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.

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.

Here is an excerpt:

“Many bigger publishers or broad network entrepreneurs come into the planning around their network with one big mistaken assumption. This assumption has existed in the market now for many years, and when people are presented with the truth they are usually shocked. The problem with this ongoing myth is it is getting more and more off base from reality and has a real risk of having your business models for your networks far off of reality.

Over the past few years this misconception has had ripple effects on sites and on network operators and in many cases has had a dramatic impact on their business plans and financial models. What is the misconception you might say? Okay, enough of the drama!

The biggest misconception in the market today has to do with Google AdSense. Most people in big sites or with limited multi-category experience with AdSense have strong beliefs that the effective CPM paid by Google is extremely low and way below the market rate would be for the similar ad spaces on an open market.”