Mobile. Mobility. Africa Needs Mobile Business! Download Is Not Revenue. We Need To Make Money, People

This is the age of mAnything – mLife, mFood, mPayment, mLove, mDebt, mYouNameIt. Suddenly Africa has found its footage in the leagues of nations in technology creation. We are not just consuming, we are actually creating apps across the continent. But hold on, while the Yankees and Europeans are making money in their apps, Nigeria and other African countries largely make free ones. That is the reason why we do not get venture funds because must of our apps are free.

Few weeks ago, we saw the nice exhibition of Nigerian developers in the MoMo Lagos pitch day. They all came up with nice ideas and how many people have downloaded their apps. Unfortunately, download is not revenue. It is how many people are buying the apps. Some have thousands of downloads but not a single purchase. Is that really success? Yes and No, it all depends. But in business, you need revenue to remain in production or better business.

Africans must know that download is not going to pay for the internet access. It is only money that does that. Tekedia thinks people need to monetize these apps unless of course you are making it free to enable people test your products and then bring job to you. That strategy works for companies for example our parent company that has an app store. That store is a simple way to tell potential clients that we do this business – make apps for customers. Except from that, we have an apps store in Android market where apps are monetized. It is better to sell one app of $.99 than have 100 hundreds of zero revenue. The latter is vanity while the former is small change that can buy cola.