Daily Mail Acquired a Prominent Serbian Social Network

We are definitely watching some motion finally starting to emerge in the internet business in Eastern Europe with today’s news of a new acquisition for Daily Mail in the region being a new confirmation of the trend. The lucky one today is Poznanici.com, a Serbian social network that now belongs to Daily Mail by 51%. The amount of the deal is not disclosed.

Poznanici.com is a rather popular social network in Serbia as it has over 100 thousand registered users from Serbia and other ex-Yugoslavian counties and gets more than 85k unique visits and 1.5 million views daily which proves the users loyalty pretty well as the site is visited by a vast majority of its registered users on a daily basis.

In fact, Daily Mail is rather active in the Serbian internet business already: earlier this year DMGT group (Daily Mail and General Trust is what it stands for) already bough 25% of Infostud, the largest job site in the country. They also had other acquisitions in the region: earlier this year the company also bought Posao.ba, the biggest job site in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

Web properties now owned by DMGT in the region also include Moj-Posao.net, the most popular Croatian job site. After buying this site DMGT became the owner of the In!Media group which owns and manages many other top Croatian websites such as the niche social network Tulumarka.com, auto site 4kotaca.net, real estate CentarNenkretnina.net and many others in addition to its flagship property Moj-Posao.

I myself have mixed feelings about big international players entering the local internet markets in the Eastern European countries as I think it could be better to see companies getting funded by local investors and earning money off their local users but if this is the only way that internet startups can survive in the region and get the money for further development, I think there is nothing wrong with it. After all, the startups should think about their development first of all - and if such acquisitions help the overall internet industry in the region, it is definitely good news.