The Fastest Growing South African Website Does It Again

ZAlebs Record-Setting Growth Continues In May With Over 1,400,000 Site Visits, 3,000,000 Page Views, 6,000,000 Facebook Engagements And 2,000,000 Twitter Impressions

Johannesburg,  ZAlebs (www.zalebs.com) the leading South Africa lifestyle website with a focus on “Life Love And What’s Hot” in South Africa, is proud to release record-setting numbers for May which continue the surge in traffic and engagement with young black South Africans. This rapid growth of the site intensified with Bhala Ventures assuming control of the brand in January of this year.

“We continue to see day to day and even hour to hour that young, black South Africans want a site that talks about what is important to us, and shares the latest news about the people we know and care about,” according to  Zibuyile Dladla, the Executive Editor of ZAlebs.

She continued by saying “Our audience is 90% in South Africa, 90% black and between the ages of 18 and 35 years old – we have over 500,000 unique visitors in this market making us, we believe, the largest site in South Africa and definitely the most engaged.”

ZAlebs is run by Ms. Dladla out of Johannesburg with support from Bhala Ventures, the venture and media development company founded by Gisele Wertheim Aymes, publisher of Longevity and former publisher of ELLE SA and ELLE DÉCOR SA, and James Cannon Boyce, formerly of the Huffington Post, and digital strategist behind (RED) during its early years.

“I have never seen a site with the passionate engagement that you see on ZAlebs – on Twitter, we often have posts with 30% engagement rate and on Facebook we average over 200,000 engagements every single day”, told James Cannon Boyce.

Gisele added by saying “Advertisers and brands are starting to notice that sites like ZAlebs have the audience they really want and the numbers are really there” and further noted that brands such as KFC, ShowMax, Research Unit and RwandAir have all begun working with ZAlebs.
Other highlights of ZAlebs’ May results include:

Over 50% of the audience, or more than 700,000 visits, per month are within the key 25 – 34 age demographic

The audience remains female skewed but still attracts over 200,000 site visits from male South Africans every month.

The audience is firmly focused on Gauteng with close to a million visits a month occurring in this one province.

80% of the traffic is mobile, with Vodacom and MTN being the dominant carriers.

Top stories routinely receive over 20,000 page views on ZAlebs.com in a single day.

“We have big goals for growth and some next steps – we are adding to our team, we just launched our first email program and our content is growing every week – we want to see if we can get to 1 million unique visitors and then go from there.” Zibuyile further noted.

James explains: “We see this as a model that will continue to boom in South Africa and then we are looking at other countries where there is a real need to build a local, smart, fun engaging site for people within that country that is built for them and by them.” He confirmed that the company is looking at countries ranging from Kenya to Nigeria and hopes to be live soon in at least one more country.

“I have seen the media landscape shift dramatically in South Africa in the last five years – and even more so in the last 18 – 24 months. The brands from Europe that used to attract so much interest are in decline and the marketers are catching up to where the audiences truly are.” Gisele shares. She tells the story of meeting a young South African graduate recently who confirmed that ZAlebs was their go-to site, telling Gisele “This is my site, it’s where I go every day to find out what is important to me.”

About ZAlebs

Zalebs.com is South Africa’s leading site for young and rising South Africans. We have over 1,000,000 people a month visit our website and more than 6,000,000 engagements on Facebook. This is not the future of South African media, it’s the here and now.

Having mastered the combination of incredibly engaging content and a business model that works, the growing team is eyeing an expansion into other African countries.

We focus on Entertainment News, Celebrity Interviews, Lifestyle Reporting, Fashion Reporting, Music Reviews and Social Media Distribution.