1. The creator studio gold rush

In November 2025, creative entrepreneur Ibidunni Oladayo opened The Content Lab, a 500-square-metre production facility designed for digital creators. Located in Ikeja, Lagos, the studio space includes three production studios, editing suites, a make-up studio, and other supporting facilities designed to streamline the production of professional digital content.

Oladayo is not the only one building infrastructure for creators. In February last year, documentary photographer and filmmaker Damilola Onafuwa opened Aroba Hub, a content studio and creative co-working space designed to serve photographers, filmmakers, and digital creators looking for a dedicated production environment.

Across Nigeria, similar facilities are appearing in major cities. From Lagos to Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Benin City, creator studios are quietly springing up, offering production spaces, equipment, and support services to a fast-growing population of digital creators. For YouTubers, podcasters, influencers, photographers, and filmmakers, these studios promise something that has historically been scarce in the creator economy: reliable places to produce high-quality content.

Demand for these creator studios is rising so quickly that some operators are beginning to specialise in only one part of the production process rather than building full-service facilities.

In October last year, Bright Eyes Editing Studio opened in Lekki, Lagos. Unlike broader studios that offer shooting spaces and production services, Bright Eyes focuses almost entirely on the final stages of the content pipeline—editing, colour grading, and finishing services for filmmakers, YouTubers, and digital media producers.

The emergence of specialised facilities like this is a sign of how quickly the creator economy is maturing. As more creators move from casual production to professional output, different parts of the value chain, from filming to editing to distribution, are beginning to support their own dedicated businesses.

What is emerging is an ecosystem of creator infrastructure providers: studios to shoot in, editing houses to finish content, and collaborative spaces where creators can work, meet, and experiment. Together, they form the early outlines of a physical production layer for Nigeria’s growing creator economy.

2. Counting the cost of creation

To be a part of the growing ecosystem of creator studios, you must first determine how big you want to go. The size you choose affects everything—rent, budget, and the kinds of clients and creators you can serve.

You can build a small creator studio inside a studio apartment. It will have only one set, for example, a podcast table, an interview corner, or a simple YouTube setup. Because the space is small, the equipment requirements are limited. One camera, basic lighting, microphones, and simple furniture are enough to get started.

The camera is where things get interesting. The most popular video camera used in content studios today is the Sony FX3, which sells for about ₦5 million ($3,570). “The FX3 is the cheapest Netflix-approved camera, making it attractive for creators who want high-quality video at a low price,” Tito Nwachokor, creative director at Mastermind Studios, told Communiqué.

For operators seeking slightly better camera quality, the Sony FX6 is another option, priced at around ₦9 million ($6,440). Lenses are another cost to consider. Basic lenses may cost between ₦500,000 and ₦1 million, while higher-end lenses like Sony’s G Master can cost as much as ₦3 million.

Audio equipment is equally important. A typical setup includes podcast microphones, wireless microphones for interviews, and an audio mixer. A Rode PodMic can cost around ₦300,000 ($214), while higher-end microphones like the Shure podcast mic can reach ₦700,000 ($500). Many studios also use the Rodecaster Duo mixer, which sells for about ₦1 million. Wireless microphones used for vox pops or mobile recording can cost as little as ₦200,000.

As studios grow, the highest costs tend to shift towards lighting, furniture, and set design. A mid-size studio, usually located in a two- or three-bedroom apartment, can support two or three sets. This allows creators to shoot different formats in the same facility: for example, a podcast set, a talk-show set, and a photography backdrop. Larger studios operate at a completely different scale. Instead of apartments, many operators rent whole buildings or warehouses and build multiple sets inside them. This strategy allows several productions to run simultaneously.

Power is another major consideration in Nigeria. Small studios may rely on a small petrol generator, which can cost around ₦600,000. Larger facilities often need multiple solutions, including solar and inverter systems, and diesel generators. Combined, these can cost between ₦10 million ($7,150) and ₦15 million ($10,730) upfront.

Post-production equipment is also necessary. Laptops, editing software, and hard drives are essential. Many studios rely on MacBooks, editing systems, and external storage drives. A single 4-terabyte hard drive can cost as much as ₦450,000 for a small studio, while a 20-terabyte hard drive setup can cost ₦2–3 million if the studio needs large storage capacity for video files. The numbers above represent the cost of buying brand-new equipment. In practice, many studio owners buy fairly used equipment to reduce their start-up costs. Prices are also heavily influenced by exchange rates, since most cameras, lights, and audio gear are imported.

3. The creator studio revenue playbook

Given the massive capital investment required to launch, studios must generate revenue immediately. This revenue comes from a mix of sources, including photography shoots, videography shoots, and podcast recording sessions. Studios also earn money by renting out cameras, lighting kits, and microphones. Some studios host small, intimate events such as private screenings, workshops, masterclasses, creator meet-ups, and training sessions. Over time, these multiple revenue streams allow the operators to keep their spaces busy throughout the week.

