Matric results season is always a very busy time at Flow as the team partners with some of South Africa’s top schools and their learners, celebrating the very impressive achievements of their matriculating classes.
The 2024 matric results season was no exception – we worked with Roedean School, St David’s Marist Inanda and St Mary’s DSG, Pretoria to celebrate the exceptional achievements of their 2024 matrics.
But this year, matric results season gave us another, unexpected opportunity to prove our communications mettle to the nation when the Flow web development team stepped up to the plate as host of the only National Senior Certificate (NSC) matric results website that was functional on the night that the 2024 results went live.
That site was the Maroela Media matric results website. Maroela Media has been a Flow client for seven years … and counting. Maroela Media held its own on the night, powering on steadily and reliably as all other websites, touted as the major NSC matric results websites, crashed, and as hundreds of thousands of matriculants were desperate to find out whether they had passed.
The fact that the Maroela Media site was the only functioning one quickly went viral, making Maroela Media the go-to site, attracting visits by the entire class of 2024 who did not seem to care at all that their results were given in Afrikaans … as long as they were given!
Traditionally, Maroela Media (published exclusively in Afrikaans to serve the Afrikaans-speaking community) is visited by around 20 000 people daily. This year, though, the Maroela Media Matriekuitslae website had 1 979 557 page views, a more than 30-fold increase on last year’s traffic of 58 133 page views.
Richard Frank, chief technology officer at Flow, says he and the Flow/Maroela team are delighted that they were able to help South Africa’s class of 2024 access results quickly and easily.
“It came down to the agility and responsiveness of the Flow team. As word whipped around the country that this was the only functional results site, traffic to the site shot up, averaging about 33 requests per second and peaking at 70 requests per second. The team scaled servers throughout the night, making sure functionality was consistent and reliable.
“Having the whole attention of the class of 2024 on our website was a major adrenaline rush. In the end, we were proud to serve South Africa and give young people the news they had been waiting weeks and weeks to hear.”
Says Susan Lombaard, CEO at Maroela Media: “To know that we could also serve the wider South African community with Flow Communications as our partner was a really heart-warming way to kick off 2025.”