Ghafla Profiled On An International Business Website
Ghafla is certainly going places. that has never been in doubt. If anything, third party analytics from Google have smashed any and every doubt anyone has ever had in the Ghafla strategy. And recently, a website that aggregates business information gave Mista Majani a call seeking to find out about Ghafla’s good fortune.
This was how the interview was:
Ghafla won’t win any journalism awards any time soon, but it’s evidence that some of the revenue models pioneered by a few American outlets are finding uptake elsewhere.
Kenya is attracting a good deal of attention from the Internet-inclined these days. It has seen a new wave of impact investors, entrances by IBM and Google, and musings that the country is primed for Bitcoin.
ghaflaThere’s also buzz around the popular entertainment news site, Ghafla, which is counting more than 1.2 million monthly uniques four years since it launched, according to founder Sam Majani. These metrics make Ghafla the country’s most popular entertainment news site, and Majani says he’s making 13 times what he spends on operations for a profit of over 90 percent.
His secret?
Majani told me he tries to take the best practices from U.S. media companies figuring out their business models. He relies on sponsored content and daily deals and runs a shop that is “very, very lean,” he says. Ghafla’s expenses are low, less than $15,000 per year. Majani says it costs $225 per month for rent and Internet bills combined. He saves some money by sharing a dedicated web server with an uncle, and pays his five employees a few hundred dollars a month apiece. (Though this may seem on par with Kenya’s average annual salary of about $1,700 a year, using average salary as a benchmark in a country that’s home to many of the world’s poorest people is a problematic measure.)
“Everyone at Ghafla gets paid. It’s just that it’s not a lot,” Majani said in a February interview. “On the bright side, I’m positive we’ll be able to pay reasonable salaries by the end of this year.”
That confidence may stem from the fact that Ghafla is netting some $20,000 a month, Majani says. The lion’s share of revenue — about 60 percent — comes from banner-ad deals with major sponsors like the French telecom company Orange and the national utility Kenya Power. Around 20 or 25 percent of revenue comes from sponsored content, especially event posts. About 10 percent comes from running ads on social media, Facebook and Twitter, where his pages have combined followings of nearly 150,000. The rest comes from a “Daily Deals” partnership with a ticket-selling company, which Majani expects will expand.
Ghafla isn’t going to be winning investigative journalism awards any time soon; its bread and butter is entertainment coverage and celebrity gossip, but the site also features event listings, some news, and crowd-sourced lyrics — a hold-over from the site’s origins.