AGRIGATOR QUESTION 2 & 7 QUESTION 2 What is Afrigators business model? How does Afrigator make money?

How sustainable is Afrigators business model? What challenges does Afrigators business model face? The business model for the site is primarily an advertising one, with top South African brands already interested in sponsoring sections on the site, supported by a corporate reporting tool which we call AfriData. AfriData allows companies to see what effect their company or brand is having in both social and main-stream media. By using advertising as their business model, Afrigator can generate money. For example they launched Beta Version , Afrigator generate revenues for the company by various advertising option.More over by having over 1000 registrated sites Afrigator had generate revenue about US$ 137,918.90. Which daily revenue of Affrigator estimated about US$ 188.93. They also launching Adgator a blog advertising in November 2008, which allowed advertisers to be top blogs in South Africa by connected advertisers with blogers or bloggers with advertisers. Using Adgator, it assist the advertisers in find popular blogs with specific category or target market by depending on on advertisers budget. This will generate more advertisers to join Afrigator and build up revenue. As for the bloggers, it help their blog by serving ads on Cost Per Thaousand (CPM) basis with 50%-50% revenue shares. CPM is the amount advertisers pays for every 1000 times a user views his/her ad and impression is recorded (or) the cost per thousand page imppressions. The more CPM the more revenue will generate. Revenue earned on the Adgator network is shared straight down the middle with bloggers. Adgator is offering bloggers an unprecedented 50 percent revenue share deal, so that bloggers can see real value from their sites. They 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 the reporting they break down cost, revenue share and total income so the blogger knows exactly whos getting what had. They also make revenue on this kind of business model by launcing Gatorpeeps, a microblogging site launched in May 2009. By using Gatorpeeps help vastly growing community in Africa to connect each other. Through Gatorpeeps users could join several communities, view

blog posts of friend also their own recent blog posts. Besides it also link it with other social network like twitter and Facebook. This will make opportunity to advertisers to market their advertising in wider scope. Wider scope mean broad connection, broad connection will generate more CPM, and more CPM will generate more revenue to the Afrigator. Therefore, by using this kind of business model can help Afrigator to generate their revenue. Business model of Afrigator very sustainable due to Afrigator carved a niche for itself of its local relevance base and its ability to aggregate and filter to growth of social media sources around the world. So they position themselves different other competitors. They focusing by improving the social media by monitoring huge amounts of content and give Africans by accessing the specific interest and permit them to go into with that particular content types and publishers. Therefore, this type of business model can sustain by offer the best service to the clients (bloggers). Afrigator had used AfriData which allowed advertisers determine the effect of their brand on the social as well as mainstream media. This will lead to them to sustain in this type of business model. This kind of strategy makes them update the latest position of advertisers brand. Besides that as Afrigator keep make them sustain relevance on both site content-wise and functionality. Afrigator business model can be sustain as they redesign Afrigator based on AfrigGreater campaign by keep asking the bloggers opinion, needs and wants. Therefore, Afrigator could take action on that particulars needs and wants. With improvements in its design and features, Afrigators could sustain and gain achievement in social media industry especially in advertising business model. Afrigator had excellently implemented business model and the expatriate opined that this type of business model can be used at any region or niche in order to aggregate and filter the growing number of social media. However there are certain challenges need to be overcome in order to maintain or sustain or even to expand the business model in the future. The key challenge Afrigator faces is to transfer whats primarily an Internet service to one easily usable from a mobile device. Hartman says the problem is that many cellphones in use throughout Africa currently have only the most basic functionality, so using them to access content is next to impossible.

Incorporating social media (such as video) is another challenge Afrigator has yet to face. The use of websites such as YouTube and Zoopy to share video is increasing at a massive rate. From the view point of analyst Afrigator could be able to give impact on the African social space but need to handle socio-economic problems, low internet penetration, infrastructural problem, language barriers, inadequate resources, and limited broadband connectivity.

7. What recommendations would you make to Afrigator? As to solve revenue model, there are two components to the revenue model the may follow. First, is the traditional advertising model, which currently forms a part of almost every web business. Traditional web advertising model is an extension of the traditional media broadcast model. The broadcaster, in this case, a web site, provides content (usually, but not necessarily, for free) and services (like email, IM, blogs) mixed with advertising messages in the form of banner ads. The banner ads may be the major or sole source of revenue for the broadcaster. The broadcaster may be a content creator or a distributor of content created elsewhere. The advertising model works best when the volume of viewer traffic is large or highly specialized. However, he says theres an additional opportunity to create revenue from extracting value from the data its service collects from those who use it. Another type of advertising revenue model is data about consumers and their consumption habits are valuable, especially when that information is carefully analyzed and used to target marketing campaigns. Independently collected data about producers and their products are useful to consumers when considering a purchase. Some firms function as infomediaries (information intermediaries) assisting buyers and/or sellers understand a given market. In this case of Afrigator they may use this kind of advertising revenue by act as expertise in ad serving, rich media, video, search and affiliate marketing to help them make the most of the digital medium. From its position at the nerve center of digital marketing, Afrigator can provide superior insights and insider knowledge to its customers. For the second issue, Afrigator recommended to improve their service by evolve to preferred choice of Wed users by make them get the feel the taste of social networking in Africa region. They can improve on this matter by representing every country in Africa. For example the language they use, the background color of website even the culture also can be implement in their websites according from which African country the user from. Besides they need redeveloped systematically of approaching Africa continent due to distance differences between them, therefore Afrigator need to understand each Africa country thoroughly. They may use transational strategy by Think Global, Act Local also known as glocalization. As Afrigator have the resources and try to make African people understand the landscape and help Afrigator the standard service into relationship and African continent network.

As a conclusion, in order to keep move on and sustain excellent achievement Afrigator need to focus intensively and creatively plus innovative way by strongly guide by customer satisfaction. Provide great service is vital to customer retention.