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Meet the brilliant mind behind the emergence of the popularly known versatile online community, Nairaland forum, Oluwaseun Osewa was born on July 17, 1982 in Sango Ota, Ogun State Nigeria. He grew up in ogun state learning about the tactics and core concepts in the technological part of life. He is presently a webmaster,site owner and a business man. Oluwaseun is single and has his site, nairaland.comnetworth ranked to be $8,737,200 {N 1,602,839,340.00} by pageranker.
Seun started his internet career in the year 2003 after going into the webhosting business.
He had attempted to start a web hosting business, but after 3 months he could only boast of one customer, so he ran out of capital and the business died.
It would probably have succeeded if he had managed his capital more wisely or raised more money as he got many hosting requests he couldn’t satisfy later that year.
After that first failure, he was encouraged to get certifications and a regular job, but he couldn’t go back to that kind of path after tasting creative freedom, so he kept researching business ideas and presenting them to friends and family, but no capital was forthcoming to carry any of them out. He did this for less than 2 years.
Eventually, he decided to start a web forum, because it was the only idea that required no additional capital: he already had Internet access and a $15 per month VPS graciously paid for by a family friend. He created 3 forums in November 2003 (one for higher institution students, one for IT discussions, and one to cover the emerging GSM industry; the Mobile Nigeria Forum at MobileNigeria.com).
The Mobile Nigeria Forum took off, so he relaunched it in February 2005 with the assistance of Mr. John Sagai Adams, who posted a link to the forum on his mailing list and participated enthusiastically in those early days. Other mobile enthusiasts like Mr. Yomi Adegboye pitched in to make the site a success. In a month or so, the forum had about 300 members, but the growth potential didn’t satisfy him.
According to him he conceptualized the idea of Nairaland when he noticed two odd things about MobileNigeria;
Firstly, despite its narrow focus, it was the only Nigerian community that gave a voice to Nigerians at home. Most other Nigerian sites were owned and dominated by Nigerians in the US or UK. They covered only issues of interests to Nigerians abroad.
Secondly the off topic section of the forum, covering topics outside telecoms, like romance and jokes, was becoming more vibrant than the Mobile Nigeria Forum itself, suggesting the need for a more general-purpose Nigerian forum.
This gave him the confidence to take forums like Naijaryders and Talknaija head on by starting a general purpose discussion forum with a strong bias towards issues of interest to Nigerians at home. He felt that such a site could attract enough traffic to make enough money from Google adverts. That’s why he started the Nairaland Forum.
Seun’s initial plan was to be making upto 60k per month but it turned out as time goes on Nairaland got much higher traffic than expected making his income on Nairaland much more than expected.
As Nairaland grows seun had problems with spammers flooding the forum so he started getting helps from moderators he selected.Seun got help in updating the forum’s frontpage and keeping it clean by moderators like Mukina2 a female mod who has been working with seun since 2007 and others.
As time goes on seun kept enjoying his money gotten from Google ads until year 2012 when Google removed his website because nairaland has too many sexual topics. Which made seun start selling his own ads space on nairaland just like other sites like facebook.com,linkedin.comand etc. He was said to be earning as much as 5-6million naira per month when he still works for Google ads.
Many say Seun gets more income from selling these ads spaces than money gotten from Google but he never confirmed that.As of now, Nairaland is still the most visited website and largest forum in Nigeria and Africa making that a very huge accomplishment.
In the year 2013 Seun entered the Forbes list of best African successful entrepreneurs under 30. Which got him more huge reputation amidst other co-webmasters in Africa.
In 2011 Seun was approached by a group of company who wants to buy nairaland for 1 million dollars which is 155million naira but he rejected the approach, and even nairaland’s estimated worth by a site ranker for the year 2011 was 512million naira making it the most expensive nigerian site.
A fact adopted from Wikipedia states that Nairaland currently has over 1,300,000 registered accounts (March 2015),[3] and is ranked as the 7th most visited site in Nigeria (and the most visited indigenous site) according to Alexa.com.
Nairaland experienced a down period in 2014 when it was successfully hacked and so went offline briefly on the 22 June 2014.The hackers were able to get access to the website’s host server and backup, and maliciously deleted all its content. Three days later, it was back online after some data had been recovered from a remote backup.However, data from 10 January 2014 through the date of the attack was lost.
There is so much to learn from this young man, the first of all is his simple way of life , despite his high networth,this inference was drawn from T.I.N magazine’s write up about Seun Osewa;
“Despite all these money Seun whom is expected to be leaving in one huge mansion in estates like Banana island lagos only lives in his hometown sango ota ogun state a very close little city to lagos state.
Fame power, money we all love and seek to have. But as someone that knows Seun quite well -even if not physically yet, and may never – the guy just doesn’t appear to like the celebrity status. Some people use money to buy fame, Seun uses money to run away from it! There are people that will pay to meet Seun Osewa in person, but he has refused to show himself. With the largest African online forum under his control, more than half a million people that depend on his online website to make their day, Seun can easily wield power. But all those appear not to be his style. A case in point: when he was listed by the organizers of The Future Awards in the controversial “Nigeria’s 100 Best” list, which presented him with an opportunity to dine with the celebrities in Aso Rock (what some people will pay millions to get), it didn’t even freak the Ota-based geek. Rather, he sarcastically commented on my Facebook wall when I raised a criticism of the TFA list that, “oh, it’s a good list because I saw my name there”. Oh, he only saw his name there, he didn’t partake in anything – a free ticket to visit Aso rock but he never went. Such is Seun’s abhorrence for fame”.
Secondly, another lesson to be learnt from him is that we should never give up on our passion no matter the obstacles we face. The most of the obstacles people face are MONEY AND MOTIVATION. Instead of giving up and spending time to think so much which may lead to depression, use the time to source for people who you could convince to believe in your dreams and render financial support. Also, be a source of motivation to yourself, thrive within you to give your best then people will be attracted to your unannounced success and will be glad be ready to make it known.
