Afrigator

» see afrigator.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

By 2007 I had a broadband line at home and a job that involved computers all day, and Afrigator still had no route to me. back then. It was a South African product for a South African and broader African blogosphere, in a stretch of years when every country's blog scene was quietly building its own scoreboard and none of the scoreboards talked to each other. I read a lot of English-language blogs in that period. None of the ones I read were on it.

Afrigator launched in April 2007 out of Johannesburg. Stiaan Pretorius and Mike Stopforth started it with Justin Hartman, who ended up doing most of the public talking about it. The pitch was narrow and correct: there were now enough African blogs to be worth finding, and no good way to find them. Technorati indexed the world and therefore indexed almost nothing local (roughly). Afrigator only cared about one continent, which is why it worked.

What it did was crawl feeds, sort them by country and by subject, and publish a running list of which blogs were pulling traffic. That last part is the bit people remember. A ranking is a small thing to build and it changes how a scene behaves, because once there is a public number attached to your blog you start looking at the number.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did ~

The core was a feed aggregator with a directory bolted to it. You submitted your blog, Afrigator picked up the RSS, and from then on your posts landed in a river that anyone could read by country or by tag. Podcasts and video feeds went in the same pipe. For a South African blogger in 2008 this was the difference between writing into nothing and writing into a room.

Naspers noticed. On 5 September 2008 MIH Print Africa, the Naspers division that handled print and its digital edges, bought a majority stake. That gave Afrigator money and a corporate parent, which is usually where this kind of story turns into an acquisition obituary. It did not. The founders bought their shares back at a later point and the site kept running independently, which is a rarer outcome than it sounds.

~ the money ~

In November 2008 the same team launched Adgator, an ad network aimed specifically at African blogs. The idea was straightforward enough: AdSense paid badly for African traffic because advertisers were not buying African traffic, so somebody had to go sell it directly. Adgator did that, and at its size it was reaching well over 1.7 million people a month across the blogs it served.

That was the revenue. Afrigator itself did not really have any of its own, which is normal for aggregators and is also the thing that eventually kills them. Crawling and indexing a continent's feeds is not free. Somebody has to pay for the servers every month whether or not the site earns anything that month.

~ the day it died ~

Adgator closed in September 2011. Once it was gone, Afrigator was a large monthly hosting bill sitting on top of a site with no income, being paid for by four shareholders who had all moved on to other work. Hartman was blunt about it afterward: the infrastructure was intense, the primary revenue stream had been switched off a few months earlier, and there was no reason left to keep writing the check.

It went dark on 1 December 2011. By then the thing it had been built to solve was solving itself badly in a different place, because African bloggers had followed everybody else onto Facebook and Twitter, and discovery had stopped being a directory problem and become a feed-algorithm problem instead. Amatomu, the rival aggregator run out of the Mail and Guardian, limped on for a while longer in a reduced state. Nobody built a third one.

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