Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, Linda Ikeji has done it. She really has.

A few months ago, she launched Linda Ikeji Studios, but said a bigger announcement was coming on November 1st.

That announcement was the launch of a social network, called Linda Ikeji Social. It is a monstrous announcement for a number of reasons.

For years, Nairaland has been the only website of its type in Nigeria: an organic community of people churning out user generated content on a daily basis, inhabiting its own niche demographic.

In that time, it has been unchallenged in that space, and now Nairaland has competition from the only quarter it could come from.

Linda Ikeji’s fanbase is large and super loyal, and now she is turning over control to them, and has a good chance to make a lot of money in the process.

For so long, many have wondered whether she would go beyond Linda Ikeji Blog. They wondered what the scale of her ambition was. Now they have the answer.

Between her studio and now this social network, she has end-to-end control of the entire media creation and dissemination process.

Having cultivated this huge fan base over the last several years, these moves show the audacity of a person who is always setting new targets, never satisfied with the usual.

It is a move that, if it proves successful, would mean an empire, making Linda one of the most powerful women in African media.

Just imagine the sight: Linda, with an army of LIB-ers behind her, kicking ass and taking names. It is a long way from her humble beginnings.

Like LIB itself, Linda Ikeji Social does not focus on a good user interface or user experience. Beauty was never the focus, for reasons that quickly become obvious.

Currently, none of Nigeria’s top websites excel in any design aspect, and while it is probably a stretch to say Nigerians don’t appreciate beauty, what is more accurate is that beauty is not what makes a website sticky. The content is the issue, not the container.

With incentives like offering N1,000 for every exclusive and original story, sharing advertising revenue with page owners that have more than 50,000 followers, giveaways and so on, that content problem is solved already, all with little intervention by Linda.

Some of those incentives may be short lived, but one likely goal of LIS is to absorb the traffic of LIB, eventually. So, rather than keep running LIB, everyone can just follow Linda on her network and see what she posts, and the web address simply redirects to her LIS page.

That last part is pure conjecture, but with other features like the ability to buy and sell, view events in Lagos and send messages to friends, what we have with LIS in effect is a walled garden, designed so that no one leaves.

It is Nigerian Twitter, monetised.

Linda’s rationale for joining LIS is simple: “You have done all your social networking for free up to now. Why not do it on LIS and have something to show for all that?”

If that incentive proves powerful enough, we could be seeing the start of a media empire. In real time.