Zikoko is way more than a BuzzFeed clone
They're clearly running with the simple content bit but with a slight twist.
In January 2001, an email exchange between an MIT student and the NIKEiD sneaker-customisation store went viral right after he shared the email thread with a couple of friends.
His order for a pair of running shoes was rejected. Customer service claimed his personal id - sweatshop - was inappropriate. So the student wrote back to Nike stating his case for choosing the moniker: “I chose the ID because I wanted to remember the toil and labour of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately?”
Nike did not budge.
Eventually, he opted for a different personal id, albeit asking a favour. That the shoes be sent with a coloured photograph of the ten-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes them. Jonah Peretti never received a response from Nike.
This encounter led Peretti down his own rabbit hole journey of media, virality and the motivation behind why people share content. Like they did his email. The product of that journey became Buzzfeed.
12 years later, Techcabal, arguably Africa's biggest tech publication, was founded. The next year, what would be Techcabal’s parent company, Bigcabal, was created. In the next couple of months, the company decided to compete in the mainstream media arena, not just in tech. The result of that decision; Zikoko.
Origin Story
BuzzFeed’s party trick has always been the “identity post,” a content approach that addresses the identity and the background of the reader, more than a general need for news. I can hear you surmise how incredibly niche that could be. You’re probably right, yet, riddle me this: is the relationship between journalists and readers balanced today? Is this the chicken and egg scenario where what the audience wants is what the media gives it or it’s the media telling the audience what to want?
Well, Zikoko is often identified in pretty much the same way some said Hernan Crespo was a Gabriel Batistuta regen. Just that for the nascent publication, the older “head” is BuzzFeed. The thing is, the band of merry content creators at arguably Nigeria’s most upbeat publication has grown in leaps and bounds in half a decade.
It has gone on to find its own voice and audience - one always looking forward to simple, humour fused content, impactful in its nature, that plays on the nostalgia shamelessly. In essence, content that leverages on Nigeria’s pop culture and is connected to the various lives of readers.
Mission accomplished? Well, if you go by the creed Editor-In-Chief and acclaimed content “ninja” Fu’ad Lawal swears by, most definitely. “We want to create smart and joyful content by using limitless formats for Africans everywhere (and secondarily: people around the world),” he says.
They’re definitely delivering on the joy part. Scan the average millennial or Gen Z timeline on Nigerian Twitter and you’ll come across at least one Zikoko quiz asking you to discover what kind of local dish you are, or a video clip of some light-skinned chap begging you to chuckle at his Seth Rogen-esque jokes; or a post that has various social media tribes debating as relentlessly as scholars would debate Plato’s The Republic. Limitless formats? Check.
While Zikoko wields online quizzes, listicles, and pop culture articles like Buzzfeed. It has successfully adapted the content to a Nigerian audience finding new content verticals that are resonating with its demographic like its The Secret, VRSUS, Naira Life, Sex Life, What She Said and Hacked series amongst a host of others.
The Landscape
There have been a few obituaries mourning Nigeria’s declining reading culture, and not without due cause. Think of arguably the biggest online video peddlers between 2015 and 2019, Pulse. Often publishing up to 300 stories daily at a point, it was clear what the intention was; reaching its audience (over 3 million site visits monthly) with accurate information as quickly as possible. This model suggests Nigerians just want to consume short, simple and easy-to-read content.
To be fair, from a publisher perspective, ad revenue responds to volume. Volume, by way of captive eyes, represents a large bargaining chip.
Zikoko is running with the simple content bit, but with a slight twist. Yes, people can't always read pop culture stories but it can help them on their way to becoming better readers. Hence, the sprinkling in of relatively serious, longer pieces every now and then. That these stories are discovered mainly via social (about 38% of its traffic) is in itself incredible.
Zikoko doesn’t just tell stories that are fun and engaging. It tells stories that prompt constructive discussion and leads a path for people to build empathy. That is what sets it apart from the rest of the field right now.
Readers can tell that the stories aren't sensationalised. That these stories are from real people who are willing to share. They trust that the people at Zikoko, like Fu’ad, Ope, Toke and everyone else on the team won’t mangle their stories. It’s actually beautiful to see the stable symbiosis, a relationship that is often hard to find between media publications and their audiences on this side of the equator.
Running the Play
You’d assume that in Nigeria, with a name like “Big Cabal,” there’d be villainous amounts of money and a large team of Pavlovian geniuses cooking up all this content in some upscale Lekki apartment with Managing Editor, Ope Adedeji at the helm, hawkishly overseeing things.
You’d be wrong, well except for the geniuses part, and they’re not that many. Fu’ad explains that the team is more or less a band of self-starters that had to be formed after agreeing on a creed: “You need to assemble people who can push that creed - smart and joyful.”
Is that not just Silicon Valley spiel? Apparently not, as he asserts that “You want people who know how to be smart, but not people who take themselves too seriously all the time. Having people with a very experimental mindset is key. People are not as experimental when they are stuck in their ways.”
In September 2019, a team of five from Zikoko embarked on a road trip tagged Jollof Road for 80 days. The plan was simple; tour 14 countries across mainland West Africa, curate the lives of people in these countries - where they visit, what they like to eat and the most uniquely interesting things about them. It was a hit.
