by Osarumen Osamuyi

When the number of people rising to the top of a pyramid scheme like MMM (the Mavrodi Mondial Movement) becomes too high for the inflow rate to contain, the house of cards will come crashing down — like in Zimbabwe.

Because I hold the readers of my blog in high regard, I know I don’t need to put any warnings in here about any of that. I cannot say the same for all my compatriots, though. MMM’s web portal now ranks 5th in Nigeria, according to Alexa — higher than Facebook, Jumia and Nairaland. Sigh.

Victor Ekwealor, writing for Techpoint.ng: By Leapfrogging Facebook In Traffic, MMM challenges Nigeria’s Mobile-First status

Last week, MMMOffice , the official portal of the scheme in Nigeria rose to become the 5th most visited website in Nigeria. This statistic is courtesy of popular web ranking portal Alexa. According to Alexa, MMMoffice.com rose 40,385 places through the ranks; surpassing Jumia, Nairaland and even Facebook.

Similarweb is another web ranking service that is as popular as alexa and it has also placed the mmm portal at 6th with a 5,994 rise. The two analysis shows the dominance of mmm in the country.

These figures have put into perspective how quickly nigerians are adopting this get-rich-quick-scheme which may be attributed to the downward spiral of the economy. Most importantly, they help to debunk the myth that nigeria is a mobile first country

 

Err…no. Victor got this one horribly wrong in my opinion. His logic appears to be that since there’s allegedly more activity on MMM than Facebook on sites that report mostly desktop traffic, then Nigerians are not mobile first.

Surely, there are not more Nigerians subscribed to MMM as there are on Facebook (mobile). So if the MMM Nigeria portal is more visited than Facebook, we can deduce that this is via desktop web.

Yet…

The data which constitutes Alexa‘s statistics is gotten from Alexa toolbars, and these toolbars can only be installed on desktop computers as there is not yet a mobile version available.
SimilarWeb on the other hand is supposed to be a fly in this oil; a sort of deviation from the premise considering that it tracks mobile and its rankings are generally considered more accurate than Alexa’s.

1. I have no idea why anybody pays any attention to rankings on sites like Alexa and SimilarWeb. That one is marginally more accurate than the other does not mean that they aren’t both bollocks.
2. SimilarWeb tracks visits, as defined “as an entry to a web domain from a different web domain or from the beginning of an empty browsing session”, not unique visitors. If Alexa and SimilarWeb are reporting that there’s more activity on the site than on Facebook, then it means two things: 1) that the few people who are using it are using it aggressively. 2) that most of them are working class people who have access to desktop PCs in their offices. None of this is evidence that the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Nigerians do not experience the internet via mobile phones.

This new statistics from Alexa and Similarweb are a call for reevaluation; maybe Africa as a whole is a mobile first continent, but could the same be said of Nigeria?

Yes, please. Let’s not speak of this matter again

---

Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

This article was first written here