Reviews

www.whitedrum.com is a new entrant to the highly competitive classified adverts market in Nigeria. There are already a few big players in this area as seen on this earlier post. Initially focused on the Nigerian and UK markets, Whitedrum.com is a product of Deltek Solutions UK and Deltek Solutions Nigeria (two different companies). The motivation for the launch could be summarised in this quote from an email I received from the CEO, Dele Oluwole:

Its been quite a busy couple of months for me. I have been involved in several projects including this personal one: www.rhetoheat.com. Its been at the back of my mind to give the social networking website idea a try. I have done so in the past but had to wrap it up. This time I wanted to try it in a different way. www.rhetoheat.com is a discussion forum with a social networking twist.

Features include:
- users can create/ have relationships with other members
- upload and share media - (only video for now), audio and photos will come soon
- maintain a profile page showing their friends, posts, bookmarked items (videos, forum posts, photos, etc).
- members can write and maintain blogs (coming soon)
- Many more features

The Nigerian classified adverts market continues to expand with a new website launching everyday. I was surprised to find some have been around since 2005 and yet are relatively unknown. Granted we have problems of access to the internet in Nigeria, these underutilised services have the big task of creating awareness about themselves. I have to agree there has been a lot of improvement over the years. As at this morning a massive 4 million Nigerians are registered on facebook alone (Recent estimates put facebook at 500 million users. Alexa.com estimates users from Nigeria to be 0.8% of this). Effectively, Classified advert websites have at least more than half of these 4 million active internet users to sell their services to.

The fascination with twitter continues with yet another mimic of the website hitting the Nigerian webscape. Complete with a bird logo and 140 character entry form, I could not fail to spot the glaring similarities with the celebrated twitter.com. I am wondering if the similarities will also include a puzzlement on how to monetize the effort. Twitter remained without a reasonable income or viable business model for quite a while. Anyway, this newest attempt is the brainchild of two Lagos based Nigerian programmers: Deji Kadri and Victor Sylva.

The African movie industry is a growing and constantly improving sector. Especially in Nigeria, Nollywood has launched the careers of many successful actors and actresses. The economic potentials are there too as many businesses have grown around it. Only recently, nollywoodmovies.tv launched on Sky networks in the UK. The station streams only Nollywood movies on demand. The venture has been a hit having become very popular especially within the African community. Izognmovies is the same sort of service - online. They stream Nollywood/ African movies to computers on a subscription basis. According to the website, they have over 3,000 movies in their library drawn from Nigeria, Ghana and other countries.

Most social networks are about sharing photos and swapping latest gossips. www.naijastories.com does it differently - it is a social network for writers. Members can "share their literary works, gain recognition, and connect with their audience and each other". The website is the brain child of Myne Whitman, a published Nigerian author who wrote the best selling love story A Heart to Mend.

Social networks are a fun place to interact with people. They can be formed around peer grougs, vocations, and other common interests. There are quite a few Nigerian social networking websites today. Prominent among these is www.naijapals.com, a top destination for Nigerian social networking experience (according to alexa.com ranking). Despite a massive competition from big foreign networks like facebook, hi5, Linkedn etc, these sites still see their membership swelling daily. As we saw in an earlier post, the following are the top contenders in this extremely competitive niche area.

The Nigerian classified adverts market is becoming more and more competitive with new sites launching every now and then. There are at least six big web startups servicing this area now. Previously we saw the mobile phone driven txtoweb.com. Today I want to look at another of these sites - www.gbogbo.com. Gbogbo.com closely resembles another advert site, nairalist.com but I dare say it is much more well designed. While Gbogbo.com has fought its way up from scratch, nairalist.com may have benefited from massive publicity on the popular nairaland.com (both nairalist and nairaland are run by the same person).

In my search for good online resources, I stumbled upon this repository of Nigerian blogs: www.nigerianblogawards.com. They have a massive compilation of Nigerian blogs and have been running an award programme for Nigerian bloggers since 2009. Blogs are nominated and voted for by the public. They have already conducted one round of voting in 2009. The 2010 session is still on. If you are looking for a directory of Nigerian blogs and authors, this is the place.

Txtoweb.com is a one of a kind classified adverts platform. They allow customers upload adverts via mobile phone sms text messages. Text only adverts have to be sent using txtoweb supplied keyword prefixes in order to be properly categorised on the website. Users can browse adverts on the website or through their phones. The service works with most of the major mobile phone companies in Nigeria including MTN, GLO, ZAIN. Users, however, have to pay the obligatory N50 (fifty naira) cost of texting. Despite this, I noticed there was a lot of activities on the website.

Content aggregation websites help gather information from several sources into one spot. With thousands of Nigerian websites spewing out news, opinions and ideas, there was a real need for this service pre sturvs.com days.

Very much like the celebrated Digg.com, sturvs narrowed down the niche to cater for especially Nigerian/ African content sharing and distribution. Most of its user base is Nigerian and there is an abundance of information categorised according to entertainment, news, jobs, etc. They even have a music and video section.

The high unemployment rate in Nigeria actually offers an opportunity to create work. A few people have put this difficulty to use in the form of online recruitment websites. They thus created work for themselves and a few other people. These job sites aggregate job vacancy adverts from various companies to make it easier for the unemployed find everything in one place. The competition is becoming stronger as there are quite a few players in this niche area now.

Truspot offers artistes and fans alike a platform to interact and share media. Focused mainly on African musicians, the site offers lots of options to enjoy and connect with your favourite artiste. You can watch videos, listen to music, you can even download free mp3. In addition is plenty of social networking features allowing users link or share Truspot content on Facebook, twitter etc. Truspot goes one step further to offer music recommendation services and they are available on mobile phones.

Pidgin English is the most widely spoken language in Nigeria. With vocabulary drawn from the local dialects, the language is constantly evolving and incorporating new "slangs" and phrases. Its hard keeping up with the changes and deciphering the new words coming up daily. A website that wants to help solve this problem is www.naijalingo.com.

I had a look at the alexa.com ranking of the top 100 websites in Nigeria and no surprises, it was dominated by foreign startups. However, I would say there has been tremendous improvements over the years in the Nigerian web presence. More people are blogging these days and lots of forums have sprung up here and there. There are quite a few popular social networks too.