Seun Osewa is the owner of Nairaland, the popular online forum in Nigeria. In this article that was written by Michelle Atagana and published on ventureburn.com, Seun Osewa tells Michelle how he built Nairaland, the website that has become Nigeria’s most popular online forum where Nigerians and other African citizens discuss issues ranging from politics, fashion, entertainment, relationships, and much more.
Below is an excerpt of the interview.
Building a multi-million dollar internet empire
The founding of the platform and the company that followed happened almost by chance.
“The process that led to the decision to start Nairaland started when I stumbled on a website called hotornot.com,” Osewa tells me.
The idea of rating the opposite sex (and seeing how other people rated as well) was a simple concept that Osewa got addicted to very quickly. Soon enough a business idea was born.
“I learnt that the creators of the site made money by selling ads on it. That was the first time I realised that one could make money by building a popular site and selling ads on it,” he says.
The first iteration of Nairaland was born.
The journey to monetisation was a little trickier for the new community. The task for Osewa was figuring out how to make money out of the growing traffic. Learning about ad networks and how they could help him circumvent having to sell ad space directly to clients was key.
“I read a blog post titled “blogging for dollars” where a blogger described how he made thousands of dollars monthly by just joining the biggest advertising network,” he says. “This was essential, because using an ad network allowed me to focus on growing Nairaland’s traffic knowing that if I could make Nairaland popular, I would automatically make a lot of money. It allowed me to be focused on traffic.”
It was only years later that Osewa began to introduce the idea of forums to the site as mobile telephony became popular in Nigeria. At the time, Osewa says that “the government had just allowed private telecom companies to build GSM networks”.
To read the full article, visit the publisher’s website.