The size—and to some extent the location—are the primary determinants of the cost of renting these studios. A small studio with one set might charge around ₦20,000 per hour for studio time. A mid-size studio, with two or three sets, can charge between ₦30,000 and ₦65,000 per hour. Larger studios, especially those built inside warehouses with multiple sets, command higher prices. These facilities typically charge between ₦70,000 and ₦100,000 per hour, especially for commercial productions, brand shoots, or music video shoots.

Beyond hourly rentals, some studio operators are experimenting with membership models. For instance, Eko Creative Hub, with four locations in Lagos, has introduced a two-tiered creator membership programme for frequent users of the space. These memberships allow creators to pay a recurring monthly fee in exchange for discounted studio access, priority booking slots, and a set number of recording hours each month. In some cases, members also gain access to editing suites, community events, training sessions, and collaboration opportunities with other creators using the facility.

For creators, the membership model reduces the cost of repeatedly booking studio time. For studio operators, it creates predictable, recurring revenue, which can be difficult to achieve in a business built around hourly rentals.

4. The economics of creator infrastructure

What is happening with the trend of new creator studios emerging is not unique. Economists have spent decades trying to explain how industries grow from scattered individual activity into organised, self-sustaining ecosystems. The story of Nigeria’s creator economy fits their models closely enough to be instructive.

The starting point is the Linkage Theory developed by the economist Albert Hirschman in the 1950s. Hirschman argued that certain investments do not just support economic activity; they induce it. When infrastructure is in place, previously unviable activities suddenly become possible. A creator who cannot afford to own professional equipment can now rent studio time. A filmmaker who lacked post-production facilities can now outsource the process. The infrastructure does not follow the industry; it calls it into existence. In Hirschman’s language, every studio that opens in Lagos creates forward linkages: it enables the next layer of creative output that would not otherwise occur.

But infrastructure alone does not explain what comes next. As the creator economy has grown, something more interesting has begun to happen: the production process is splitting into distinct stages. What was once a single, messy, do-it-yourself chain—shoot, edit, grade, distribute—now begins to split into distinct, specialised businesses. Studios focused only on shooting, editing houses focused only on finishing, and equipment rental outfits supplying cameras, lights and other production gear.. This kind of decomposition has a name in business theory: modularity. The economists Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark showed that as industries mature, they tend to break into interoperable components, each of which can be optimised independently. The emergence of a place like Bright Eyes Editing Studio in Lekki, focused entirely on editing and colour grading, is a sign that the Nigerian creator economy has crossed a threshold. It is mature enough to support specialisation.

And finally, there is the question of geography. These studios are not appearing randomly across Nigeria. They are concentrating in particular corridors across major cities, where creators, clients, and collaborators increasingly find each other. The economist Alfred Marshall, writing over a century ago, noticed that industries tend to cluster in specific places and that the clustering itself becomes an advantage. Skilled workers concentrate there. Knowledge moves between firms. Suppliers set up nearby. The cluster becomes more productive than the sum of its parts. What Marshall described in Victorian England’s manufacturing towns, you can now see taking shape in Lagos and other major cities across Nigeria: a geographic centre of gravity for content production, still forming but already pulling people and money towards it.

Taken together, these three dynamics— activity, specialisation deepening the production chain, and geography concentrating talent—suggest that the creator economy is not simply getting bigger but also becoming more structured. And that structural maturity tends to be self-reinforcing: the more developed the ecosystem, the easier it becomes for new creators to enter, which drives more demand for infrastructure, which attracts more investment, which deepens the specialisation further.

Once it starts, the cycle is hard to stop.

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1. The virality illusion

For the average African creator, virality rarely translates into income. A video with 500,000 views might generate $30 in ad revenue. That is, if the creator is even monetised. A trending post might attract thousands of followers. But follower count does not pay the rent. Visibility, whilst valuable, is not the same as viability.

This gap shows up clearly in the data. According to the second edition of the African Creator Economy Report, only 5.8% of creators list ad revenue as a meaningful source of income. More than 60% of creators earn less than $100 a month from their creative work. In an ecosystem built on attention, most participants are not making money from the systems that profit from their attention.

What sustains creators is not the platform economy, but the informal market around it. Across the continent, income flows from off-platform work: brand partnerships, consulting, training, speaking engagements, freelance services, digital products, physical merchandise, and access-based offerings. Creators are not monetising content as much as they are monetising the trust and expertise built around it.

But this conversion from attention to income is not automatic. It requires negotiation skills, legal protection, financial tools, pricing power, and, often, access to brands and institutions that sit far beyond the reach of most early-stage creators. The result is a system where a small group learns how to turn visibility into business, whilst the majority remains left out. This point is where the fault line appears.

