What Happened To The AHHB
Words by Phil Chard
As a writer, the temptation is to find some profound and verbose thing to say when a simple explanation will suffice.
That explanation is this - shit happens. As it goes when shit happens it tends to follow Murphy's Law.
For those that followed and supported The African Hip Hop Blog, you may have noticed the two-year hiatus on content. One of our former contributors Ts'eliso Monaheng documented our untimely and unexpected closure here.
In summation, life caught up to us all and shit happened.
Ross, Twaambo and I never planned nor wanted to shut down. However, we were haemorrhaging money and we could no longer afford to. As a business, The African Hip Hop Blog was not a profitable one. But that was by design.
When Ross started this platform as 25toLyf it was because he was someone who loved music and wanted to promote it. Whether it was his childhood friends from the original 25toLyf clique and Mob Movers or an artist who emailed a submission - he sacrificed time and money simply because he wanted to invest in his passion. When Twaambo and I joined the team, we did so for love. We gladly sacrificed countless hours building the brand because that is what our passion dictated.
I fondly remember the times where I would finish work and stay in the office until 10 pm reviewing submissions and writing articles. Or the countless weekends I sacrificed to review an album and prepare a Mixed Bag Monday post. Not once did we never think about money. We were young and loved African music. We could see the movement that was taking shape and we wanted to be part of it. Being able to share that passion was rewarding enough.
Our readers saw that passion too. We grew from a few hundred visitors every month to thousands and eventually millions. Part of that was the content and part of it was due to the brilliance of Twaambo and his SEO skills. If we wrote about it, guaranteed we were always on the first page of Google.
As we grew the investment grew. Once again, we never questioned the money. I remember not questioning the need to spend my savings on equipment or to travel across borders for an event.
At this point, the blog had become bigger than we expected or planned for. But, probably because of naivety we still never considered the money. To us, money in content represented everything wrong with the culture. It softened critiques, it watered down opinions, it violated the trust we had built with our readers.
I recall a time when an alcoholic brand was doing a co-branded campaign with a Hollywood movie. They approached us to be part of the campaign and we turned the money down without batting an eyelid. Our reasoning - "this brand and movie don't have anything to do with Hip Hop. We can't sell out." Even back then the amount offered was substantial - buy a nice car substantial. Yet somehow, we didn't think twice. It's surreal to reflect on that level of blind naivety and passion. Sometimes I cringe at the youthful ignorance of it all.
There were more brands, more offers, from online clothing retailers to electronic companies. All of whom didn't meet our exacting and non-descript standards.
But like a living organism, the blog kept growing, even without our coaxing. Submissions kept multiplying. By 2017 we were receiving upwards of 200 submissions a week. Our inboxes were overloaded. So much so we had to design a proprietary submission tool.
Writers began contacting us. Events wanted to partner with us. It was no longer a side project; our baby had grown into a full-time responsibility. Still, the passion remained. Sadly, our ideals did not evolve. Well not fast enough to stay afloat.
In a few years, the blog had gone from costing us a few hundred dollars to several thousand. Eventually, we pivoted and began taking on advertising and brand deals. But we were still selective, still naive. We partnered with brands like Multichoice, Sprite, Absolut Vodka, Vodacom and many more. We're eternally grateful for their support but that support couldn't stem the tide.
While this was happening, we were all getting older, we all had more responsibilities, more demanding jobs, more bills, more of life's hurdles to overcome.
We couldn't keep the momentum going and we all decided that a break was needed. A new strategy and business model needed to be crafted. During this time, I stopped checking blog emails. The thought of tackling that ever-growing mountain of unread messages would induce a panic attack. I doubt any of us checked, the thing we loved so much had become a job, a stressful job where the paycheques were going the wrong way. It was during this time a payment to our host lapsed and the unfortunate events detailed in the article referenced above occurred.
Without warning our baby was gone. We didn't want to lose her. At the time I was in a fellowship under the guidance of some brilliant minds in the hopes of developing a business strategy that would work and scale for the blog
But it was too late the data was gone and unrecoverable.... kinda. We still do have a text backup of the site which I am manually restoring. The AHHB will return and visitors will no longer be met with an “Under Construction” landing page. We feel we owe that to you, the readers, the artists and the writers who spent hours building this brand.
Point Black: The Next Chapter
You may ask. What is this website? What is Point Black? Why have the social media handles for the @AfricanHHB changed? Well, this company was created partly because of the blog. Once we realised an entity needed to be formed to receive payments and develop campaigns for clients we formed Point Black. Even though the team has moved on - Ross is now working in the upper echelons of the music industry and Twaambo founded one of the biggest music platforms in Zambia. We still work together, and we share a common goal - to promote African content and African creatives.
Our passion never wavered; our love never waned. We just needed to rethink things. Even when the blog was operational, I could not see a viable business model for online content that allowed us to maintain our independent voice, create high value editorial content and meet our costs. We saw how brands would buy articles, how artists would try swing for favourable reviews. We saw the click-bait headlines and the web pages so overrun with ads they were impossible to navigate. We wanted no part of that game, so we consciously took our ball home. We left the game, but we planned to return.
After 2 years of plotting a way forward, this is our next chapter. For now, The AHHB will remain as a backup of all the content we created before Digital Ocean chose to nuke it without warning. In its place Point Black will continue to work on promoting artists across the continent, building this creative industry, and telling our stories.
Our first major project in this chapter is The Pungwe Sessions Volume 2. It has been 6 years in the making and the team here has worked tirelessly to make it happen. We hope you will continue to support us on this new chapter the same way you did before.
To everyone that made The African Hip Hop Blog the award-winning, culture-shifting giant that it was, thank you. From the readers to the professors who referenced us and the artists that trusted us with their work. Thank you.
To the writers who contributed - Ts'eliso Monaheng, Sabelo Mkhabela, Mayuyuka Kaunda, Shingai Darangwa, Simon Mudimu, Christine Rupiah, Lombe Kabinga, Philani Dlamini, Ross Hagan, Twaambo Haamucenje and anyone else who contributed, thank you. You have all moved on to bigger things and if it weren't for you this amazing ride would have ended far sooner.
AHHB for Life!
Also, backup your shit. Then back up that backup.
