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African Bloggers Not Finding Internet Gold, Yet

African Bloggers Not Finding Internet Gold, Yet

The magnitude of Africa Daily Groupe is underscored by the fact that Blay fully self-funded the venture. Blay isn’t opposed to corporate sponsors backing African media sites, but she also believes that African digital media and blogging is currently at its purest form, as African businesses and corporations haven’t yet begun pouring their money into the industry.

“What’s going on right now is alchemy. What’s going on right now is magic, and the moment it takes a more organized structure, is the moment the magic dies and the alchemy stops,” Blay said.

African blogger Freedes Em of popular cooking site My Burnt Orange entered the African blogging space precisely because she wanted some organized structure; she wanted to build her brand and create a cookbook.

The London-based blogger — born in Botswana and of Ghanaian heritage — works in the rail and infrastructure industry by day and loves to throw dinner parties by night, so much so that friends started calling her Martha Stewart.

“It suddenly dawned on me, ‘Why not create a cookbook?'” Freedes said. “I love to cook, and I gave myself six months to create this book, but a year had passed, and it hadn’t happened. I thought if I created the blog, it would keep the momentum going so the book doesn’t get tucked behind a pile of laundry.”

Freedes has already started talks with publishers, fresh off the momentum of her website, which also has a YouTube channel. Freedes says her three largest markets are the U.S.,  the U.K. and Canada, but she’s also logging hits from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Nearly 40 percent of traffic on her YouTube channel comes from mobile users, which she believes are from African subscribers.

Blogger Mawuna Koutonin of African tech blog SiliconAfrica is less optimistic about the Internet’s ability to harness business for Africans.

About 30 percent of Koutonin’s traffic comes from Africa, but he points out that when you consider illiteracy rates on the continent, bloggers who use almost exclusively text-based formats are limiting themselves to a niche audience of city hipsters and Africans in the diaspora.

He also believes that because they don’t quite understand the digital world,  it’ll be a while before African businessmen start pumping money into online ventures. Radio, which for the average African consumer is easily understood and accessible, is currently gripping the continent, Koutonin said.

Still, Koutonin has received invitations to write paid endorsements for companies — mostly from search engine optimization companies, telecommunications companies and poker websites. He’s rejected those offers because like Blay, he wants to keep his site as authentic as possible.

“I only write about stuff and people I love,” Koutonin said. “I’d accept sponsorship from those companies and people.”

Nmachi Jidenma, who works for a Silicon Valley-based African startup called Yola, founded African business, technology and culture blog Celebrating Progress Africa in 2009. The ambitious venture grew from content she posted on her Facebook wall to a highly regarded site that has over 15,000 email subscribers.

While Jidenma is also circumspect about the extent to which African digital media sites can currently rely on the African business world to help them grow, she does have faith that as the global digital media industry continues to experiment with monetization models, the African industry will boom.

She said, “I do believe that in the next few years online publishers will have hopefully figured out creative ways in which brands can speak directly to their audience — without compromising the digital publisher’s integrity.”