Meet Ameyaw Debrah. He is arguably Ghana’s biggest blogger. Growing up, like many other kids, he had many career options he wanted to explore, but he eventually got into blogging by accident and then founded Ameyaw Debrah Media.
“I started at a very early stage where there wasn’t so much money to be made online,” he told Face2Face Africa. “And I was able to stick with it and go through the growing pains to a point where the ecosystem changed to now opportunities avail itself for us to be able to make revenue and a living off what we are doing.”
Ameyaw started his blogging journey at a time when it was not fashionable to do so. Internet and smartphone penetration was low in Ghana. However, his persistence eventually paid off. “I found myself in it [blogging] and once I was there, I just knew I had to make it work and so I had to work hard and make it and it turned out to be something,” he said.
Reflecting on his blogging career, the celebrity blogger said the most rewarding aspect of his job is the feedback he gets and the impact he has made and continues to make as a blogger.
“The most rewarding part of my career is feedback and impact,” he said. “When you do something and you have done it to the best of your ability and then people are praising it, you are getting mentioned for it, you are getting interviewed for it, it feels good.
“You just wake up and you are having people enter your DM (direct message) and say you inspire them or even if they have heard something and they don’t want to believe it until you have said it. It is very fulfilling and so those are some of my highlights.”
Like any other entrepreneur, the journey to building his own media empire has not been smooth sailing. According to him, the most difficult thing for him as a media owner is creating “content that you don’t know how the audience is going to react to.”
He further explained that “because as creative people, sometimes, you are in your head creating the best thing and then you put it out there and it falls flat, people are not responding to it. And so that is one of the difficult things I find myself having to do.”
He also finds the variety of content online equally challenging, a task for him to continue to produce unique and exclusive content.
Touching on his background, Ameyaw told Face2Face Africa that he was raised by his grandparents who were living in Ghana’s Eastern Region. He also grew up exposed to different cultures.
“My parents were in the United Kingdom, and so a lot of the content that we were consuming was from the UK,” he said. “At the same time, our parents left us in the care of our grandparents, and so we were living in the Eastern Region, Nkawkaw and that open us to a different kind of life, which is not similar to what we have in Accra.”
“This sort of experience made us well grounded in what is expected of us as Ghanaians when you want to fit into the global stage,” he added.
Watch Ameyaw Debrah’s full interview with Face2Face Africa here.
