YouScribe, a France-based next-generation reading service provider owned by Orange and operating in Africa, has expanded its offering to Ghana. The platform partnered with Digital Virgo, a leading mobile payments specialist, and MTN Ghana, to roll out in the West African nation.
Ghana is the second English-speaking country that YouScribe is making inroads into. In June 2021, it launched in South Africa, also working with MTN’s operations in the market. Because of its French roots, the service dominates in French-speaking Africa.
French-speaking users currently account for 90% of its African subscriber base, with footprints in countries such as Morocco and Ivory Coast, respectively its first and second largest markets.
Entering Ghana with its English-language content will tap into the country’s growing digital subscription market, which is expected to reach 6.1 million users by 2027.
This base is supported by high smartphone penetration, which stands at 99.7% as of Q3 2023. The growth also coincides with the growth of Ghana’s digital publishing sector. Sales have increased fivefold since 2018, reaching $35 million this year.
YouScribe claims to have more than 1 million audio and e-books, newspapers, press titles and educational documents in its 13-year catalog. Since its inception, it has amassed over 1 million subscribers and has become the largest French digital library in the world. In Africa it has a presence in at least 11 countries.
For a daily fee, readers can access the entire directory. In South Africa, the service costs $0.19 (R3) per day for users on the MTN network. For Ghana, it starts at around $0.056 (GH₵ 0.75). With this low-cost model, he managed to gain hundreds of thousands of subscribers in Africa.
According to YouScribe, its users have grown twentyfold in the last 4 years, reaching over 1.5 million readers worldwide, of which over 95% are in Africa.
“The launch of YouScribe in Ghana is an important and ambitious step in our ambition to connect cultures through a multilingual digital library with authors from across the continent. We are very proud to be able to promote Ghanaian culture in our library,” said YouScribe Founder and CEO Juan Pirlot de Corbion.