{"id":39697,"date":"2011-12-12T12:01:42","date_gmt":"2011-12-12T10:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=39697"},"modified":"2011-12-12T16:43:47","modified_gmt":"2011-12-12T14:43:47","slug":"afrigator-closed-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/39697-afrigator-closed-down.html","title":{"rendered":"Afrigator closed down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Afrigator<\/a>, an African social media aggregator which was launched in 2007, closed down on 1 December 2011.<\/p>\n

Afrigator was launched in the golden age of blogging in South Africa, and at its peak the website indexed thousands of African blogs, podcasts and videos.<\/p>\n

In September 2008 the Naspers<\/a> division MIH Print Africa acquired a majority stake in Afrigator which brought additional funding and further developed the Afrigator platform. However, the relationship did not last, and the owners of Afrigator bought back their shares at a later stage.<\/p>\n

Afrigator also ran Adgator \u2013 an advertising network launched in late 2008 which helped African blogs to monetise their traffic through a service similar to Google<\/a> Adsense. Adgator closed down in September 2011.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbout two months ago we closed Adgator down due to declining revenue and a core shift in focus for the four shareholders involved. Due to all of us having other interests Adgator became more of a burden than asset,\u201d explained Afrigator founder Justin Hartman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Justin<\/a>

Justin Hartman<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cAfrigator was closed down essentially to avoid the recurring costs of running the operation. The hosting bill to run Afrigator (across a pretty intense server structure) was just too high when you consider our primary revenue stream was closed down a few months earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s been 4 years and 9 months since Afrigator started and while it’s a sad time for all of us concerned it was coming and needed to be done. Businesses don’t fail – people give up and this is true about Afrigator. As soon as our focus shifted we could no longer focus on growing Afrigator.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hartman is currently the CEO of SocialCode, a digital agency which he founded in 2010 that offers a range of digital services for clients which include UNICEF, Hyundai, SuperSport, Remgro, Vodacom<\/a> and Distell.<\/p>\n

Afrigator is however not the only \u2018Web 2.0\u2019 startup which did not last.\u00a0 Muti, an African bookmarking website similar to Digg and Reddit, changed into an online directory recently.<\/p>\n

Despite receiving numerous accolades locally and internationally, Muti failed to attract the critical mass needed to make a social networking website successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well known blog aggregator Afrigator closed its doors on 1 December citing the cost of running the website<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[7397,35,7395,7401,7399],"class_list":["post-39697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-afrigator","tag-headline","tag-justin-hartman","tag-muti","tag-socialcode"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39703,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39697\/revisions\/39703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}