Afrigator wont be celebrating their 5th birthday after all, things went awry and it had to close this month, December. Afrigator has run for 4 years 9 months as a well known African Blogs Aggregator, launched on 2007. Apparently, it has also been in the hands of Naspers which has been very visible in the web scene, starting, running and closing website services due to what one would assume to be poor market research.
In September 2008 a division of Naspers MIH Print Africa had majority stake through an aqcuisition, the relationship did not last and the original team bought back their shares.Afrigator run an ads platform Adgator, which was their income earner, a competitor of Google Adsense which focused on monetizing blogs. That was closed two months ago, reason: declining revenue, Afrigator which did not have another income stream had to follow siut too. Apparently the cost of hosting and managing was huge, the database is definately big, and the team saw this as a white elephant.So Bake, what lesson is there to learn, what can we pick from here?
