iROKING and the Don Dorobucci

It’s been an interesting 2014 for iROKING, we have largely remained silent (aside from me blogging) as we rebuilt the brand and fundamental product offering. It is still very much work in progress but what is settling to know is that we have still managed to largely hold our desktop and mobile audience. As you can see from above, even with a seasonal dip during the summer months, we ended Q3 (September) with 953.4k users on m.iroking. We have seen gentle reduction of the iroking.com (desktop) site ending last month with ~23k unique users. With other partnerships we remain in the ~1.1m uniques per month range. Not where we want to be, but not too shabby.

Africa Bias

What I really love about iROKING is the balance towards Africa. Of the top 10 (below) countries 7 are from the continent, with Nigeria and Tanzania taking the lion’s share of 66.81%. The total activity on the platform (mp3 downloads, video downloads, music streams etc.) stood for Q3 at 4.625m up 12% from Q2’s 4.125m. We are actively trying to build our Internet TV in Africa strategy for iROKOtv and are a rounding error in terms of traffic and usage in Africa compared to iROKING. We are desperately trying to export lessons learned from our little (revenue) sister site.

iroking vs the Don Dorobucci!

I still feel iROKING has a great shot at being one of the first music platforms to reach 5m uniques in the coming years. There are just a few things we need to achieve on a product side to improve that. With the emergence of MTN Music+ (a mere $0.90 per month for subscription and 150mb data) it is interesting to see what impact this has across music services in Africa. Thus far, no impact, but I suspect that it’s merely too early to tell. As we all know MTN has arguably the largest media buying budget in Nigeria and across Africa. The jury is out on whether us mere startups can compete in the new customer acquisition wars.

I was at the 88mph offices yesterday having a long conversation with the Mdundo guys; you know, waxing lyrical and trading war stories… They’re biggest in the East. We’re one of the largest in the West. Mdundo have a great product team and are fully focused on bringing the best from the East globally. If you look at interest and search terms (not the best proxy) there are some interesting trends.

But that graph doesn’t tell the full story. The beast in terms of search terms, interest and impact in Africa is still Notjustok.

They had a 2/3 year head start and blew with the industry. We all have a long way to go. But there will be a platform with 5–10m across Africa. We are just focused on trying to be in with a shot.

Monetization

Is still a struggle for all platforms. Simple as that really. The business models don’t quite match the popularity. Yet. But they will.