Interview with Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com: King of Celebrity News
January 19, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik
In this interview series of the PalatnikFactor.com, we’re talking to Fred Mwangaguhunga, Founder and CEO of MediaTakeOut.com. MediaTakeOut.com is a blog that has hundreds of thousands of monthly readers with all celebrity news. On any given story, MediaTakeOut.com has over 100 comments and over 100k views. The site also keeps on growing in popularity. MediaTakeOut.com is currently the most visited urban website in the world.
Fred Mwangaguhunga, Founder and CEO of MediaTakeOut.com
What we really want to focus on is the online marketing of MediaTakeOut.com and how Fred is making this venture such a success.
Q: Fred, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Can you tell us a little about yourself and how MediaTakeOut.com came about?
A: Sure. I started MediaTakeOut.com in January 2006. Before MTO I had a couple of careers. I worked as a corporate tax lawyer on Wall Street, and I started an online-based laundry and dry cleaning service in New York.
People always ask how a person with a non-media background, like myself, decided to move into the Internet news space. The short answer is, I sort of fell into it. When I was working with the laundry service, we spent just about all of our marketing dollars on ads placed in blogs. So I saw first hand how popular they were becoming.
When we eventually sold the laundry business, I figured it made sense to start a blog – and try and get into a growing industry. The rest is history.
Q: What is the most successful online marketing strategy you have implemented?
A: Early on I reached out to larger sites and asked them (begged is probably a better way to describe it) to link to one of our stories. 99% of the time they told us no. But the few times that they did link to us, it provided us a big boost.
Q: What is the least successful online marketing strategy you have implemented?
A: We’ve had a ton of those. We spent money putting together a Myspace page and a Facebook page for MediaTakeOut.com, and neither worked out very well.
I know that a lot of online marketers would disagree with me, but I never really understood how Facebook or Myspace could ever give you a real traffic (or awareness) boost. To me, Myspace and Facebook is all about personal relationships with real people. And anytime I see a company Facebook or Myspace message it looks like Spam to me.
But every marketer that I came across would tell me that I was wrong, and that we needed to have our own Facebook and Myspace page. I finally gave in and had them created. Now looking back, I’m even more convinced that my initial feelings were right.
Q: How do you think social media sites such as Facebook and social news sites such as Digg changed the marketing scope for blogs such as yours?
A: I don’t know about Facebook. As I said above, I’m not sure how much value it can provide. Digg, I think is another story. A single Digg link can send tens of thousands of readers to your site.
The problem with Digg is that they have a very Draconian policy. When a site gets too large, or if it falls out of favor with the powers that be over at Digg, they put it on a ban list, and people are no longer allowed to link to it. Somehow we got on that site, along with TMZ, Perez Hilton and I think every other major entertainment website.
Q: What current platform do you use to run MediaTakeOut.com?
A: We have a custom built Content Management System. It’s built for speed and security.
Q: What current trends do you see in 2010 and on in the online marketing sector?
A: I see more collaboration between companies in 2010. I’m seeing more link exchanges, joint content, and across platform ad sales between sites.
In the past, internet companies had an “every man for himself” attitude. Now things are changing, the industry is beginning to mature and larger companies are becoming more comfortable working with smaller ones, so long as it’s in their interest.
Q: What is the story that has driven the most traffic to your site to date?
A: We were the first place to report that R&B singer Chris Brown assaulted Rihanna. When we first posted that story, we had such an immediate spike in traffic it caused all 6 of our servers to completely seize up.
That was probably the biggest spike in traffic that we’ve seen. It was crazy.
Q: What would be your advice to someone looking to start an online based business?
A: Just start it. All too often new entrepreneurs spend too much time planning. In the world of the internet, the landscape can completely change in a matter of weeks. So if you’ve got a good idea and you’ve done a bit of preparation, get to it.
Q: Does MediaTakeOut.com implement any search engine marketing (i.e. paid search or SEO)? If not, do you plan on implementing any search engine marketing?
A: We use SEO, but have kept away from paid advertising. Actually we’re in the process to a total SEO overhaul of the site. That should be completed in the next 4 weeks, knock on wood.
Q: Who is the target demographic for MediaTakeOut.com?
A: Generally our readers tend to be young (25-40) and fairly well educated. And while most are African American, we have a substantial White and Latino audience as well. We currently have more than 7 million monthly readers and 400 million page views, making us the most popular urban website in the world.
Q: What is the best source of traffic to your website?
A: Search engines provide the most links to our site, with Google performing the best for us. That being said, the vast majority of our traffic comes from readers typing MediaTakeOut.com into the address bar.
Q: How is MediaTakeOut.com currently monetized and which method of monetizing is yielding the best results?
A: We derive all our revenues through advertising.
Fred, again, thanks for doing this interview and wish you much success in 2010 with MediaTakeOut.com. THIS IS AN EXCLUSIVE PALATNIKFACTOR.COM INTERVIEW.
Comments (5)
Great interview, Fred is right about the social networking sites. You just can’t spend to much time on these type of sites. My experience is that people are mostly not interested on these type of sites if you are a business.
Online marketing is not exactly for the actual product, creating a website or for allowing customers purchase items online. Online marketing can likewise include how a business owner can hire a work squad. The amount of people who are contemplating computers, web design, and learning to host websites proves just how booming online marketing can make the employer, the employees, and the independent contractors. And with a sufficient Internet savvy team, your business earnings can increase too.
Has he even read the comments on his site? Young and educated? Try ghetto – that site is one of the most offensive – racist and sexist – sites I’ve ever seen!!!! And it’s patterned after Drudge? GMAB! HAVE YOU EVER EVEN VISITED THIS SITE????? It’s not even close and thankfully Matt Drudge is smart enough to outsource most of his links so that none of the comments can be directly reflected on his audience. MTO does itself an injustice by allowing comments… they sound like gang members and crackheads… and the profile pics of the commenters basically affirm just that… and I’m not buying those site numbers.
Mediatakeout is a website that serves to entertain the uneducated and ignorant people of black soceity today. I as a black female am offened by nearly all the content of the website that protrays nothing but the over glamourization of black womens body parts rather than intelligent posting ignorant things women taking nude shots of themselves and booty pictures. This site makes me digusted at what they call and insightful blog for educated audience.
hi-ya, superb blog.