SA: Newspaper's aggregator becomes homepage for South African blogs, claim developers

A website developed by South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper has become the de facto homepage for the nation's blogs just three months after launching, developers have claimed.

The newspaper group launched its AmaTomu.com website three months ago - it also has a blog hosting site Amagama.com - in the last two months developers claim to have registered 350,000 outbound clicks to South African blogs from the aggregator.

"Ultimately the newspapers have this window where they can use their popularity from a base of readers to promote new platforms and transfer from newspapers to media companies," Vincent Maher, strategist with Mail and Guardian online, told Journalism.co.uk.

"We are doing it locally because there is no-one else doing it, we would not go head to head with Technorati, but locally there is a need for that niche to be created."

He added: "Our product basically is like rolling Technorati and Google Analytics into the one product, then use metrics of the one to create content on the other, that's basically what it does.

"Because we track the traffic on blogs we can do charts based on unique users over a thirty day period, we have an internal voting system and we count outbound links to classify things by their interestingness."

The site also runs a 'buzz graph' feature that tracks hot topics by keyword across measured blogs for its 900 registered users.

"The modern media company is about capturing audience and providing platforms to publish content for its readers and we want to grab as much audience as possible and monetise that," Mathew Buckland, general manager of new media with Mail and Guardian told Journalism.co.uk.

"The citizen media opportunity is too big and fantastic to ignore. We are fairly small organisation so it is actually much cheaper, quicker and easier to invest in user generated content platforms."

The company was planning, he added, to establish an advertising network where revenue could be shared with the bloggers from its aggregation.

"We are generating more outbound links than traffic ourselves, so if you monetise it on a per-click basis the revenue is massive," he said.

"What we want to do is send clicks through to the bloggers and revenue to the bloggers.

"We will use our successful relationship with our advertisers and take that to the blogosphere, what we are planning to do is launch a network advertising model across the blogosphere."

Blogs not hosted on a Mail and Guardian site, he added, would pay a small handling fee and claim the rest of the revenue generated by the paper's advertising clients.

In the next six weeks, Buckland added, the company was also planning to launch a Mail and Guardian branded blogs hosting site called Thoughtleader.co.za where leading lights in a plethora of areas would be invited to contribute blogs.

"It will be an edited blog platform where content is checked and vetted…it will be by invitation only. In fact it is very close to the Guardian's Comment is Free," he said.

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