Naijarita News

Excessive web traffic is the bane of every successful website. You labor to build a nice website, publicize it on every webboard you visit, call all your friends about it, put a link in the signature of every email you send and then people start visiting. Argh!

Worse, they like it so much that they tell their friends who tell their friend and it turns into a vicious cycle. Search engines contribute the problem by driving even more visitors to your website. This growth can continue until your website requires several dedicated servers and is making thousands of dollars a day from adverts. Obviously, this is undesirable.

Every morning, Nigerians around the world log on to their favorite Nigerian news websites to find out what’s happening at home, and they drop links to their favorite stories on Nigerian forums and blogs in order to further discuss the news. This makes Nigerian news websites the ones hardest hit by the excessive traffic menace.

Fortunately, these news websites have developed various rock-solid techniques for fighting off website traffic. Let’s study them so we can learn from them:

1) Require Registration for Old Stories:
Websites like ThisDayOnline require you to register to read articles that are older than a few days old. This is not very effective at reducing traffic, but at least it slows down the people that are trying to read your old stories and if you’re lucky you get to collect their e-mail addresses and spam them to submission. It is only 20% effective.

2) Require Payment for Archived Stories:
This technique is used by the Vanguard Newspapers and Allafrica.com. This works because most of their readers have no interest in paying to read news that is freely available elsewhere, and those that want to pay might not even have access to credit cards. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well because most people will read the news before it’s archived. This one is 25% effective.

3) Use the Same Links For Stories Published on Different Days:
This ingenious technique was invented in Nigeria by a company called DNetSystems for the Punch and Guardian newspaper websites. Articles are published on generic Links like /article01 and /article02, and the story behind each link is changed every day. This discourages users from linking to stories from forums and blogs because the article you link to today will be completely different in 24 hours. It also helps to frustrate search engines because their indexes are updated less frequently. It is 90% effective and a strong testament to Nigerian ingenuity.

4) Requiring Registration For All Pages of the Website:
This is a highly effective improvement to Technique 1, because (1) Most web users will simply refuse to open, share, or link to a site that requires registration or payment to view any page, and (2) search engines like Google cannot read a password-protected site. It is 99% effective, regardless of whether registration requires payment or not.

The Nigerian-owned Technology Times website invented it, and is using it with great success. Would you believe that their stories have not been spidered by Google since mid-2005 when they started using this policy? This month, in fact, they are very close to meeting their search engine referral and website traffic goal of zero dot zero!

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Mr. Shina Badaru, the CEO of Technology Times, happens to find this article quite amusing because he has a lovely sense of humor. I hope this means that they’ll drop the registration requirement as soon as possible!