“Going… going… SOLD to the man with the successful start up!”

No, not the Disney-fied Avatar park we reported on yesterday, but another media juggernaut altogether. Stellenbosch-based start-up investment firm, World of Avatar, headed by South African online media up-and-comer, Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, has reportedly bought MXit for an undisclosed amount (that some are speculating could be as much as R500 million).

South African tech-media hawks, Memeburn broke the story this morning, quoting an exclusive interview with MXit’s new big cheese, Knott-Craig Jnr, who will take over from incumbent CEO, Herman Heunis.

To put some scale on the deal, Knott-Craig Jnr clarifies why MXit is no lightweight in South Africa’s social media landscape:

Twitter does 8 billion messages a month, MXit does 22 billion a month. Your average Facebook user spends 15 hours a month on Facebook, your average MXit user spends 45 hours month on MXit, people don’t know this. It is a massively engaged, massively active audience.

Never fear, MXit users, the new boss is not planning any drastic changes to the wildly successful home-grown platform. MXit is available in 128 countries and reports an active population of almost 43 million users, which is a hell of a lot of emoticons.

[Source: Memeburn]