by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) Type in www.news24.co.ke to your browser or www.news24.com.ng and you get a site that looks familiar to the South African eye: it has the colour palette and lay-out of our biggest news portal, News24, but look a bit closer and you see the content is different: about Kenya and Nigeria respectively.
These two sites are, in fact, News24’s great big leap into Africa although they have started modestly and without much fanfare so that they can 
learn about the two markets that are so different to South Africa’s.
You might also have noticed an isiZulu News24 (that you can go to from the English-language portal) and you get the picture: News24 – which so dominates the breaking-news scene in SA – is on the march, which is interesting considering that Iqbal Surve, Independent Newspaper’s proprietor-in-waiting, has also mentioned Africa and the vernacular markets as key growth areas.
Grubstreet spoke to News24 editor-in-chief Jannie Momberg, who is overseeing the move.
GRUBSTREET: It looks like you’re mostly aggregating news on the Kenyan site but on the Nigerian one, it’s coming from a local news agency.
JANNIE MOMBERG: Ja, the content strategy is roughly the same as News24 but we place different emphasis on different parts of it. At News24, we also aggregate and we also use wire copy and our own content and our user content… The difference is that, in Kenya for instance, there isn’t a national wire agency where in Nigeria there is one… so in Kenya we aggregate more to be able to update the site more…
Kenya has a lot more content from our users than we have in Nigeria. The second-most popular section on the Kenya site is content from users after the national news section.
GRUBSTREET: That’s interesting. And when did you guys launch these sites?
MOMBERG: Let me give you a little bit of background. About three of four years ago, we looked at how we could expand the 24 footprint… and we decided that we were going to do it two ways: 1). To look at other languages in South Africa, and 2). We were going to look at the rest of the continent… In 2009, the first site that we launched was our Afrikaans site, the idea being that it was easiest to launch because there was so much Afrikaans content available in Media24 (that owns newspapers such as Rapport, Beeld and Die Burger)… and we also launched the isiZulu site a couple of years ago.
So in South Africa, we now publish in three languages.
The other side of it was the rest of continent and we decided we were already strong in southern Africa so let’s look at West and East Africa, specifically Nigeria and Kenya. That was our thinking at the time, and also that if we started in Kenya then we would then be able to apply the lessons to the rest of East Africa – and the same for Nigeria and West Africa…
In November 2011, we launched the Kenya site and we launched the Nigeria site in June 2012… We read up a lot about the two markets but we decided that we were going to have to go in and test the market and learn on the job so we didn’t go in with a big bang.
We’re using the same technology as we do in South Africa so the two sites’ tech side is being managed and maintained from Cape Town. It exactly the same technology and exactly the same CMS that News24 uses so that we are not over-investing in the tech side…
From the editorial side, we’re using the same kind of editorial strategy that worked for News24 in South Africa: start small and appoint people in Cape Town and locally.
So we’ve got people in Nairobi and Lagos and Cape Town working on these sites.
GRUBSTREET: And how are they working out?
MOMBERG: The expectation was that it was going to be mostly a mobile audience – and that’s pretty much how it’s worked out so far.
GRUBSTREET: For both Kenya and Nigeria?
MOMBERG: Kenya had 35 000 unique browsers (in February) for the web and mobile had 82 000. Nigeria is a little bit more interesting: the web is 28 000 unique browsers (in Feb) – bearing in mind the website is only nine months old – and mobile 169 000…
The other very interesting thing with Nigeria is that we also launched a mobile application in these territories – and in February that app had 77 000 active users in Nigeria.
BlackBerry is massive in Nigeria and the app has taken off… If you put this together with the mobile and the web, it looks quite promising.
GRUBSTREET: It sounds like it’s growing nicely. You guys must be pleased.
MOMBERG: Ja, but it’s still early days.
GRUBSTREET: What are the competitors like in the two countries?
MOMBERG: My impression is that the Kenyan internet market is a lot more developed than in Nigeria although Nigeria is a lot bigger.
The two main newspapers in Kenya are The Nation and The Standard and they’ve got pretty decent websites – on par with what you find in South Africa. When we launched the Kenya site, those were basically newspaper websites – in other words, they updated once or maybe twice a day. Within a few weeks of us launching with our updates around the clock, they started updating their sites a lot more so they absolutely responded.
In Nigeria, the internet market is close to 50-million people already so that’s a hell of a market they’ve got going there. The biggest website in Nigeria is really just a forum – and they are about the size of News24 in South Africa.
I do think it will be a tougher battle for us in Kenya than in Nigeria – in the sense that the existing media houses are on a par with what we find here in SA.
Whereas in Nigeria, there is so much more potential because it’s such a massive audience.
Interestingly, the last stats I saw put both Kenya and Nigeria about about 28% (internet) penetration whereas SA is only about 18%. So there is a natural growth path laid out as, although penetration is at about 30% (in Kenya and Nigeria), there is a lot of room for growth.
In Nigeria, the internet market is close to 50-million people already so that’s a hell of a market they’ve got going there. The biggest website in Nigeria is really just a forum – and they are about the size of News24 in South Africa. Then there are two news organisations – Vanguard News and Punch – and their websites are not on a par with the Kenyan sites.
They’re not bad but they don’t update as frequently and the content is not as good as I’ve seen on the Kenyan sites.
So we’re operating in both markets but if I had to choose one because we could only win in one place, it would have to be Nigeria – because if you can win there, you can win big.
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.