Hayibo.com bows out
2010-09-01 11:52
Petro-Anne Morkel, News24
Cape Town - Hayibo.com, the satirical website that pokes fun at current affairs in SA, will close up shop on Friday as a result of its struggle to attract advertisers.
“All good things must come to an end, and Hayibo.com is no different,” read the site's final newsletter.
Anthony Pascoe, who started the site with Tom Eaton in January 2008, told News24 that the decision to close down the site was due to a lack of advertising revenue.
“For a long time we have been getting the message from corporate South Africa that they don’t feel safe associating their brand with the site, because of the nature of the content and because we are a little leftwing and maverick,” said Pascoe. “They never know what we were going to say.”
Needed to grow
Hayibo had approached external advertising consultants in an attempt to boost their advertising revenue, but “the message was pretty much the same…big business didn’t want to come onboard”.
While Hayibo.com did receive some advertising revenue from “small, niche businesses, it was not a huge amount of money”, explained Pascoe. It was not enough revenue to grow Hayibo from a part-time project to a profitable full-time website.
The site received between 80 000 and 100 000 unique users every month.
He explained that even though the site could have continued to function as all of the staff have “real jobs that actually pay money” and work on the site in their free time, “at some point you have to draw the line. We needed to get to the stage where people work on the site full time. We just weren’t getting there.
“I was happy to sit home in the evenings and write stories, but it gets too much after a while. We have been doing this for three years.”
“(Hayibo) was close to our hearts. We saw a future in it and invested a lot of time in it…It’s an enormous shame, but we wanted to go forward instead of just going along,” he added.
Complaints
When asked whether Hayibo had ever gotten into trouble for the types of stories they have written, Pascoe said the two instances for which they had received complaints involved Schabir Shaik, who was sentenced to 15 year imprisonment on fraud and corruption charges in 2005, but was released on medical parole.
One satirical story claimed that Shaik’s prison was a hotel in Sandton. “The people from (the hotel) phoned us and asked very politely that they don’t want to be associated with Shaik. It was reasonable and we changed the story.”
Reach for a Dream’s lawyers contacted Hayibo after they published a story that said that Shaik’s drive around Durban was organised by the welfare organisation as he only had one year to live.
On Thursday, Hayibo.com plans to have a collection of highlights on their site. “We won’t leave quietly. We will go out with a goodie on Friday,” said Pascoe.
“It will be a sad day, but it has been great.”
- Hayibo.com