Speaking about the source of all those eyes on his site, Samuel Majani, Ghafla founder and CEO said, “We’ve added a lot more serialized pieces of content, like “Ghafla!Girls” and Ghafla!Guys,” “Fashion Evolution,” “Top 10 Box Office,” which appear daily/weekly on our website. These serial stories have also been given their own sections on Ghafla! in order for their fans to browse them easily.”
The sections added user engagement, increased the site’s pageviews and making Ghafla grow into one Kenya’s top five news portals. Before this Ghafla said it had crappy content which wasn’t retaining readers so much even after visiting the site.
“Though we had a lot of traffic, we weren’t retaining them very well,” said Majani, “On 1 million monthly readers, we were getting around 2 million pageviews, which meant that every reader was reading about 2 pages total on the site. Those figures pointed to a problem of not having engaging content. ”
Ghafla is one of Kenya’s success stories. With seed funding in the bank, Majani quickly set up a team to put cover local entertainment news, a gap he felt existed and with great execution and team work plus patience, Ghafla has grown to what it is now and though there have been rumors that Majani is set to sell it to some Kenyan media firm, his passion to cover local entertainment scene grows day by day.
However, a cross-section of Kenyans point fingers at Ghafla’s semi-nude photos from young girls who, in search for fame do anything. Another media group also recently launched a competing entertainment news site, something that has not shaken the Ghafla crew.
Check out Ghafla’s new office too.