Dominic Mensah (from left) Prince Boakye Boampong and Jesse Arhin Ghansah, founded OMG Digital beginning with OMG Ghana in 2012. (OMG Digital /TechCrunch)
A booming Africa-based website recently secured $1.1 million in seed funding, which will help the so-called “BuzzFeed of Africa” expand to even more countries.
OMG Digital currently has a presence in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana through the website OMG Voice, which focuses its content on African pop culture and entertainment. Listicles on topics from sports and fashion to food and travel are included on the website, with emphasis on different countries.
Founders Jesse Arhin Ghansah, Prince Boakye Boampong, and Dominic Mensah secured seed funding through American company Y Combinator, which provides a new model for funding early start-ups. The money will allow them to expand OMG Voice to South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania, according to TechCrunch.
Ghansah, Boampong and Mensah established OMG Ghana in 2012 to generate content that relates to African millennials and founded OMG Voice in February three years later. Ghansah told TechCrunch the group became frustrated when they went online and discovered only articles that were mostly about politics and news.
“We’re not creating content solely for a homogenous ‘African,'” he told IT News Africa. “We develop specific content strategies for producing locally relevant material for Africa’s diverse audiences; working hard to ensure that our content is available to millennials regardless of what platform they may be on.
“Through this, we have managed to build not only one of the biggest audiences in Africa but also attract some of the biggest consumer brands on the continent and around the world.”
Such content, generated by a 25-person team, includes articles about African celebrities like “Everybody Is In Love With D’banj’s New Album Art And It’s Not Hard To See Why” for Nigeria, “12 Photos Of Jua Cali’s Beautiful Wife You Need To See” for Kenya and “12 Tweets About Odartey Lamptey’s Story That’ll Give You All The Feels” in Ghana.
More than one-third of Africa’s population is made up of millennials and more than 90 percent of OMG visits coming from cell phones. OMG Digital has over 90 million aggregated content views, according to IT News Africa, and 4.5 million people have visited OMG Voice since it launched.
Next, OMG is looking to reach more English-speaking markets and then branch out to markets that speak other languages, including French, TechCrunch reported. They’re also looking to launch a tech and lifestyle arm soon to accompany their culinary extension.
“Our aim is to be in the newsfeed of every user on the continent through an OMG Digital brand in the future,” Ghansah told IT News Africa.
