Bloggers in Kenya are set to have their own ad-serving platform. The platform will enable advertisers to have their adverts served to a huge number of blogs published in Kenya. The announcement was made by Kahenya Kamunyu at the monthly Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE) meetup held at Secretz Lounge in Nairobi last Friday. BAKE was set up in March 2011 when several bloggers led by Kennedy Kachwanya decided that coming together as an association would be a better option for bloggers in the country. BAKE’s mission is to “create and promote high quality online local contents and innovations” and “create viable online Marketing channel for the Kenyan companies”. Kamunyu has been handling the technical requirements, including the set up of the BAKE online platform which aggregates all member blogs. He is also working on the ad platform.

Kachwanya explains that several advertisers had been interested in advertising in blogs but had faced a challenge on how to approach the matter. By having a common association, it makes it easy for firms to easily partner with the bloggers through a central channel.
Bloggers and other content developers have also had the perception that current ad-serving platforms have not matured in the local market and require too much effort to reap any gains from them. By establishing their own platform, the bloggers will be in a position to negotiate for better terms from potential advertisers.
Revenues from the platform would be shared proportionally according to unique visitors on each blog. Unique visitors are people who have not accessed a site within a specified time period, usually 24 hours.
Bloggers will still be in a position to use other platforms alongside the BAKE one.