{"id":24266,"date":"2012-10-16T00:03:06","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T22:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=24266"},"modified":"2012-10-16T09:10:01","modified_gmt":"2012-10-16T07:10:01","slug":"hayibo-satire-for-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/24266\/hayibo-satire-for-sale\/","title":{"rendered":"Hayibo! Satire for sale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Satirical news site, Hayibo.com<\/a> is to enlist the help of a dedicated team to assist it in becoming self-sustaining, with an eye on becoming profitable for the first time.<\/p>\n

Hayibo is well-known among those who follow the volatile South African socio-political landscape, providing a tongue-in-cheek view of the country’s headline-grabbing events.<\/p>\n

In September 2010, Hayibo said it would shut down due to a lack of funding, however an 11th-hour bailout by specialist publishing house, Cape Media<\/a>, kept the site functioning and has continued to do so since.<\/p>\n

Two years on (September 2012), and Hayibo aims to venture away from the purse strings of\u00a0Cape Media.<\/p>\n

“Cape Media were a fantastic support to us – they backed us when nobody else would,” Hayibo founder, Tom Eaton<\/a> told BusinessTech. “But we want to see if Hayibo can exist on ad sales alone.”<\/p>\n

Selling satire<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Hayibo hasn’t made money in the past – mainly because our team has been too small to allocate someone full-time to chasing ad revenue,” he said.<\/p>\n

The site has been generating some income with a syndication deal with the Weekend Argus; however, Eaton noted that this revenue is “negligible”, which pushed the site’s decision to approach a dedicated ad-sales team.<\/p>\n

As a part of its new business strategy, Hayibo has hired the services of digital and social media service provider, Creative Spark Interactive<\/a>, to handle ad sales and consult on ways to grow the site.<\/p>\n

“Hayibo is a niche site, but the brand punches well above its weight in terms of national recognition,” Eaton said.<\/p>\n

According to the latest Effective Measure statistics for September 2012, Hayibo.com attracted over 71,303 unique visitors to its site – 39,615 of which were from South Africa – boasting a strong audience ready and receptive to the Hayibo brand.<\/p>\n

“We’re pretty confident we can turn that brand awareness into revenue and become self-sutstaining,” Eaton said.<\/p>\n

“The long term strategy is to grow – whether by adding more content or going into online video,” he said.<\/p>\n

The hard sell<\/strong><\/p>\n

Eaton indicated that attracting the right kinds advertisers may present a bit of a challenge for the site, as companies do not tend to be “philanthropic” with advertising spend.<\/p>\n

“Satire is a hard sell because it doesn’t endorse any particular economic sector,” Eaton said.<\/p>\n

“If anything, we’ve criticized brands and condemned materialistic, uncritical ways of living. That makes some advertisers uncertain about how to link their product to our brand.”<\/p>\n

Despite the challenges of the past, and those still to be faced in finding the right match in advertising partners, Eaton remains positive on the site’s outlook:<\/p>\n

“I am confident that we’ll find the right advertisers, because Hayibo’s readers are a pretty tasty demographic: highly educated, high Living Standards Measure (LSM), and perhaps most important, eager to support those who support satire.”<\/p>\n

Related articles<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Zoopy \u201coff air\u201d for 2 months<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Vodacom planning to sell stake in Zoopy<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Zoopy founders leave company<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hayibo.com is putting plans into action to make the popular satirical news site profitable and self-sustaining.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":24278,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[4372,4370,26,4371],"class_list":["post-24266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-cape-media","tag-hayibo","tag-headline","tag-tom-eaton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24266"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24277,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24266\/revisions\/24277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}