Pamoja Media was started around a vision of empowering African publishers. As publishers themselves the founders of Pamoja Media recognized that African Publishers seeking to monetize their content tend to operate at a slight disadvantage because many of the world’s top brands do not understand the African markets. So what often happens is that advertisers go in and give small publishers very tiny pay outs, while at the same time offering extremely large payouts to a handful of largest publishers within many of Africa’s urban markets.

So if you are a small or a medium sized African publisher, with really exceptional content appealing to an African audience you are left to fend for yourself to get advertising. This was actually the impetus that led to the formation of Pamoja Media.

In accordance with that vision of empowering African publishers, Pamoja Media is inviting African publishers of any size or traffic ranking to join the network. The only requirement is that the site is regularly updated and is relevant to an African audience.

Publishers may sign up to join the network by clicking here.

One of the nice things about working with such a large cross section of Africa’s online content portals or publishers is that after a while, you begin to notice trends. Sadly, one of these seems to be an across the board trend where amongst both large and small African publishers there is a highly disproportinate over reliance upon Google as a revenue stream.

Why is this a problem?

In theory it makes perfect sense for bloggers, social networks, and news portal sites that attract an African audience to use Google’s Adsense to monetize their content because the Adsense program is very well established, it is very easy to implement, and presents few requirement hurdles for publishers to cross before signing up. So if you are a new publisher this is very nice place to start once you feel that you have reached that traffic threshold where you can no longer afford to not monetize the site. Going to Google is a great move.

However, as a publisher your emphasis should be on building longevity and shoring up your brand. There is really no better way to do this than by fully optimizing your ad revenue. Which means that over time your reliance upon Adsense should diminish as you add more revenue streams that may have been harder to implement in the beginning of your journey as an African publisher.

What are the alternate revenue streams?

A good place to begin understanding the main categories of publisher revenue streams is on a blog that is authored by best selling author-Chris Anderson. Chris Anderson is also the author of a ground breaking New York Times bestseller called The Long Tail.

A few of the ad models that he mentions in addition to the CPM model are licensing, sale of statistical information about users, paid subscriptions, affiliate marketing, and merchandise just to name a few. In the context of Africa’s publishers it is easy to say that if a publisher were only able to follow just one or two of his suggestions; while simultaneously branching out to find other ad networks that pay more than Google then that publisher would be well on their way to tapping into a near endless well of revenue that could withstand many of the economic storms that the global business community is forced to navigate through in this age.