Built in Africa focuses on entrepreneurs, startups
and technologies that are born on the continent
and empower the continent’s citizens.

Online communities and discussion platforms are
the cornerstone of the internet. In this second
instalment of our “Built in Africa” series, we
feature one of the most prominent online
communities to come out of Africa – Nairaland –
and its founder Seun Osewa.

In Africa you don’t really hear about forums or
insanely popular platforms (which work like
Reddit or Craig’s List) that are built in Africa for
an African market. Africans are active on forums,
but those these are generally part of other
networks, such as gaming, chat and specialised
groups. Nairaland is the exception.

I first came across Nairaland while at university
— all the Nigerian expats used it to connect with
home, keep up with the local gossip and be part
of the society that seemed so far away.

The platform is an online community targeted at
Nigerians, and with more than 1 198 439
registered accounts, it is currently ranked as the
seventh most visited site in Nigeria according to
Alexa.com. The site receives more than 6-million
unique users from around 16-million visits, and it
reportedly has more than 60-million pageviews
monthly.

Building a multi-million dollar internet empire
The founding of the platform and the company
that followed happened almost by chance.

“The process that led to the decision to start
Nairaland started when I stumbled on a website
called hotornot.com,” Osewa tells me.

The idea of rating the opposite sex (and seeing
how other people rated as well) was a simple
concept that Osewa got addicted to very quickly.
Soon enough a business idea was born.

“I learnt that the creators of the site made money
by selling ads on it. That was the first time I
realised that one could make money by building a
popular site and selling ads on it,” he says.

The first iteration of Nairaland was born.

The journey to monetisation was a little trickier
for the new community. The task for Osewa was
figuring out how to make money out of the
growing traffic. Learning about ad networks and
how they could help him circumvent having to
sell ad space directly to clients was key.

“I read a blog post titled “blogging for dollars”
where a blogger described how he made
thousands of dollars monthly by just joining the
biggest advertising network,” he says. “This was
essential, because using an ad network allowed
me to focus on growing Nairaland’s traffic
knowing that if I could make Nairaland popular, I
would automatically make a lot of money. It
allowed me to be focused on traffic.”

It was only years later that Osewa began to
introduce the idea of forums to the site as mobile
telephony became popular in Nigeria. At the time,
Osewa says that “the government had just allowed
private telecom companies to build GSM
networks”.

I noticed that the forum had something no
other Nigerian forum had at the time — it
was focused on issues that Nigerians at
home cared about. Other Nigerian forums
online focused on issues only Nigerians
living outside cared about, like racism and
US politics, but on that little forum, we
discussed truly Nigerian issues.

For the internet entrepreneur, this was the last
piece of the puzzle to his multi-million dollar
empire. So instead of just a rating site, he decided
to build a forum that all Nigerians at home and
abroad would care about and use.

According to Osewa, the goal was to gain enough
traffic to be able to turn a profit through
advertising. What happened, however, surprised
him.

“I didn’t expect it to become the most visited
Nigerian/African website and hold that position
for many years,” he says. “That was a pleasant
surprise.”

Monetisation challenges
As the site became more popular it would make
sense that Osewa would reach his goal — to make
a lot of money via ads. As it turns out, it’s not
that easy.

“Initially, monetising the forum was very easy,”
he explains. “I had some previous experience with
the best online advertising network available at
the time, so I knew that they could convert
traffic into money reliably.”

Osewa and his team would focus on making
Nairaland more successful, and in return the ad
network would reward them with impressive
cheques every month. It seemed simple enough.

“It wasn’t entirely cost-free, of course: we were
required to censor our content to make sure that
nothing they didn’t approve of would appear on
any page of Nairaland. Some of our members
didn’t like this censorship — nobody likes to be
censored — but we thought it was a small price
and didn’t really have any choice, anyway.”

But censorship wasn’t the only problem that the
platform had to find a way around — it was also
becoming a victim of its own success.

As the platform grew bigger it became harder for
the team to guarantee that none of its millions of
pages wouldn’t contain any content that the
advertising network didn’t approve of.

The team scrambled to “more aggressively”
censor what they could in order to remain part of
the ad networks but in end it was no impossible
— the members of the community would have
the final say.

So the ad network “kicked us out for good,”
recalls Osewa.
In the end getting kicked out did wonders for the
platform, as the team decided that it would be
better to build their own ad platform and keep
Nairaland as free of censorship as possible.

Always solve the problems people complain
about
“Problems worth solving are usually the ones that
people complain about all the time,” Osewa says
when I ask where African innovators should focus
their talents.

He argues that it really is that simple when it
comes to innovating.

When you this from a Nigerian perspective, the
problems that need solving become glaringly
obvious. Nigerians and Nigerian Twitter are
concerned about power and the cost and lack of
electricity.

“We complain about power all the time. We
complain about the cost of buying, running,
fueling and maintaining the small generators that
every business must buy in order to be able to
get anything done.”

Nigerians are also concerned about the cost of
travelling outside the country and the current
healthcare standards.

“We complain about having to travel out of the
country, which few of us can afford, and to get
good healthcare if faced with challenging medical
conditions.”

Nairaland and the future
When it comes to Nairaland, Osewa feels that
doing the same thing over and over in different
locations makes no sense — which is why he feels
that Nairaland is likely to remain a very Nigerian
forum and not expand to other parts of the
continent.

“For Nairaland to expand outside Nigeria, we’d
have to change the essence of what Nairaland is
about,” he tells me, and that’s just something he
will not do.
Michelle Atagana: Managing Editor of Built in Africa

http://ventureburn.com/2014/04/built-in-africa-seun-osewa-and-the-most-popular-site-in-nigeria/

Wow. Simple focus point, Discussing issues Nigerians at home cared about.

But I know Seun, he's a stubborn boy, posts like this will soon be closed

.

.

interesting! small boy with big brain
well, just keep thanking God for giving u such a great ideal

Ecclesiastes 9:11
I returned, and saw
under the sun, that the
race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the
strong, neither yet
bread to the wise, nor
yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet
favour to men of skill;
but time and chance
happeneth to them all.



that nairaland is the most visited forum in Africa doesn't make u the smartest Yoruba man out there

its because its ur time to shine