Digital Digest, May

Havas majority shareholder braced for buyout; Facebook revenues soar despite growing crises

Havas set for €2.3bn Vivendi buyout

Vivendi SA, the French owner of Universal Music and Canal+, is set to complete the purchase of Bolloré Group’s 60% stake in Havas for €2.3bn (£1.94bn).

Vincent Bollore’s Group Bolloré currently has an approximate 60% stake in Havas and also owns a 20.4% stake in Vivendi.

James Wright, group chief operating officer of Havas Creative group said: “It’s been on the cards for a while and collaborating with Vivendi is something we’ve done for some time. It would put us in a unique position to benefit from the rapid convergence we are seeing between data, content and communication to further build market-leading innovative and effective client solutions.”

Facebook publishes Q1 results

The world’s favourite social networking company has begun 2017 in strong fashion as advertising sales grew by 51% to $7.9 billion.

“We had a good start to 2017,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO.

“We are continuing to build tools to support a strong global community.”

Monthly active Facebook users climbed to 1.94 billion people as of March 31st – a 17% increase on 2016. Mobile is the dominant means of access for Facebook users and mobile advertising revenues accounted for 85% of total ad revenue in Q1 2017.

However, chief financial officer David Wehner has warned that advertising revenue growth would “come down meaningfully over the course of 2017” – perhaps in no small part due to continued errors in overcharging their customers and confidence declines. In a recent blog post, Facebook said:

“During our regular reviews to ensure the accuracy of our systems, we recently found and fixed a bug that mis-attributed some clicks on video carousel ads as link clicks. This bug occurred when people were on mobile web browsers on smartphones — not on desktop or in the Facebook mobile app.”