You probably haven’t heard, but a few days ago, BellaNaija, Nigeria’s most respected entertainment media house announced they were diversifying. They didn’t exactly phrase it like that, but anyone who knows, knows. They announced this diversification without ceremony or fanfare on their own website, perhaps to downplay just how big what they just did could become. After nearly 8 years, Bellanaija was taking its most unexpected success, Asoebi Bella and turning into an independent platform complete with its own app.

Did someone say ka-ching?!

Anyone who even remotely works in Media knows what Alexa is. But if you have never ever heard of it before, you’re in luck. Alexa.com, is an aggregator of sorts, able to analyse all the traffic every website in the world receives and uses that information to create a ‘debatably’ accurate list of the most relevant and most visited websites worldwide. Traffic in this context refers to all the people who open a website at any point in time, how much time they spend there, where on the site they spend that time and if the information they get on the site influences their decision making elsewhere. The top ranked sites on Alexa are the ones who are not only able to engage users for long periods of time but are also able to make users spend some cool cash through the site.

Traffic and Alexa rankings matter to all the websites you visit, even the free ones because a high ranking means the website can sell the attention of its visitors (you) to advertisers. You get content, the advertiser gets the opportunity to try to convince you to buy stuff, the website gets money; everybody wins. However, the amount of time we can spend on the internet is finite and the number of possible websites to visit are constantly increasing. Options mean we spend all our time on one website, and website has less collateral with which to bargain for money from the advertiser, which is bad. So websites get desperate (or creative, depending on how you look at it) in finding ways to keep you on their websites.

Bellanaija stumbled on Nigeria’s persistent obsession with weddings a few years ago with Asoebi Bella. It was a simple enough idea, take pictures of wedding guests every other week and make a post about them, several years later, while other parts of the Bellanaija site rises and wanes, Aso-ebi Bella and BellaNaija Weddings continue to flourish, stoking our obsession and in turn being stoked by it. Many of the ‘respectable’ Nigerian sites have followed in this strain, capitalising on our need to affirm our aspirations to marriage and making bank.

There are many lessons about us as a people that can be learned from this.

Editor