Narialand a wall or a fence too high?
The Nigerian Reddit and how it was beating Facebook in Nigeria.
Good morning.
It 9am again on a cold Friday, We been awake all night trying to make sure we get you something good.
Let’s talk
The Nairaland community has a reputation for being the most hostile collection of people on the Nigerian interwebs – even more so than Linda Ikeji’s comments section. @techcabal
Enter Nairaland
With over 7,050,090 unique visitors, 36,846,836 visits, 236,881,816-page views in April 2020, Nairaland is ranked as the 7th most visited site in Nigeria and the 3rd most visited indigenous site. With 298.7K followers on Twitter and 155,508-page likes on Facebook, if klout was still around, our analysis tells us Nairaland would have a 101.221 Klout score.
Founded in March 2005 by Nigerian entrepreneur Seun Osewa, Nairaland was projected as the biggest African forum by Forbes in 2013. Currently, Nairaland gets more visits than Wikipedia.
Many young internet users live in Nairaland, doing business and search for trends and topics. According to an interviewed user, he admits how Nairaland has been a land of fortune for his business and through the forums, has closed a number of transactions of over 50m. Almost half of job seekers interviewed mentioned they use Nairaland to confirm the authenticity of job interviews. Nigerian students in diaspora share experiences on Nairaland for future students about the challenges and adventures of education abroad. They share insights on the cost of living, adjusting to the culture and sometimes cold weather, and more functional questions about education, getting a part time job, etc.
Nairaland has evolved to what you might say to be a daily watering hole for politically heated discussions among young Nigerians who write up deep dive into candidates, topics and events. Nairalands impact on the evolution of Nigeria’s political discourse sounds like a good working title for an upcoming TED talk, but I digress.
Nairaland is everything to everyone. If there’s a conversation to be had, it's probably happening on Nairaland.
The beauty of the forum model is the organic growth with no huge marketing budget, the forum dominated minds of many Nigerians hitting over a 1m user as of 2013,
Nigerian Internet user stats 2013
even a period when the gap between the mobile users and desktops was tiny.
In 2013, top online activities in Nigeria were essentially done on Nairaland. (News and Information, Social Networking, Business/Studies)
The growth of the Nairaland mirrors the behavior of internet users in Nigeria. People were looking for a place to explore and there were few local sites that provided robust environment for conversation driven by the crowd. To counter this point, many would argue there were other sites around (Facebook, twitter, etc) and Nairaland was able to hold its weight against well funded companies with a thirst for Nigerian users.
On Tuesday, we’ll take a deep dive into the many differentiators Nairaland has that has led it to its continued success.
See you next Tuesday at 9 am WAT.
“Lets continue the conversation, why do you think Nairaland was so successful?”
Let us know at @citural (twitter) and also follow us.
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