Surf Publications Ghana Limited

What Surf Publications Ghana Limited does

Surf Publications Ghana Limited is a Ghanaian micro-company headquartered in Accra that, since founding in 2000, has operated Yellow Pages Ghana (live since 2006), an online business directory serving all 17 administrative regions of the country. The platform functions as a searchable database in which businesses register themselves and consumers locate services by name, category, or location; the directory claims 34,701+ listed businesses and approximately 14,200 weekly visitors, with primary categories spanning Computers & Internet, Shops, Agriculture/Fishing/Mining, Home & Garden, and Public & Social Services. Operations are lean, with 11 employees and no disclosed subsidiaries, partners, leadership roster, or external funding in the supplied data.

The product surface is essentially a single integrated directory rather than a suite of modules. Businesses obtain a free Standard listing with limited visibility, or a paid Premium listing positioned as delivering materially higher exposure ("5,000X"). The platform's underlying stack relies on Paystack for payment processing of paid tiers, Cloudflare for DDoS protection and bot management, and standard session/analytics cookies for session and usage telemetry. Anti-scraping is a visible design priority: phone numbers and email addresses are masked by default and require CAPTCHA completion to reveal, supported by IP rate limiting, abuse logging, and bot detection. Privacy terms reserve rights for account data, security logs (90 days), and anonymized analytics, and explicitly permit transfer of user data in merger or acquisition scenarios.

Monetization centers on the freemium layer: free Standard listings to seed the long-tail supply of catalogued businesses, and Premium listings as the primary revenue lever for advertisers seeking visibility. No pricing, advertiser count, ARR, GMV, or revenue figure is disclosed. The company has no public ticker, no disclosed parent, no acquisitions or M&A history, no investment rounds, no patents or trademarks, no awards, and no management team bios in the supplied material — leaving Surf Publications as a small, privately held directory operator whose economics are effectively opaque to outside observers.

Name

Surf Publications Ghana Limited

Website

https://yellowpages.com.gh

Company type

Private

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Surf Publications Ghana Limited operates Yellow Pages Ghana, an online business directory listing 34,701+ businesses across all 17 regions of Ghana, offering free Standard and paid Premium listings to Ghanaian SMBs and consumers searching for services.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Online Business Directory

NAICS

Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (519290)

akta.pro primary industry

Local Search & Business Directories (BPAMAAAE)

Keywords

• Online business directory
• Business listings
• Local business search
• Premium advertising
• Ghana directory

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Digital Commerce or Content

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Personnel

Core offering

Operates Yellow Pages Ghana, an online business directory platform with over 34,701 businesses listed across 17 regions of Ghana. The platform enables businesses to create free standard or paid premium listings and allows users to search for businesses by name, category, or location, serving as a discovery bridge between Ghanaian businesses and consumers searching for services.

Product overview

Yellow Pages Ghana is a single unified product — an online business directory platform. It provides a searchable database of businesses across Ghana with free basic listings and paid premium advertising options. The service has been operating since 2006 and serves as a bridge between businesses seeking visibility and consumers searching for services. The platform does not offer multiple distinct products or modules — it is one integrated directory service with tiered listing options.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Yellow Pages Ghana Online business directory service enabling users to search, find, and connect with 34,701+ businesses across 17 regions of Ghana. Businesses can self-list for free with standard visibility or upgrade to premium advertising placements for higher exposure; users search by name, category, or location.

Ideal customer profiles1 record

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Recent moves3 records

Expansion highlights3 records

Broad incumbents

• Yelp: Global incumbent in local business discovery and reviews, monetizing via advertising sold to SMBs — the same model Surf Publications Ghana uses, but at vastly greater scale and with a richer review/social layer.
• Foursquare: Pioneer in local search and place-discovery, evolving into a location-intelligence and business-discovery platform — overlapping directly with the local-business-discovery problem Yellow Pages Ghana addresses.
• Bing Places: Microsoft's free business-listing service integrated with Bing and Maps — a global platform alternative that further commoditizes paid directory listings like those sold by Yellow Pages Ghana.
• Google Business Profile: Free business listings with maps, reviews and search integration that every Ghanaian SMB is reachable through — the structural competitive ceiling on any paid directory like Yellow Pages Ghana.

Regional players

• Yellow Pages South Africa: The most directly comparable regional peer: a country-specific business directory in a neighboring African market, operating the same free-listing-plus-premium-advertising model Surf Publications Ghana runs.
• Pigiame: Kenya's largest online classifieds and business-discovery platform; not a direct directory clone but the dominant East-African analog showing how regional players can scale local-listing economics.

Direct peers

• Brownbook: Worldwide online business directory with free listings and paid upgrades targeting SMBs — same product/positioning, same revenue mechanics, comparable scale challenges.
• Hotfrog: Global small-business directory offering free and premium listings across countries and categories — a near-identical operating model to Yellow Pages Ghana at broader geographic scope.
• Justdial: India's leading local search and business directory platform with tiered free/paid listings across hundreds of categories and cities — the closest business-model analog to Yellow Pages Ghana at much larger scale.

Emerging players

• Truecaller: While primarily a caller-ID app, Truecaller has expanded into business search and discovery for SMBs in emerging markets including Ghana — an emerging threat surfacing inside a non-directory product.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights5 records

Customer concentration

• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/surf-publications-ghana-limited

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Surf Publications Ghana Limited