shareholders in terms of its editorial output, in order to maintain the independence of the company, and the company's shareholders have always respected this independence, and they would never take any measures to threaten it.