Eugene: We Want to Become a Key Solution Provider for Young Nigerians to Grow their Businesses on the Internet
The internet is a chaotic environment where millions of people are searching and emailing at the same time.
According to statistics, Google receives 63,000 inquiries each second, sends 3,400,000 emails, 54,977 Facebook posts, and posts 5,700 tweets. These numbers illustrate how easily information can become lost on the internet, and why it is critical for entrepreneurs and company owners to be intentional.
Eugene Agoh, Founder of AdsTargets, discusses his company's role in helping businesses in reaching target audiences in this interview.
Introduce yourself and what you do at AdsTargets?
My name is Eugene Agoh. I am currently pursuing my PhD in Economics at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania. I held several positions and worked previously in different capacities both home (Nigeria) and abroad. I am currently the founder and CEO of AdsTargets. At AdsTargets, I also head the digital marketing team as well as plan and manage the day to day operations of the company.
Since 2016, how has the journey been so far?
So far, it’s nothing short of surprises, a stiff learning process but overall, we have achieved great results in terms of growth in the number of users both advertisers and publishers across the globe. We also developed and added many features to enhance the performance of the platform. We see a brighter future ahead.
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Your motivation, and vision in your entrepreneurship journey even as a PhD student?
My motivation primarily is to give us young Nigerians the opportunities to develop and grow our businesses without depending on foreign platforms or Ad Networks that are discriminately against Nigerians for no reason.
In many cases, Nigerians are prevented from making or receiving payments on these platforms due to restrictions on Nigerian Banks for reasons I can’t explain.
As a matter of urgency, we need to start developing our homemade digital platforms ranging from Ad networks to social media platforms.
We have a lot of online businesses that could easily scale to big businesses but unfortunately lack the support system which includes digital tools and platforms that could enable digital entrepreneurs to scale their businesses easily and faster. Reflecting on these needs motivates me to start from somewhere which is why we have AdsTargets Ad Network today. At least, this gives Nigerian digital entrepreneurs the opportunity to advertise and monetize their traffic with ease.
How is AdsTargets looking to create an impact across the advertising industry and innovations?
Our goal is to provide unique ad formats and pricing models (CPC, CPM, CPA, CPV and CPD) that best fits the needs of our Nigerian users. We aim to control over 30% of the advertising and traffic monetization in Nigeria in the next four (4) years.
What are AdsTargets unique service offerings?
Our technology is unique in many ways, first, we use both AI and human moderators to prevent fraud to ensure advertisers get the optimal value for their advertising budget. We also made it possible for our Nigerian advertisers to make payments using PayStack which is another great Nigerian payment gateway that allows Nigerians to make card payments, direct transfers and more.
Also, We have a wide range of ad formats and pricing models more than any other Ad Network operating in Nigeria currently apart from Google. Nigerian publishers are paid and receive their earnings directly to their bank accounts without the need to own foreign accounts or Paypal.
Apart from the multiple ad formats, we give businesses the opportunity to create their affiliate programs in a matter of minutes in order to boost their visibility online by getting many other publishers to promote their products and services.
In addition, our threshold for withdrawal of funds earned by publishers is only $35 (Approx. ₦14,000) and the lowest in the market. Also, the minimum payment for advertisers is also $35 (Approx. ₦14,000), also the lowest in the market.
We aim to give everyone a fair opportunity to advertise and monetize traffic.
To elaborate further, Our Ad formats include Banner Ads, Text Ads, Native Ads, Video Ads, Interstitials Ads, Affiliate Ads and Pop-Ups. Pricing models are define as follows CPC: Cost per click, CPM: Cost per 1,000 impressions, CPA: Cost per action , CPV: Cost per view for video ads, CPD: Cost per day.
What are your plans for AdTargets, market and expansion?
Globally, advertising has seen healthy growth over the years, in 2021, global spending on advertising was 763.2billion USD. This was a 15.6% growth. This is expected to hit a trillion USD by 2026 according to Statista.
Coming home, Nigeria has also seen impressive growth on digital advertising reaching 400 million USD and projected to hit a billion USD before 2025. My projection is, these figures may even suppose 3 billion a year in the next 6 to 10 years considering the growth of the industry. The time to invest in our digital economy is now.
How would you describe the advertising space?
Advertising is mostly controlled by the big tech giants, Google, Meta, LinkedIn and recently Amazon.
However, with the coming on board of smaller ad networks such as AdsTargets, competition may likely increase soon. In Nigeria however, Google and Meta are the dominant market players.
What are your biggest challenges?
Dealing with fraud. Fraudsters trying to use stolen credit cards and on the other hand, some publishers attempting to sell bot traffic is the biggest challenge faced by ad networks. Through AdsTargets, we have done a lot to prevent these from happening.
Expectations for the next five years for AdsTargets?
We are working on optimizing our platform to serve our clients better. We hope to make it easier, flexible, and more profitable for our customers to advertise and monetise their web traffic. We are working on including an influencer function to make it easier for marketers and influencers to connect. On Market expansion, we hope to capture between 30% to 40% of the advertising market share in Nigeria and expand to other African countries. Ghana, Kenya, South Africa are at the top of our list.
What else would you like to share?
As a young business, we need the support of our people both clients and investors. We are open to discussing partnerships and investments. We also appeal for continued and fair media coverage to enhance our growth locally and internationally.
Source: Legit.ng
