Storytel had a very active and very reading public, let’s say “nuclear”, whom we loved and understood very much and whose tastes we knew well. As far as I can see now, none of the remaining services managed to fully capture this audience after us, it dissipated and, it seems to me, this is, to some extent, a step back, to 2018. Of course, now two new players and very large have entered the market at once, the updated Bookmate (Yandex) and the MTS book service, but it seems to me that they will have to do the work of assembling this active and beautiful audience accustomed to audio consumption into a whole.
On the other hand, this is a completely different level of work with the audience, these are all great ecosystems, a kind of market where you can listen to a book and watch a movie at the same time and, of course, they will do it. build work with readers in a completely different way. But I’m pretty optimistic here. Literally today at the Eksmo conference, the Wildberry market was called the main growth engine for book sales, and you can probably laugh as much as you like about the fact that people throw pepper plaster, hyacinth bulbs, ointment ski and a book on the deal. in the basket, but I don’t see anything wrong with that. So I don’t think the market has really lost anything here; rather, it is now being rebuilt, and this, of course, is not always the most pleasant process, but during changes it is probably much easier to start something new than when you need to break a solid and already established system.
