What is brand Africa—both as individual countries and as a collective continent —thinking?

“In short, Afrigator attempts to use social media tools and technologies to showcase the best digital content that Africa has to offer. We invite citizen publishers with African content or who are based on the continent to submit sites so we can send traffic to them. We also scan the Web for African-related tags and aggregate that content on our site,” says Justin Hartman, CEO and a founder of Afrigator.

Why do Africans love the brand? It’s all about the experience. “Afrigator is an extremely strong and recognized brand not just in Africa but globally. We are a market leader within our space, and through innovative products and services we are building trust and value for our brand because we continually engage our users. We have built up an extremely loyal user base that thrives on our ability to deliver new products that benefit them,” Hartman says.

In a world overloaded with information, Internet users are looking for solutions that offer filtering, relevancy and make sense of the tsunami of content available online. This is where Afrigator fills the gap with its intelligent content-filtering with a strong African accent. Content on Afrigator is divided by country channels, category and content type. The development team has created an organic categorization algorithm that sorts content into single or multiple categories by scanning the content as it is pulled into the site.

Afrigator currently doesn't have significant competition, although aggregators are springing up in countries with strong blogging activity, like Nigeria. However, the response is one of inclusion and cooperation rather than competition. “The fledgling aggregators we're seeing are largely very different to what we are doing and we don't see them as competition. It is just a matter of bringing them on board. It is better to collaborate than to compete. However, where there is competition we welcome it, because this will drive improvement,” Hartman says.

In November Afrigator launched Adgator—an advertising network that enables bloggers to display and make money out of advertising on their sites. The very first advertising network for African bloggers, Adgator is a runaway success story.

“To our surprise, Adgator has been phenomenally successful both from the blogger and advertiser perspective. I have to admit that we were worried about how the market would receive Adgator, as it was a completely new initiative which is on trial in South Africa, but the results have blown us away. Pre-launch we set a goal of getting 100 of South Africa's top blogs signed up on the network. This was achieved in the first three hours of launch and currently we're approaching nearly 350 blogs on the network,” Hartman says.

Advertisers have shown immense interest in Adgator, indicating hungriness on the part of brands to get involved with blogs and social media. Obviously Adgator fills the gap because it is a one-stop shop for advertising with a unique, targeted audience that big brands can tap into.

“Afrigator's success is dependent upon how representative we are within the African continent. We claim to be an African product but are still not representing every country within Africa. Currently our biggest markets are South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya, and these are growing very nicely; however, we want similar growth within other countries. We've realized that approaching Africa as a continent must be done systematically because there are far too many differences between each country for us to really assume to understand each one.”

To assure long-term reach, Afrigator is working to gain traction in each country by being local and on the ground, which means they can interact meaningfully with users and absorb local cultures.

What’s on the horizon? “Mobile is a massive area that we're focusing on right now. It is our belief that if you can't [provide] a decent mobile offering within Africa then you're really missing the mark. If we do manage to make mobile work in Africa I believe our mobile offering will be much bigger than the Internet offering.”

With the ITU statistics for mobile usage in Africa close to 300 million, and the vast majority of these originating from sub-Saharan Africa, Afrigator has a booming market that could, in time, make the network a pervasive brand with compelling pulling power for advertisers who want to penetrate the African markets.

Not bad for a brand that values the success for the parts, and the whole, of Africa.