Adgator - Africa's First Blog Advertising Network

In December 2007 I did a presentation at 27dinner in Jo’burg where I previewed the first Beta version of Afrigator. Most people at the time thought we were going to announce an acquisition but alas it really was just geeky from start to end.

One of the key points I raised in the presentation (sideshow here, video here) was that we were going to implement a revenue model for the website and in turn share the revenue with the bloggers. Ramon was the first person to ask how we planned on doing this but at the time we were still unclear as to the model and in truth it’s taken us almost 11 months to figure this one out.

Enter Adgator – a newly launched product, under the Afrigator stable, that links our blogging network to advertisers and helps to monetise blogs in a way that Google Adsense and other forms of online marketing simply can’t do.

The more I’ve been watching the collective growth of our network the more I’ve come to realise just how powerful blogs are in relation to other traditional websites. As an example, the top 100 blogs in South Africa (as measured by Afrigator) account for more than 1.7 million unique users and serves over 5.6 million page views each month.

This makes the network as powerful in terms of audience reach to South Africa’s #1 local website, News24, which also serves around 1.7 million uniques each month ~ (Nielsen Netratings – Q2 June 2008).

The scary part for me is that more than 1,200 blogs registered on Afrigator haven’t implemented our tracking code so they can’t be added to these figures and if you had to add them to the mix I have little doubt the network would look a whole lot different.

So, with a total network cap of 3.2 million unique users and 7.9 million page views I’ve often wondered how we can use this network to all of our advantage and I believe Adgator is the answer to this pondering.

The concept of Adgator is simple. Sign up as a blogger, insert a piece of code into your blog theme and we’ll go out and find advertisers who are willing to spend money. Each time a blogger sees one of our ads on their website they know that they’ve made money. Initially we’ll be sticking to a CPM model because that’s what advertisers understand and we will share 50% of the revenue with bloggers.

This model means that a blog serving as little as 2,500 page views a month can make R300 for doing nothing and if you’re lucky enough to be a high-traffic blog your earnings could be as high as six figures. Our aim with Adgator is to be as transparent as possible and all blog owners will have their own access to our system so they can track their earnings in real time. In our reporting we break down cost, revenue share and total income so the blogger knows exactly who’s getting what.

As an advertiser or media planner the value proposition is easy to quantify. Without realising it at the time Afrigator has been indexing, filtering, categorising and profiling blogs in a way that is perfectly tailored for this business model. Instead of throwing a banner up on a major traffic website we can now offer real, targeted advertising to markets and audiences that fit an advertisers’ needs perfectly.

Adgator excites me in a way I can’t describe. The possibilities are endless really but to start off we’ve invited 100 of SA’s top blogs to the network for a pilot program. Invitations were sent this morning and we’re in the process of finalising some exciting advertisers that will really compliment the product and blogs that the creatives appear on.

In the first quarter of 2009 we plan to implement this blog ad network in Kenya and Nigeria so watch this space for more details on these announcements.

If you’re a South African blogger and you didn’t get an invite but want to be a part of the network please visit the site and sign up. We’re certainly not going to limit the network to 100 blogs and the quicker we can build the network the better.

I’m sure you’ll have some questions, please feel free to ask me anything…