By Shruti Menon Seeboo
Are you ready to propel Mauritius into a vibrant digital future? Mauritius Digital Connect is your launchpad! This exciting half-day event, taking place on August 9, 2024, promises to be a game-changer for the island nation’s technology and fintech landscape. It’s your chance to be part of the movement that propels Mauritius towards a thriving digital future.
Imagine a day overflowing with cutting-edge insights, explosive networking, and the unveiling of a groundbreaking solution -witness the much-anticipated launch of Digitalgo 1.0, a revolutionary platform poised to empower Mauritian businesses and redefine the way they connect with their audiences. In a conversation with Digitalgo’s founder, Julien Gonnin, he sheds light on the event’s purpose and the exciting launch of Digitalgo. Excerpts:
- Why is Digitalgo hosting the Mauritius Digital Connect event, and why did you choose the theme of scaling up the digital economy?
At Digitalgo, we aim to become a major player in the Mauritian digital landscape. Hosting this event is our first step towards establishing ourselves as a leader. It allows us to raise awareness about our brand and offerings while simultaneously sparking a conversation about the broader topic of the local digital economy and its potential.
2. You mentioned a vision to elevate the local digital offer. Can you elaborate on that?
Absolutely. Mauritians are active online consumers, spending just as much time on digital platforms as people in developed nations. However, our local digital economy doesn’t fully benefit from this activity because users primarily engage with international websites and apps. This happens, in part, because we lack a robust selection of local digital options. Additionally, local businesses often lack access to monetisation tools that are commonplace internationally and fuel the growth of online offerings. These tools are not always well-suited for our smaller market size.
3. How does Digitalgo address this issue?
Our first digital product specifically tackles this challenge. We’re building a Programmatic Advertising Network – the first of its kind in Mauritius. This platform will provide a relevant and effective advertising revenue solution specifically scaled for the Mauritian market.
4. Can you explain the significance of this programmatic network?
Projections show that digital advertising spending in Mauritius will reach Rs 2.2 billion in 2024, with Rs 680 million specifically dedicated to banner advertising. Our goal is to ensure that a growing share of these advertising dollars are reinvested back into the local economy, rather than solely benefiting international businesses. A local advertising revenue model is crucial to achieve this.
5. How will this benefit local players?
A local programmatic network will have several positive impacts. Existing online media and websites will have access to a more sustainable revenue stream to support growth. Additionally, new digital entrepreneurs and content creators will benefit from a “Plug&Play” solution – they can easily integrate Digitalgo into their platforms and focus on attracting visitors.
6. What can attendees expect to gain from attending Mauritius Digital Connect?
We want to raise awareness about the current state of the digital economy and its immense potential for growth with the right model in place. Our goal is to transform the current limitations into a thriving ecosystem. The event will feature insightful presentations from various speakers, addressing specific market challenges and opportunities. Of course, we’ll also be sharing more about Digitalgo and how it can contribute to this positive transformation, ultimately improving the experience and results for companies running local advertising campaigns.
7. Can you elaborate on the specific challenges faced by local digital businesses?
We have seen too many times some great ideas coming to life but falling short because the business model wasn’t sustainable. A lot of these times, such projects rely on website/app traffic monetization, at least on their initial phases. But as we did not have a solid and relevant tool in place until now, all those companies needed additional capital and resources to monetize their traffic through direct selling. Which adds a lot of additional costs and complexifies a business line which should be simple: drive traffic to your website or app.
These challenges generally force the businesses to over-invest or make them unable to build the momentum needed to become competitive against international offerings.
As for established local digital businesses, which have been able to build a momentum on their offer and traffic, they are simply not optimizing their revenue. Either because they can’t be competitive on the international scale or because they overspend to sell their advertising space directly, without providing to the advertisers the level of control they are used to.
8. What are some of the opportunities for growth in the Mauritian digital economy?
Our local digital demand is high with Mauritians spending more than 4 hours per day on a screen. In parallel, our digital offer is still quite low. Except for a couple of dozen successful local websites and apps driving recurring traffic, the majority of digital segments and activities are wide open for new businesses to position themselves. Either by building localized digital services (like AirBnB, Uber, Yelp did elsewhere) or by creating interesting digital content platforms (in music, video and editorial). Until now, it was a complex process to raise such an offer. But now, with Digitalgo, digital entrepreneurs have a Plug&Play solution to set up on their website/app and kickstart their revenue generation.
9. How can collaboration between different stakeholders play a role in scaling up the digital economy?
I personally think it would be beneficial for all local players to set their focus on our international competition rather than between ourselves. International offerings are the ones eating the biggest part of our cake, driving traffic, data and revenue away from our economy and market.
Consolidating our local digital offer, by bridging some of our platforms and technologies would allow more synergy and a digital ecosystem which can compete with international apps, e-commerce and other SaaS, from our demand standpoint.
It also provides a louder voice to speak to our public institutions and work together on measures to support re-centering local demand towards local offer.
Learn more about Digitalgo: Digitalgo caters to advertisers targeting Mauritian audiences, Mauritian website owners seeking website monetization, and Marketing agencies managing local ad campaigns. Link to the website: https://digitalgo.click/.
