The recipe for blogging and journalistic success on the Internet is both simplistic and a little mystifying. You need a website, perhaps a camera, definitely a lot of ingenuity, and a strong network of supporters.
There are bloggers and digital media journalists who have all, or some combination of the four, yet their websites are largely unknown. At best the sites are part of vast blogging networks of colleagues who support each other — but receive little traffic from those outside the fold.
Then there are bloggers like Ree Drummond of cooking and lifestyle blog “The Pioneer Woman,” and Nate Silver of political blog “FiveThirtyEight.com,” who’ve been able to leverage their sites into multi-million dollar deals. Drummond is now host of her own Food Network cooking show, while Silver’s blog is now hosted by The New York Times.
So, how is the Internet treating African bloggers and digital media journalists?
Consider this statistic: 650 million Africans are mobile phone users according to the World Bank. This figure might seem a little irrelevant in a conversation about the Internet, but consider this other fact: the majority of Africans with Internet access reach the web through their mobile phones, giving African sites a potentially broad audience that of course, also includes readers in the diaspora.
A cursory Google search on any given day unveils reams of fashion, political and style blogs, websites and digital magazines that are tied to the continent. The names are too many to mention, and the majority of these sites seem to be created by Africans in the diaspora, but the most important takeaway is that Africans appear to be harnessing the Internet to wax creatively about the continent.
Dig deeper and you’ll notice that the majority of African blogs and digital media sites, from the most polished to the most amateur, display an astonishing lack of corporate sponsorship (or corporate sanitization, depending on your viewpoint).
This phenomenon begs the question: are African websites making money? Are African bloggers and journalists building empires? And is the African media space developed enough to support these ventures?
From a survey of four African journalists, bloggers and tech professionals, it appears that the concept of digital media as a revenue making tool is in its infancy.
Ghanaian journalist Zandile Blay is a digital media veteran who notched high recognition for her Vogue Magazine-recognized fashion news blog, “The Blay Report,” before branching into the African media space in 2009, when she created Africa Style Daily.
“Africa Style Daily” is an African-focused culture and entertainment website that has since influenced Blay’s most ambitious project to date: Blay recently repackaged “Africa Style Daily” and created the Africa Daily Groupe — an interconnected group of 12 different websites that focus on different themes. African food lovers can connect to Blay’s “Africa Food Daily.” Sports lovers can connect to “Africa Sports Daily.” There’s “Africa Travel Daily,” “Africa Technology Daily,” “Africa Business Daily,” to name a few. And of course, fashion lovers can connect to Blay’s “Africa Style Daily.”
“There are so many African sites that are launching, and they’re all different, smart, savvy, well traveled, and they’ll validate good content,” Blay said. “Africa Daily Groupe was inspired by (the) same motivation: good story telling, good people to profile, good content — and if you need that for fashion, you need that for technology, you need that for business, and you damn sure need that for food.”
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.”