Independently collected statistics from www.alexa.com indicate that GhanaWeb - the well-known webportal for Ghanaians - is the most popular African website in the world.
GhanaWeb ranks at position nr. 7781 on the list of the world's most popular websites. This position is truly remarkable for a website which is exclusively targetted at a relative small country in West-Africa. Ghana has less than 20 million inhabitants.
Surprisingly the popularity of GhanaWeb exceeds the popularity of similar websites from large African nations such as Nigeria and South-Africa. "It is unbelievable but we have not found a single African website which ranks higher than us", explained Rob Bellaart, CEO of GhanaWeb. "All the well-known and established sites based in Africa and/or about Africa rank considerably lower than GhanaWeb". "There are very few African sites which rank amongst the first 10,000 but GhanaWeb definately ranks the highest".
When asked for an explanation for this phenomena Rob Bellaart said "My partner Francis Akoto launched the GhanaHomePage in the early days of the worldwide web. This site was already online before Yahoo. Just like Yahoo we have been able to stay ahead in all these years", "Unlike Yahoo we have never faced strong competition. This enabled us to grow into the 300-lbs gorilla which we are today.".
Alexa (www.alexa.com) was founded in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999. The statistics from Alexa are collected by a browser-plugin which has been downloaded 7 million times. Consequently the traffic statistics gathered by Alexa are based on the actual surfing behaviour of a very large group of Internet users.
The GhanaHomePage was launched in 1993/1994 by Francis Akoto, a Ghanaian living in Finland. In 1999 the GhanaHomePage was re-located to GhanaWeb after which a long and steady range of (technological) improvements were applied. The website currently actracts over 12,000 unique visitors per day and generates over 5 million pageviews per month.
