By Emma Elebeke

An African web portal, Howzit MSN is partnering with Ad Dynamo, a South African ad-serving firm to help monetize  the growing web traffic in Nigeria.

The company said the partnership is aiming to sell premium advertising inventory that reaches Howzit MSN users in Nigeria and to brands looking to address the country’s dynamic and fast growing consumer market.

Speaking at the official launch of the solution, the General Manager, Howzit MSN, Mr. Marcus Stephens, said since launching a dedicated African channel at the beginning of the year, the portal has amassed more than 1million unique users and northwards of 18mllion page views across the continent outside of South Africa. A substantial portion of the user base comes from Nigeria with a healthy portion from Kenya.

“Since launching our African channel, we have found a thirst for local content among users in East and West Africa, as well as other parts of the continent. As pleased as we are with the first year’s growth, we are only just getting started.

“With 46 million internet users in Nigeria and 10 million in Kenya – numbers that are growing all the time – there is huge potential to expand in Africa and to provide a platform for brands that want to  market their products and services to the continent’s fast-growing middle-class. We are looking forward to growing this footprint with Ad Dynamo in the months to come, he said.”

Also speaking, the Global Business Development Manager of the company, Nicole Harding, said that Ad Dynamo has been expanding globally, with offices in South Africa, Nigeria, UK, Netherlands and Brazil, and is partnering with MSN to be its premium sales hub in Nigeria, adding Ad Dynamo uses its contextual advertising platform serving more than a billion ads per month across over 28 websites – to target users with display advertising that benefits brands, with profit ranging from exposure to relevant African, Nigerian and MSN content portal which include a transparent, cost effective and measurable way of reaching the market.

Howzit MSN is owned by Kagiso New Media,  one of South Africa’s largest web portals and the official South African partner for Microsoft’s MSN.

According to Harding the brand is aiming to quickly establish itself with presence in the African digital publishing space and now reaches English-speaking readers and advertisers across the continent.

With this solution, Hardling said Microsoft is redirecting African traffic from its global MSN property to the Howzit MSN African channel which allows users to find localised content in business, news, travel, lifestyle and technology.