HumanIPO, a tech blog owned by 88mph, a Kenyan based accelerator headquartered in Nairobi has today announced that it’s throwing in the towel. This comes after many months of reporting where the blog had reporters based in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa among other African countries. The blog cites low traffic resulting to lack of advertising money and thus the need to close shop and not bleed further.
HumanIPO has seen quite a huge employee turnover and at some point had a team like the average media-house, but did not convert this to business while they could. In a blog post announcing the demise of the blog, they asked for anyone willing to buy off what’s left of the shell to contact them.
Africa’s tech news site will be publishing its last story on Thursday, January 15th.
We want to thank the thousands of readers that use the site weekly for their support.
Unfortunately we haven’t been able to build sufficient amount of traffic to make it an interesting business to continue.
If there are investors or entrepreneurs that are interested in taking over the platform then please contact us on [email protected].
88mph has had quite low successes in Kenya but one of the investments they hold dear is Ghafla Kenya, a gossip and entertainment blog that at some point attracted investment from Radio Africa Group who bid quite low and ended up starting their own rival site. HumanIPO which has offices in Kenya, South Africa and Estonia didn’t get to the point of revenues and the company had been holding up getting advertisement money to sustain the huge wage bill they already had with no success.
Pesatalk is another blog that ended the HumanIPO way, started with lots of hype but the systems stifled growth of the blog till it went belly up.
It has not all been gloomy though. Inside all that there is some positives in regards to the number of young ladies and gentlemen who had their first stint in reporting and internships at HumanIPO before they went on to other things, some got jobs elsewhere as reporters while others started their blogs which are not doing badly.
