• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, July 16, 2013

Though the Internet has room for the whole wide world, there are still the same blind spots that can seem familiar to anybody who pays much attention to media.  Moguldom Media Group, with sites that include Bossip.com and the newer Style Blazer, are aimed at African-American online visitors as are MommyNoire, MadameNoire, Hip Hop Wired and 24Wired TV. 

These sites aren’t always deep dives into newsy topics, but they’re fairly filled with stories and videos about hip-hop stars and their scandals.  Still, on MommyNoire, reading “Mom to Mom: No More Hoodies” and watching a video about mass incarceration days after the Trayvon Martin verdict gives a varied spin on the news.  

Moguldom founder, chairman and CEO Jamarlin Martin was a trader and doing well, when he started a blog about the markets in 2005. That blog became a business and seemingly an obsession-covering various markets kept him updating his news as money passed time zones.

But when he entered the Internet business, Martin also saw an opportunity, like a good investor, to get into the African-American digital market. “When I looked at the fatigued old media, they weren’t companies that were putting a lot into it,” he says. In 2006, Bossip was born, though in fact, Martin is not, a hip-hoppy, gossipy kind of guy. (His first blog was titled Detached Trader. Not too fly.)

“As a trader, you learn you don’t want to go into an area that is very crowded,” he says. “With Bossip I’m looking at areas that don’t have a lot of competition.  And when we started a site like Style Blazer, where we cross women of color and fashion and present it to an advertiser, there is no competitor.”  Procter & Gamble is a major advertiser.

Today his Websites attract over 12 million users monthly, making it the owner of the largest online audience of urban African-Americans. The company is now based in Fort Lauderdale with 75 employees and offices in New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles. Moguldom Digital Network gets 6.4 minutes per visit on desktop and mobile combined, better, it says, than TMZ or Gawker or RadarOnline based on its reading of comScore data.   

There’s seemingly no end to Moguldom products, all based, more or less, on hitting niche markets, which, as it also turns out, are markets aimed at minorities, who tend to overindex on media use.

Coming soon: “We’re building a content library. Our vision is to build a content library of 50 documentary films and have a stack of programs that relate to our audience, so we can go OTT and upgrade our content, right on to TV.”

Sooner still is a bigger project being launched officially today. Moguldom is officially rolling out AFK Insider.com, a Website for consumers and business professionals in Africa as well as investors and others interested in doing business in fast-growing African markets. It will be a news aggregator that Martin will quickly also spin into a separate TripAdvisor-type site for travelers to the continent, business and vacationers. 

He hopes, naturally, to preside over the leading digital content platform in Africa.

“Identify a niche opportunity, and underserved market, and get to them quickly. That’s our secret sauce,” he says. And apparently Moguldom is getting some company. On Monday, The New York Times reported that the Publicis Groupe was making a $15 million investment in Jana, a mobile app that is aimed at users in the developing world.

pj@mediapost.com