Afrigator has closed down

You can thank the high cost of internet in Africa for that. Our penetration rate is so low...How can a web site targeted to African bloggers flourish in this day and age and when the average African has never even seen a YouTube clip? How?

Blame these so called Government "leaders" for their greed and corruption. It's a shame, I remember Afrigator way back, used to visit it a few times a week.
 
It's sad i'm in the industry yet I've never heard of afrigator! Too much money on dev and too little on marketing possibly?
 
Blogging is on a decline. Back in 2006 - 2008, there was an avid blogging community, but social media sites have pulled the focus away from the blogs. Everyone is on Facebook and twitter now.

It's also incredibly hard to make money from web ads in South Africa.
 
@BGE: did you ever hear of amatomu.com? That was the Mail & Guardian's blog aggregating project run by Vincent Maher and Matthew Buckland when they were employed by M&G. Amatomu was first and more popular than afrigator until amatomu folded after V&M left M&G.

Most SA bloggers knew about these services. The problem is funding. Afrigator shut down because it cost them too much in hosting fees on a monthly basis. They both operated on the "free principle" but they should not have. They should have levied a monthly / annual fee for a blogger to include their blogs in the index. That would also have eliminated most of the junk blogs that indexed themselves and injected spam postings into the listings.

Both amatomu and afrigator offered a valuable service to bloggers. both of those aggregators drove more local traffic to my blogs than all the search engines combined. Plus they offered a blog ranking service so blogs could prove to advertisers how popular they were.

If I were to create a blogging aggregator today, it would be a paid service from start and it's goal would be to drive traffic to the blogs and to display stats which are valuable to local advertisers. Then you can add an advertising service onto it, like afrigator did with adgator. But the whole thing has got to be cash positive from day one, and not rely on third party advertisers to pay the bills. The bloggers themselves must fund the service, because it is of huge benefit to them.
 
Amatomu is still going, albeit just. There is another newer blog aggregator called myScoop, it started a year back, offers real-time statistics and is growing by the day, its got just over a thousand local blogs registered on there at the moment.

As for paying for a service like that, if these aggregators should impose a levy to make use of the site it would not be as popular among local bloggers as it currently is, most bloggers do not make a dime, and unfortunately South Africans are not that generous when it comes to paying for online services.
 
VioAdmin said:
You can thank the high cost of internet in Africa for that. Our penetration rate is so low...How can a web site targeted to African bloggers flourish in this day and age and when the average African has never even seen a YouTube clip? How?

Blame these so called Government "leaders" for their greed and corruption. It's a shame, I remember Afrigator way back, used to visit it a few times a week.
Click to expand...

My first thought as well .. Africa left in the dark again due to incompetent/dishonest leaders while the world moves on.
 
If the aggregator offered significant traffic and good stats, plus the ability for advertisers to purchase ad spots, it would sell itself. Afrigator had a lot of these features, but eventually was overrun with spam post listings. When listing your blog is free, the index is easily compromised with low quality content (i.e. spam).

There is sufficient evidence to prove that the free model for these valuable online services is unsustainable for most companies, especially in South Africa which is a small market. When you only have about 15 million Internet users, you have to get them to pay for services aimed specifically for them.
 
Of course your hosting costs will be an issue if you close down your primary source of income... WTF kind of logic is that!?

If your primary income was too much of a "burden" to be an asset, consider the ramifications of now having to close down the site because of hosting costs... you'll soon notice that the "burden" is worth it. Hell, everyone struggles from time to time. Delete the ****ty spam and let Google Panda stroke your African-cock again. But no, they decide to shoot themselves in both feet... good luck running a company with that mentality...
 
I'm the owner of myScoop.co.za

Some insight into our world: We currently have just short of a thousand registered blogs. Around 20% of these blogs have tracking enabled which consumes insane amounts of processing power and memory. myScoop has over 1400 registered users. myScoop was only one eighth the size of Afrigator so I can just imagine what the operating costs were.

I'm currently just breaking even when I compare the AdSense advertising revenue to that of my operating costs.

I am in the process of creating and releasing a few new modules for myScoop that would offer something "unique", but then again, I need to find the time to finish these. One of these modules which is pretty much 90% complete is that myScoop can create a "rate card" for your blog where you can tell potential advertisers what sort of advertising you are offering on your blog, along with past statistics of your blog, recorded by myScoop and other sources. It also displays your current rank on myScoop along with your "user engagement rank" and other metrics. This idea originated whilst trying to come up with a way to monetize the site. Thoughts? Either I could charge the advertisers for the information, or the bloggers.

Would like to hear your thoughts on this.


Thanks
 
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