This week, Lovin Malta acquired Love Malta.
Love Malta is not a small brand. It has 330,000 Instagram followers, 170,000 YouTube subscribers, and over 148 million cumulative views on YouTube. It has spent years telling the story of Malta and Gozo through the things that make people fall in love with the islands — the coves, the light, the festas, the people. It built a genuine following, internationally and locally, by doing one thing consistently and doing it well.
Lovin Malta is now its owner.
The combined group — Lovin Malta, Love Malta, DealToday, MeetInc — now has over 820,000 followers across its social channels, more than 100 million monthly views on Facebook and Instagram alone, and a content portfolio that covers every segment of the Maltese audience: news, youth, business, deals, and now lifestyle and culture. Jan Herzan, Love Malta's founder, will stay involved through the transition.
This is a significant development in the Maltese media landscape.
Almost none of Malta's other media outlets reported it.
The Misunderstood Investment
Before going further, a clarification is worth making because the coverage at the time got it slightly wrong and the misconception has persisted.
When Alexandre Dreyfus — the French entrepreneur behind blockchain platform Chiliz and fan engagement platform Socios.com — acquired a 72% stake in Lovin Malta in January 2025, the coverage described it as a €10 million acquisition. It was not. The €10 million is the total investment envelope of Qamar Ventures, Dreyfus's vehicle for investing in Malta's media, technology, entertainment, and sports sectors. The Lovin Malta stake was one part of a broader investment plan, not the price paid for that specific stake.
The distinction matters. Qamar Ventures is not a one-time buyer. It is a platform — a fund with a mandate to build a portfolio of Malta-focused digital assets. Lovin Malta was the anchor investment. Love Malta is the next acquisition. The pattern suggests there will be more.
Dreyfus has lived in Malta for 17 years. He built Chiliz here. He understands what Malta is — a small island with a disproportionate concentration of financial services, iGaming, technology, and international business, sitting at the intersection of European, Middle Eastern, and North African networks. He is not acquiring Maltese media brands because he is sentimental about the island. He is acquiring them because he understands what a dominant local media platform is worth in a market with those characteristics.
What the Portfolio Now Looks Like
The Lovin Malta group now operates five distinct verticals, each serving a different segment of the Maltese market.
Lovin Malta itself covers news, culture, and current affairs — the primary editorial voice and the brand that most people associate with the group. Freehour is Malta's largest student platform — in which Lovin Malta holds a minority stake — with one of the most engaged youth audiences on the island. DealToday is a deals and promotions platform serving both locals and tourists. MeetInc is a B2B corporate directory and professional community platform. Love Malta Eats, the food and dining vertical, joins the portfolio. And Love Malta brings lifestyle, nature, and culture content with a strong international dimension — particularly relevant for reaching audiences considering Malta as a destination.
The strategic logic is clear. A single advertiser or commercial partner can now reach every meaningful audience segment in Malta through one commercial relationship. Youth, professionals, tourists, deal-seekers, culture followers — all of them accessible through the Lovin Malta group. In a small market, that is a genuinely rare proposition. Most markets have audience fragmentation that makes aggregation difficult. Malta is small enough that consolidating its major digital audiences into a single group is actually achievable, and Lovin Malta appears to be executing that consolidation deliberately.
The Silence of the Competitors
Here is the thing about this story that deserves its own paragraph.
Lovin Malta's competitors — the other outlets and platforms that operate in the Maltese digital media space — largely did not cover this acquisition. A significant development in the competitive landscape of their own industry, and the response was silence.
I understand the instinct. It feels uncomfortable to write approvingly about a competitor's growth. It feels like giving them publicity they could use commercially. The path of least resistance is to not mention it and hope your audience doesn't notice.
This is a mistake, and it is one that reveals something about how Maltese media thinks about its own industry.
The Love Malta acquisition is news. It is news about the media landscape that your readers operate in, advertise in, and consume. Covering a competitor's significant move is not a gift to the competitor — it is your job. The readers who trust you to tell them what is happening in Malta deserve to know that the media environment they navigate just changed in a meaningful way.
FreeMalta did not exist when Dreyfus acquired his stake in Lovin Malta in January 2025. I am covering this acquisition now — not because I am cheerleading for a competitor, but because it is the right thing to do. This is an industry story, and industry stories belong in the publication that covers the industry.
Malta's other media outlets will note that FreeMalta covered this. They probably won't say so. That is their choice.
What Comes Next
Qamar Ventures has a €10 million mandate and, by the evidence of what it has done so far, an active acquisition strategy. Lovin Malta was the anchor. Love Malta is the second move.
The question for the rest of Malta's digital media landscape is what the endgame looks like. A group with this reach, this portfolio of verticals, and this commercial infrastructure has a significant structural advantage over standalone competitors operating without equivalent scale. Advertising budgets in a small market tend to concentrate. If a single group can offer reach across every audience segment, the case for splitting that budget across multiple independent operators becomes harder to make.
This is not unique to Malta. It is what media consolidation looks like in every small market where it happens. What is notable here is the speed and the clarity of the strategy. Dreyfus is not buying Lovin Malta and waiting. He is building a portfolio, acquisition by acquisition, vertical by vertical.
This is 2026. Lovin Malta is ten years old this year and celebrating with a year of giveaways — concerts, flights, cruises, signed Messi jerseys. The group has the commercial infrastructure to sustain that kind of consumer investment. That is not what a media brand in decline looks like.
FreeMalta will be watching.
FreeMalta is Malta's first AI-native intelligence platform and an Official OpenAI Select Partner. For more on Malta's business and media ecosystem, visit freemalta.com.
