Balancing The Readers’ Needs And The Advertisers’ Needs

Of late, we have been facing a bit of a conundrum.

Ghafla! is a hit with the Kenyan public, both at home and abroad. Our 1.2 million readers can’t get enough of our news, seeing as they read on average 11 stories per month from us.

However, when it comes to media, what makes it a tricky business is that you have to serve two masters at the same time: the consumers and the advertisers. And sometimes what the consumer wants is not the same as what the advertiser wants. To make things worse, the entertainment industry is full of attention seeking behaviour, whether it’s the skimpy skirts in music videos, or the sex-themed theatre productions, or the drunken parties. A large portion of our readers want to see this stuff, but then there are the advertisers, who put food on our table, and they do NOT want to be associated with such racy content.

To take care of both these needs, we decided to come up with a few compromises to make our website a brand-safe destination, and still the place that people all over the world can rely on to give them the boldest coverage of entertainment news. First and foremost, we yesterday announced that we were making a commitment to ban and delete all the nude photos on Ghafla. Now, further to that, we have come up with an “Uncut” section, where all the ‘morally questionable’ happenings in the entertainment industry will be written about. In this “Uncut” section, there will be no direct advertising whatsoever. It will be clearly labelled as explicit and over 18 material.