Just like the clone leader Rocket Internet brothers, a Russian Venture firm named the Genesis Technology Partners has entered Nigeria’s Internet space.
The firm last month launched a beta version of their new online news portal called Naij in Nigeria.
The portal features local news, photos, music, weather, and allows users to share photos, gifts with their friends and promises that Naij would become the fastest growing online news portal in Nigeria.
It is currently ranked 39 in Nigeria by Alexa, a top Internet analytic site.
Naij is expected to launch a number of other new services such as video, jobs and forums. It is in addition looking to include a dating and email service “soon.” At the moment, the news on the site is user-generated with some of it aggregated.
Following the success of one its 2009 launched NUR.KZ, as the most visited portal in Kazakhstan in just two years, the company is now looking to replicate the same model in Nigeria.
Like its sister sites in Russia and the CIS region, Naij could grow to become the number one local website in Nigeria “within a year or so,” as it continues to provide relevant news and information to Nigeria’s growing Internet users.
Genesis Technology Partners is one of the largest CIS Internet holdings and the largest Internet holding company focusing on CIS-markets and on running websites with local country content including news, classifieds, video, blogs, music, auto, price aggregators, etc with advertisement as its sole revenue model.
The Moscow-based firm runs the biggest local websites in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and the fourth largest local website in Uzbekistan visited by 10 million unique monthly users.
Nigeria, experts say, looks attractive to most techno entrepreneurs given it has Africa’s leading Internet population with about 45 million active Internet users, as of today.
