Bozza’s digital platform aims to take talent from the slum or township and allow it to connect with potential audiences.
Late in 2012, Bozza closed its second round of funding with investment from Omidyar, Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa and an individually wealthy investor.
For Emma Kaye, the company’s CEO this provided the runway to start exploring the business models and to “build out the business.”
The CEO is quite clear that she is not going to be one of now very numerous content platforms that have exploded on the continent with the arrival of better.
“Nearly all these content platforms are working with the top layer of celebrities who are already famous. Bozza is about enabling individuals in the creative industries to have a voice. But content is about the talent and Bozza will be digging down deep into that to create new talent. It’s about breaking the glass ceiling that exists for township or slum talent” she continued.
Despite having got a considerable source of self-generated local content and people potentially interested in it, Bozza has been tackling how it can best make a business model out of these assets.
So Bozza has gone into the market with its third version of its platforms and is now focused on three ways to monetize; one will be to operate a similar fermium model to LinkedIn. This means offering things like local music talent opportunities.
The other way is attracting sponsorship and advertising from brands who want access to the green artists’ audiences and it will see whether it is possible to scale this as the artist’s audience size grows.
Lastly it will, organize content from the platform to operators and handset manufacturers, offering dynamic and new content.
Bozza is currently in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya but also from across the continent and with a stippling of users from Europe. The platform is available on Android, Blackberry, Java and Nokia Express. The platform has grown steadily and reached 300,000 users without marketing.
In making its Pan-African expansion, it has worked with local partners who have got a strong understanding of things like poetry, music and video and know how to get new talent to market.
