{"id":44047,"date":"2013-08-13T23:00:40","date_gmt":"2013-08-13T21:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=44047"},"modified":"2013-08-14T09:05:38","modified_gmt":"2013-08-14T07:05:38","slug":"is-google-killing-sa-aggregators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/44047\/is-google-killing-sa-aggregators\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Google killing SA aggregators?"},"content":{"rendered":"

South African blog aggregator, Amatomu<\/a> has not shut down, but it continues to be plagued by technical issues and is struggling to find a purpose as Google<\/a> dominates its space.<\/p>\n

This is according to its founder, Matthew Buckland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amatomu is a blog search engine and article aggregator, which focusses predominantly on blogs published in South Africa.<\/p>\n

It was founded in March 2007 by local web entrepreneurs, Matthew Buckland and Vincent Maher<\/a>, while working for the Mail & Guardian.<\/p>\n

Since its creation, both Buckland and Maher have moved on in their careers, with Maher currently taking up the position of chief product officer at Mxit<\/a>, and Buckland as CEO of digital agency and online publishing business, Creative Spark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Creative Spark inherited the site which, according to Buckland, hasn’t shut down, but is plagued by technical problems that have persisted for seven years.<\/p>\n

“Creative Spark inherited the site and is essentially doing a holding job, meaning the platform is now very dated,” Buckland told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n

On Monday (12 Agust 2013), trying to gain access to the site called up a connection error which has been prevalent for at least a month. This is a result of a technical error, Buckland said.<\/p>\n

“Amatomu has been experiencing these types of errors for the past seven years and is regularly up and down,” he said.<\/p>\n

\"Matthew<\/a>

Matthew Buckland<\/p><\/div>\n

According to the CEO, Creative Spark is focused on its digital agency and publishing business and has other priorities – which does not include Amatomu; hence, the company “steals” time to maintain it.<\/p>\n

“Amatomu was a pre-Twitter and Facebook era creation. We are uncertain of its strategic direction given how the internet has moved on and evolved,” Buckland said.<\/p>\n

“Also, Google\u2019s dominance in search \u2013 which includes blog search \u2013 has also reduced the business case for Amatomu.”<\/p>\n

Challenging Google and failing<\/h3>\n

Aggregators, and South African aggregators in particular, have struggled to maintain ground on the web in the face of internet giant, Google.<\/p>\n

On 1 December 2011, popular social media aggregator, Afrigator, was also shut down by its founder, Justin Hartman, citing declining revenue and a shift in focus for the four shareholders involved with the site.<\/p>\n

Afrigator ran an ad service, Adgator, which was a product similar to Google’s Adsense. The service shut down in September 2011, putting further strain on the aggregator service, ultimately resulting in its closure.<\/p>\n

However, Buckland maintains that it’s not yet the end for Amatomu.<\/p>\n

“There are no plans to close it, but maintain it until we find a new strategic direction for it,” he said.<\/p>\n

By the time of publishing, Amatomu was back up and running, with a message stating that it’s “busy with some upgrades” to its server and database.<\/p>\n

More on South Africa innovation<\/h3>\n

Fix the internet, boost employment: economist<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

SA Internet population close to 14 million<\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n

Broadband speeds: how does SA stack up?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

How South Africa is failing at the Internet<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South African blog aggregator, Amatomu has not shut down, but it continues to be plagued by technical issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":44056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[6476,6477,6475,53,26,6474],"class_list":["post-44047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-afrigator","tag-aggregator","tag-amatomu","tag-google","tag-headline","tag-matthew-buckland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44047","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=44047"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44152,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44047\/revisions\/44152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}