Nadya Eka Lestari
TechInAfrica — Lifestyle and fashion-focused media platform Zumi has announced the shutting of its shop following the struggle to make decent revenues and raise capital.
Launched in 2016, Zumi had raised more than $250,000 from Chandaria Industries investment arm Chandaria Capital, UAE-based Majlis Investment, and a few other investors. Founded by Ex-Rocket Internet Africa Employees William McCarren and Sabrina Dorman, Zumi was aiming to pivot into an e-Commerce platform as advertising revenue was not obtained.
A paradigm shift in media from print to digital is happening around the world. Digital-only media companies have been hailed as the future of journalism, and the venture capitalists have been testifying it by investing $100s millions in these companies.
However, that shift did not happen as perfectly in Kenya. The number of digital media platforms in Kenya have gone up significantly in number in the last 2 years. Media platform such as Gadgets Africa, Pulse Live Kenya, Tuko, TechWeez, AfroMaisha, are the examples. Even though the digital platforms have a high and an instant reach, the advertiser’s mindset is still bent towards print and traditional media. Under the digital advertisement category for advertisers, budgets are mainly targeted on FB, Instagram, and Google.
The company officially announced the update on its Facebook pages on November 14 that the company will cease operating, However, the individual content producers will continue as usual.
There has been a lot of debate in Kenya around the reason behind digital media platforms struggles to survive even when the digital wave has hit the country. A lot has been attributed to the lack of awareness about native advertisement and performance metrics by the advertisers.
Recently, Kenya is a consumer market that has been flooded with international brands for a while. However, the population consumes awareness about these products still rests on traditional methods. Though it must not be ignored by the advertisers that the population is getting younger by the way and digital is the preferred medium of content consumption.
Source: weetracker.com