Not bad for the alleged “BuzzFeed clone” no? This is the sort of curiosity and culture curation zest that drives Zikoko.
Come for the Fun, Stay for the Culture
Zikoko doesn’t just write stories to amp up readership. This is not your Batman-Superman/Ironman-Captain America narrative arc. It is starting difficult conversations that Nigerians tend to sweep under the carpet.
It’s syncing with Nigeria’s irreverent younger generations in terms of range. This is visible in significant contributions to minority spaces like the LGBTQ community as well as giving a voice to rape victims. Something a lot of other publications genuinely struggle with.
The uncanny ability to balance the heavier stuff with the light-hearted subject matter is unmatched.
Take the latest content-mania offering, its Live Dating vertical. Here, young Nigerians are helped in a quest to, well, find love.
Like something right out of a lucid Ryan Seacrest dream, the Cupid seeker goes on Zikoko’s Instagram account and holds a series of scaled-down speed dates with members of the audience and as you would expect, hilarity ensues. This is the sort of content that has allowed the brand to blossom into more than just a Buzzfeed clone.
Fu’ad says the aim is to make things up as they go along, which is pretty hard to believe, to be frank.
“I think what has been great for Zikoko is the mindset. It is knowing that whatever we want Zikoko to be we’ve not figured it out yet, so we are experimenting aggressively. Whatever works we keep, whatever doesn’t, we drop,” he says.
Alright, surely there’s some form of deliberate mind-melding on the team right?
“It is a mindset that you cannot instruct people to have, people need to understand the ‘why’ and aggressively figure out how to make things work. One of the merits of that system is that I am constantly surprised by what people on the team make because they are on their own trying to figure things out by themselves which is a blessing, to be honest,” he continues.
Looking at what seems like incredibly well-orchestrated, Geppetto-level, production, nothing about Zikoko seems random. He does admit to wanting to ensure the publication might as well be a person though: “I joined Zikoko as a fan. I was working at a clearly bigger media company at the time (Ringier-owned Pulse) but things here were different in the sense that it felt like it had a personality.”
The Controversy of Inspiration
Accusations of a lack of originality persist though. The niggling doubters all say it’s not just BuzzFeed providing inspirational fodder. Brands as varied as Conde Nast and Vox Media have been whispered around. Is that an issue?
Fu’ad says it is probably the exact opposite. There are great methods that can be employed by both well established and upcoming brands. “We look at all the aspirational publications, every single one of them, and ask ‘what are they doing that we can adopt?’” He says, adding that interestingly: “quizzes have always been an integral part of Zikoko since the beginning, in 2015.”
The confidence that Zikoko has found its own voice, even if it seems analogous with others, is earnest. “Occasionally some people say Zikoko is like Buzzfeed, sometimes they say it is like Vox. I have seen a tweet… which was weird - not weird because I hate it - but because I was like ‘oh?’ as they went ‘Zikoko is like Vice, it is like Refinery 29...’ and so on.”
Social as the container to deliver most of the content is not new but it is not something you’d accuse Zikoko of plagiarising. It is more that the audience is prone to share what it enjoys, wherever it is too. So instead of searching for the content, it comes right to them, wherever they may be.
The Endgame
The clone narrative may be played out. Zikoko is becoming important as the choice media platform for young Nigerians. This audience, approaching a million visits monthly, sees the content as not just shareable but “honest.” That whatever the story might be, and whoever the story might be about, it might as well just be about them. A feeling that is well capable of spurring them to take action in their own lives.
Now, more than ever that’s incredibly important. With a global pandemic that has changed how we all view the world, Zikoko is being held to a standard it probably did not ask for. How does a publication balance churning out quality content and acting as a coping mechanism? How does it keep heads above water, especially in the face of media houses dropping employees like flies?
Pretty easy, Fu’ad says, yet again; “We treat this like it is an essential service; like we are treating Covid-19 patients. Zikoko does feel like a frontline in the sense that, over the past few months it has become the way a lot of people cope with the anxieties of the current climate, I think that kind of helps.”
In typical underdog fashion, this is a lot to handle, he adds, because “It is exhausting, everyone is punching above their weight to a large extent. Ad revenues are suffering, definitely, but in the typical Zikoko template we are also aggressively thinking about all the ways to make the most of it or figure out new models and channels.” Still touting the experiment line unabashedly.
Zikoko is building a tribe of readers that enjoy the spontaneity in its content. It won’t be long before it spreads its tentacles into other parts of Africa to fulfil its mission of bringing smart and joyful content to young Africans and the world. While that’s up ahead, perhaps reminding us of the bigger names is not such a bad thing, right? Fu’ad certainly thinks so “When people say these things it feels like a compliment because these are publications we respect and putting Zikoko in the same sentence as them, for now, is a big deal.”
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This edition of tabbing was written by @_fosi and edited by @ngbede.
This was an awesome read that provided fresh insight into the motivation behind Zikoko. I got a more personal understanding of the experience and I’ll try to read more from Zikoko.