It’s clear that the basic idea behind abidjanito is not particularly unique and original, and many have tried and are trying the same thing, even in Abidjan’s undeveloped market. So why bother? For us, pure and simply, looking through the current offering, there is hardly a site out there that’d you’d actually want to use as a guide. The sites that do a good job at what they try to do (abidjan.net, abidjanshow.com) tend to be those on the periphery of what we want to do. But if you’re trying to enter a market where many have tried and failed, it’s important to reflect on why others have found things so difficult. In a series of posts, we’re going to try and address the principal problems in the current offering of sites to show the room there is for a fresh, professional offering. Most of this advice applies more widely as well.
1. Content
Content, as they say, is king, not least if you hope to be offering advice/acting as a guide. It’s pretty inexcusable to want to be an information portal when you don’t have any information to offer. How does this happen? I think one of the key problems is that these sorts of projects are frequently one-man-band efforts. One person has an idea and wants to do everything themselves. Logically, that person has to be a web designer, because if you can’t build a website for your project you can’t even start. But the problem is that those who write code can rarely write text. And so you get a reasonably decent website, but no or low-quality content.
To have a really good website in this milieu, it needs to have bags and bags of unique and high quality content. Those people who create written content are frequently called ‘journalists’. There’s no shortage of journalists in Abidjan as any attendee at a press conference can tell you. But there does seem to be a disconnect between these journalists and people creating websites.
Secondly, to really succeed, you need to have an independent voice. We’re already getting a bit advanced here, but when websites start getting serious about content, they will then need to start getting serious about serious content. Newspapers tend to have three motivational factors i) to make money from advertising ii) to make money from sales iii) to support a cause, party, institution or ego. The more that the third factor diminishes in importance, the more you have to work hard to serve your public (and hence boost sales and attract advertisers). The Ivoirian media frequently serves particular interests (what could generally be called publi-reportage), whether through the direct payment of journalists for stories, or a general cultural ‘capture’ of journalists by elites. But if you want to get away from this, you need to have an independent voice that is trusted by your readers, who will then be more willing to come to you for advice. Here at abidjanito, we’re not interested in reading a review saying a hotel is the best thing since sliced bread, if the hotel manager paid the writer to write the article. For us, that simply has no value, except to hood-wink the pubic and satisfy the particular interests of the hotel manager.
But this leads to a third, related, problem. You may have the best will in the world to write independent content, but do you know what you’re talking about? Many Abidjan residents, don’t stay in hotels in Abidjan, obviously. In addition, only a select elite of Abidjan residents (particularly Ivorian residents) eat out in any establishment other than a maquis, garbodrome or kiosk. So, the best writers will have experience of staying in hotels and eating in restaurants throughout Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Africa and, if possible, the world. That is not something that comes particularly cheap. Either you need lots of money – or good contacts with these sorts of people, who might be willing to support you because they themselves would value the service you intend to provide.
So, it’s quite clear that the challenge of producing content is a difficult one, and it’s hard to see a current offering in the market that comes close. Next, we’ll talk about the related topic of photographs.
