Posted on August 01, 2012
Knott-Craig, whose company, World of Avatar, bought social network platform MXit from Naspers in September 2011 for an undisclosed amount, believes that the company is proof that African tech companies are of global quality and can match their competition in Silicon Valley.
Since it began as a message service in 2005, MXit has grown from being solely a social networking site to a platform offering a virtual currency called Moolah, classified advertisements, chat rooms, games and educational programmes. It is now the largest digital community in Africa.
“We have ten million regular users in South Africa, but Africa is where we are gaining the most traction and MXit has become a truly global business,” Knott-Craig said.
The platform has 55 million registered users in 126 countries and while numbers in South Africa have peaked, the site has recently experienced significant growth in countries such as Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria.
While growth in terms of registered users has come from these new markets, the site primarily generates revenue through the sale of content. Approximately only 10% of current users use both chat and other content on MXit, and an “easy way for us to make more money would be to get users involved in more content online,” Knott-Craig said.
More utilities, such as games and photo sharing, have been introduced based on topics of interest, such as English football and music, to encourage a migration from just chat to content.
Knott-Craig said the company is also currently building a platform for local entrepreneurs that would allow them to sell their content, such as music, to the MXit market.
Gus Silber, who together with Knott-Craig co-authored “Mobinomics: MXit and the mobile revolution in Africa”, said MXit has a strict policy of not mining users’ data and that anonymity is one of the company’s most powerful attributes.
Knott-Craig asserted that the platform does not record any user data or content of messages, which “totally removes the temptation to mine it for information”. While some basic information such as location and a time and date stamp are recorded, data is stripped so as to protect people’s privacy.
One of the first things he wanted to change on purchasing the company was the aspect of anonymity, Knott-Craig said, with as many as 25% of the user base employing pseudonyms. But he changed his mind on this point upon discovering that many people use the counselling services offered on the platform through its social impact division called Mxit Reach.
“By remaining anonymous, people get to meet people without being judged and it takes away the underlying social constraints. Once we realised how powerful that is and its potential for social change, there is no way we would ever cancel the anonymity.”
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