South African ex-pat, Gareth Knight, just mailed me about the success of his recently launched startup Kindo, an online family tree application.
They’ve managed to signup users around the world by very quickly offering it in 14 different languages. Of course, having startup capital from the guys behind Skype and Last.fm must have helped that along nicely.
Translation into the other languages was a smart move, because they access market verticals on a regional level. According to TechCrunch, this creates a barrier to entry for other would-be players in this space.
Despite the popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook globally, there are many examples of social-network success on a regional level:
- Â Skyrock is the biggest social network in France (Alexa Rank 2), bigger than WindowsLive, YouTube, Yahoo or Ebay there;
- StudiVZ (Germany) is the biggest soc. net. in Germany and the 6th biggest site in Germany (Alexa);
- There are at least 10-15 massively successful local social networks, some more of them are vkontakte.ru (Russia), Mynet.com (turkey), netlog.com (Benelux+France)…
I sincerely hope that we see the same patterns emerge in South Africa, and we start seeing sites like Zoopy.com, MyVideo.co.za, Afrigator.com, Amatomu.co.za, Laaik.it, and Muti.co.za out-ranking their international counterpart’s traffic in our country. Do you think is likely?
This is interesting. I think there may be a future in it for us in SA
Opportunity could lie in the fact that there’s already local language-specific content and blogs out there, plus that Google offers searches in 5 official SA languages, which does suggest growth in this area. But, especially initially, volume may be an issue, i.e. are the logisitics of creating such a campaign worth the response? The % of people reached who might not otherwise have been may be miniscule…would love to hear more opinion on this though.
I agree that it helps with popularity, BUT, one of the most annoying things i have found is not being able to quickly and easily change the language on these pages.
i want my pages in english, but they are served to me automatically in italian.
maybe my case is limited to a small few but what about all the spanish speaking americans. wouldnt it be cool if sites checked your OS or browser language instead of your ip?
Hey Dave,
Thanks for the post
That’s a big question, and I’m not sure it’s likely until the web population in SA grows bigger….
Something worth considering is whether there is enough traffic to support these sites?
Traffic leads to monetization, which supports growth through new features and then increases viral adoption… but it all starts with traffic.
How do the guys who build and support these sites make enough moola from them to turn them into full time gigs that can compete with other sites that are already doing that?
Just a thought, I hope they do
@Tereza: Yes, I know Wikipedia has Zula and Afrikaans communities already. The language issue is important online, but perhaps, for us, even more so for mobile. I’ll be looking into it!
@gabi: You’re sooo right. Although there are a bunch of people who would rant about privacy issues if that were implemented methinks.
@OneAfrikan: According to the stats, the web population growth in SA has slowed down signigficantly of late – but among the 4million or so people who are connected here, usage is up big time. I think that’s a fairly decent size market. Mobile internet access here is getting huge.
@Dave: I hear you, but is the population big enough to support the services you’ve mentioned, or new ones? For example, which web domains in SA are actually profitable?? Are there stats on this? Are their owners doing the domains you mentioned full time? Just some questions to think about – i’m experiencing that traffic and user base is super important for monetization, the connotations are obvious…
@oneafrikan: Of the social-media applications that I mentioned only Zoopy.com and MyVideo.co.za are stand-alone businesses in their own right (though I don’t know whether they’re profitable yet – in fact I doubt it… perhaps they could weigh in on this conversation??). The others are supported by other businesses – Laaik.it and Amatomu by big media (24.com and MG.co.za) and Muti.co.za and Afrigator.com by the owners’ other projects. But there are many examples of people making plenty cash with websites in SA, since the user base is affluent (the majority having household income of over R200 000 per year) compared to the rest of the population.
Some examples friend’s businesses: Bizcommunity.com, thunda.com, blueworld.co.za, jump.co.za, pricecheck.co.za… All are profitable, owners work on them full-time, and employ a bunch of people
(I’ve left out the big-media guys like 24.com, thetimes.co.za etc)
Interesting… but then you start to get into the difference btw something social, and something people need which creates sales or provides a direct personal or business benefit… think there’s a motivation here for a (South) African leaderboard…
Based on everything I see I am always more amazed with on-line marketing on account of seeing how the the current generation interact with their friends through computers. My 11 year old nephew just sent me a site they had launched to organize teenage topics for their classmates. They were asking about a way to setup marketing on the site to . I am so very poud.