While many local Web 2.0 sites are struggling to find a foothold in the market, one is proving to be a hit among South African netizens.
Amatomu – a South African Blog Aggregator – was launched four months ago, and is already nearing 1 000 blog listings from the South African blogosphere.
Matthew Buckland, co-founder of Amatomu, says that the feedback from the blog community has been overwhelmingly positive. So far the website has delivered more than 640 000 clickthroughs to the blogosphere.
“Some local bloggers are reporting that amatomu.com is regularly one of their biggest referrers. We currently are tracking around 130 000 page impressions daily from mainly local blogs,” Buckland said.
Amatomu currently serves 65 326 pages per month to its 18 373 unique visitors. Buckland said that they are not particularly concerned with these figures as their main aim is not to retain traffic, but to send traffic outwards to the blogosphere, aggregator-style.
Buckland subscribes the website’s success to the fact that it was the country’s first blog aggregator, and that it is an original concept.
“It is a continental first and arguably a world-first. I haven’t seen or heard of anything like amatomu.com anywhere in the world. People compare it to Technorati, but it’s different as it is Technorati but with more community and added analytics,” Buckland points out.
“I think Amatomu.com hit the sweet spot for bloggers, creating a sense of community for bloggers whereas previously bloggers have been quite a disparate and fragmented publishing community. To some extent amatomu.com brought bloggers together, under a single umbrella.”
Blogging growing in South Africa
Blogging is currently making headlines in South Africa, and Buckland feels that it is likely to continue its current growth spurt.
“Blogging is taking off in South Africa. It’s a function of the fact that the internet in general is now entering a second boom with the arrival of so many more broadband options and downward pressure on connectivity prices. But it’s still a long way down for South Africa’s pricy internet,” he said.
“Blogging is also an ideal democratic medium that allows people to express themselves outside of the formal media environment, and people are finding their voices and finding blogging empowering.”
Challenges ahead
Buckland points out that despite their successes many challenges still face the new website: “We are still in the honeymoon period and challenges lie ahead of us in controlling splogs [spam blogs] and keeping the categories relevant. We also need to understand how to represent the different categories of blogs such as commercial blogs, multi-user blogs and single user blogs.”
Amatomu has also been presented with Venture Capital options to take the model international, to try to replicate its local success in other regions. The Amatomu team is currently evaluating these options and is also developing the commercial elements of the site.
With an improved search function and performance enhancements from Amatomu on the horizon, the local blogosphere is starting to take shape.
Source: My Adsl
