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STUDY ABROAD OPTIONS
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 ZIMBABWEAN MARKET DEVELOPING BUT IN ITS INFANCY Although banner advertising on the world wide web has been a fundamental part of the dotcom bubble, Zimbabwean cyberspace has not seen much use of this medium, writes Tony Mechin. Ironically, since the crash of the international market, Zimbabwe has seen a growth of interest in advertising on the internet. Laura Brown, Managing Director of WebDev, a local web development company behind the implementation of a portal for one of the more successful Harare based ISP’s, said "There have not been that many sites built specifically for the Zimbabwean market,with an estimated 100,000 users."Her company’s site, www.zol.co.zw, has an advantage in that when the ISP installs their new users, the portal is set as the default, and as she says few of the users know how to change the default. The small size of the market has an interesting side effect.Perhaps due to the novelty, click through rates are fairly high, with some advertisers regularly achieving over 1%. But this may also be due to the knowledge that browsers have of their own town. According to Auxilia Chimambo, Web marketeer for Cyberplex, a web development company that has built www.allzimbabwe.com, "We have seen good results from banners that offer incentives. Estate agents, hotels and banks are leaders in the market and we’ve seen great responses to special offer for the first ten people who click thru, for example." Bonjai Zamchiya, GM of www.AllZimbabwe.com, another portal specially for Zimbabweans,believes that banner advertising in a small market such as Zimbabwe’s has a great deal to offer, but it is still early days. "It’s an awareness thing basically.We’re doing a lot of agency work at the moment, brand management, that kind of thing."His company has started taking orders from outside of Zimbabwe and he sees a growth in targeted marketing. A major player in the African ISP market, recently launched their new continent-wide portal, www.Africaonline.com, and according to Jacob Ngandu, of their Internet Business Services division said "We placed adverts in each of the our eight countries web sites and we’ve had a great response."He sees that the fact that the users of the internet in Africa are largely the people who make up the market for goods and products as being one of the reasons for the importance of banner advertising in Africa. Perhaps due to the low number of pages served in comparison to the rest of the world, cost of advertising in Zimbabwe is often based on a weekly or monthly rate. Although no-one interviewed was willing to discuss their monthly page view numbers, it seems that advertising rates are at least half of that of US or European based bulk banner servers. International companies looking to market products into the African market may find it worth while seeking out the leading portals in each country and use them as a vehicle for their campaigns. The author of this article, Tony Mechin, is producer of the SolarEclipseAfrica.com web cast project. It has confirmed that three webcams will be in place to send images of the totality of the June 21st total solar eclipse, starting at 11am GMT.Olivier "Klipsi" Staiger, an experienced eclipse-chaser and webcaster will be broadcasting via a Nokia GSM cell phone from Lusaka, Bob Cohen, video producer and correspondent, will be uploading images by satphone from the luxury resort of Chikwenya, Mana Pools on the Zambezi and Jim Holland, sysop of Mango, will be at the Pumpkin Hotel, Nyampanda to the east of Zimbabwe.
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This page last updated on January 28 2004.
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