Africa New Media Group (ANMG) has quietly shut down its 10 native digital news websites including Kelebrity to concentrate on public relations and marketing as the financial reality of digital media starts to hit the continent.
The website which was started in July 2016 and became famous for using caricatures instead of featured photos focused on the Kenyan entertainment scene. It had risen to be among the most popular sites for millenials and Gen Z’s alongside Pulse.co.ke, Tuko and the Nairobi Gossip Club.
Kelebrity’s shut down and nine other websites owned by ANMG will definitely send shockwaves on Africa’s nascent digital news era which has managed to significantly reduce the influence of traditional media (newspapers, TV, radio).
However, after what has seemed like a decade of excellent fairy tale growth for digital media startups pushed by smart phone ownership and internet connectivity, many companies are starting to realise that the impressive growth in numbers is not corresponding with revenue.
Funded mainly by speculative investments by venture capitalists from Europe and America, digital news websites have taken Africa by storm eating up the market share previously held by mainstream media houses.
In doing so they created opportunities for smaller news operations, with a tighter focus on audience segmentation and churning out enormous content some of which is non original and faulty but based on the ability to go viral.
Among the companies which have been fueling the growth of digital news consumption in the continent has been ANMG from Canada , Ringier (Switzerland) and Genesis Media (Ukraine).
Most of these companies are marketing agencies. They make money by selling data from their readers to advertisers while at the same time providing ready audiences to their marketing clients.
ANMG for instance was pushing its popularity to marketers through its in house publishing department that run 10 replica news websites across Africa including Kelebrity which has silently been shut down.
Apart from Kelebrity ANMG was also running Malalebs which focused on entertainment news in in Malawi, Naijalebrity (Nigeria), Tangalebs (Tanzania), Zimbolebs (Zimbabwe) and Nalebrity (Namibia).
In addition to the above entertainment sites, the company was also running Whatshotafrica, Bettowinafrica, Yaza, Papernapkin and Listenupafrica.
All these websites which were being run from offices in Nairobi, Paris, Accra, Capetown, Harare, Dublin and Nice have been shut down. It is still unclear what led to their closure or what is the fate of the employees who were running what was Africa’s largest digital media company.
“We write, share and speak for GAP (Generation Alpha Plus) in Africa. Every day, millions of people interact with our content, across Africa and around the world through our partnership with MSN. Our generation is not the future – we are the present,” ANMG says on it Linked Inn Page with no mention of its websites which have been down for months now.
It is still not clear why ANMG has shut down its websites because it does not even mention them on its own website. Sources however say that the 10 websites were bleeding money and it had become impossible to continue sustaining them.
Like some of its peers in the digital-media industry, ANMG and its investors bet big on the rising power of social media networks like Facebook and Instagram, anticipating they would deliver a tide of young, upwardly mobile readers that advertisers craved.
Though readers came by the millions, new media companies have been having trouble wringing profits from the young readers. Digital advertising revenue, once thought to be based on audience size, has instead gone to social-media platforms, particularly Facebook.
This reality is already causing problems in the developed markets leading to some digital native companies like Vice, Buzzfeed and Vox Media to file for bankruptcy within the last year.
With the shutting down of websites owned by ANMG, the financial reality of digital media has finally hit Africa. What will happen from here going forward, only time will tell.
