Afrihost and Axxess dominate Webafrica and Mweb
PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report showed that Afrihost and Axxess have a big lead over their main competitors, Webafrica and Mweb.
Afrihost and Webafrica are the two largest independent Internet service providers (ISPs) in South Africa.
Afrihost was founded in 1999 by Gian Visser, Brendan Armstrong, and Peter Meintjes. Greg Payne, Angus MacRobert, and Dean Suchard joined later as directors.
In 2009, Afrihost transitioned from a boutique hosting company to a broadband powerhouse by offering affordable ADSL data.
This is widely considered one of the most successful disruptor stories in South African business history and laid the foundation for exceptional growth.
Over the next seventeen years, Afrihost rapidly grew its subscriber base and invested in Axxess, Cool Ideas, and Home Connect.
It is known for its customer centricity and, along with Axxess, has won MyBroadband’s ISP of the Year award more than any other ISP.
Webafrica, like Afrihost, was founded as a hosting company. The people behind the company’s early success were Matthew Tagg and Rupert Bryant.
Webafrica followed a very similar trajectory to Afrihost, evolving from a niche hosting company into a large consumer broadband player.
In 2011, Tim Wyatt-Gunning took over as CEO. Under his leadership, the company aggressively transitioned into the fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) market.
Webafrica showed rapid growth and became one of South Africa’s largest independent ISPs. In 2023, it further expanded by acquiring Mweb from Dimension Data.
This was particularly significant because Mweb was once the dominant force that Webafrica and Afrihost fought to disrupt in the late 2000s.
Today, Webafrica is led by CEO Sean Nourse and remains one of the largest independent ISPs in the country, headquartered in Cape Town.
Afrihost and Axxess beat Webafrica and Mweb
PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report showed that Afrihost and Axxess achieved much better media sentiment scores than Webafrica and Mweb.
PressPulse is an online media-sentiment tracking platform that developed a custom artificial intelligence (AI) system for measuring sentiment.
It tracks South Africa’s top business publications and measures companies’ success in achieving positive exposure in them.
The sentiment ranking is based on the number of positive, neutral, or negative articles and the reach and influence of the publication where they are published.
Each company is assigned a sentiment score. A positive score indicates overall positive exposure, while a negative score indicates negative exposure.
The score’s size indicates the impact of the exposure. A big positive score, for example, shows that a company enjoyed highly impactful positive exposure.
Press Pulse’s sentiment analysis for South Africa’s ISP sector showed that Afrihost topped the rankings with a positive score of 54.
Axxess, which is still led by its founders, Franco Barbalich and Andrew Simpson, was second with a positive score of 31.
Afrihost and Axxess ensure they receive consistent, positive exposure, which keeps them top of mind and helps them achieve growth.
Webafrica and Mweb, in comparison, struggle to get any exposure at all. In the case of Mweb, most of its exposure is negative.
The chart below provides an overview of PressPulse’s media sentiment report for the four ISPs.
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