What looks like a problem of low pay is, in reality, a problem of a missing middle class. The creator economy produces stars at the top and hopeful participants at the bottom, but very few stable professionals in between. There are not enough creators who can rely on repeatable income, long-term contracts, or durable businesses rather than one-off deals and viral moments.

2. The Creator Economy’s missing middle class

In classical economic theory, the middle class is not defined by wealth alone, but by stability.

Middle-class households sit between subsistence and affluence; they earn enough to cover basic needs, absorb moderate economic shocks, invest in the future, and plan beyond the next paycheque. They typically have predictable income, access to financial services, legal protections, and a degree of economic agency. The middle class is what turns growth into an economy, not just a spike in prosperity.

It does not appear spontaneously. It forms when certain conditions converge. First, there must be productive work that pays reliably, not just occasionally. This system is usually created by firms, institutions, or industries that can employ large numbers of people at sustainable wage levels, not just a few high earners at the top.

Second, there must be infrastructure to protect that work. Think banks that provide credit, legal systems that enforce contracts, training institutions that build skills, and professional organisations that create systems and standards that turn labour into a career rather than a hustle.

Third, there must be pathways for continuous mobility. People need to be able to move from entry-level roles into more secure and higher-value positions, whether through experience, ownership, or specialisation.

This is how an economy moves from being a collection of individual success stories to a system that can reproduce prosperity at scale.

When this framework is applied to the creator economy, the absence becomes clear. Most African creator markets today look like hourglass economies. At the top, a small group of breakout stars commands attention, brand deals, platform partnerships, and global visibility. At the bottom, a vast base of aspiring and early-stage creators produces content for little or no pay, hoping to break through and win the algorithmic lottery.

What is missing is the middle.

A creator middle class would not be defined by viral moments, but by durable, repeatable income built by creators themselves. These creators may never dominate global trends or command millions of followers, but they will rely on their work to function as a business and provide sustainable income. Their success would not hinge on a single platform, a burst of attention, or a brand deal, but on systems they control.

They own audiences rather than rent them from platforms. They develop formats that can be extended across YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, courses, events, and communities. They build catalogues of work that can be licensed, repackaged, and sold over time. Their income comes from a mix of subscriptions, partnerships, intellectual property, and services, not only from ads or one-off sponsorships.

What separates them from both the viral elite and the aspiring base is not fame, but structure. These creators can plan beyond the next post. They can forecast income, sign longer-term agreements, invest in better tools, and take creative risks without putting their livelihood on the line.

3. Defining the creator middle class

In a functioning system, this creator middle class would look like people who:

1. Run small but sustainable creator-led businesses, not just personal pages.

2. Build and license formats, brands, and intellectual property, not only viral clips.

3. Work under recurring partnerships and contracts, not just one-off brand deals.

4. Access credit, legal protection, and financial services as operators, not informal freelancers.

As this layer grows, it naturally pulls a second economy into existence around it. Once creators become stable businesses, they begin hiring, contracting, and training others. Editors, writers, producers, designers, managers, and strategists emerge not as side hustlers orbiting fame, but as professionals working inside creator-led companies. This is where the broader middle class of the creator economy forms, inside studios, collectives, and small production houses built by creators themselves.

Platforms reward scale, and brands reward reach; as a result, the system produces visibility faster than it produces institutions. When a creator burns out, changes platforms, or loses relevance, the business often disappears with them.

A true creator middle class would change the nature of the economy itself. It would mean that creative work can become a career path. That value can be stored in companies, formats, and intellectual property, not just in personalities and follower counts. That people can enter the ecosystem as assistants, editors, researchers, or strategists and grow into operators, studio heads, and owners.

In economic terms, it would signal a shift from an attention market to a production economy. And that, more than any fund, fellowship, or platform announcement, is what would determine whether Africa’s creator boom becomes a lasting industry or remains a cycle of stars rising, fading, and being replaced by the next viral name.

You can access the Africa Creator Economy Report 2.0 here for free.

We are excited to announce that the second edition of our research report on the state of the African creator economy is now available to everyone.

Developed in partnership with Technology Media (TM) Global, the report is a follow-up to the 2024 Africa Creator Report. It is a culmination of our research throughout 2025 into how the continent’s creator economy is structured. And it is fittingly titled “The Business of Creativity: Funding and Sustaining African Creators.”

The African creator economy has moved from the margins of digital culture to the centre of economic and social discourse. Millions of young Africans are expressing themselves, building communities, and creating livelihoods through digital platforms. Therefore, understanding how these enterprises are structured is essential to approaching the next phase of growth appropriately.

The report provides concrete data on how African creators make money, how they are scaling up, how they sustain their enterprises, and the issues that threaten sustainability.

We also introduced new frameworks to explain the industry’s nature and complexity better. One of these is the Audience Anchor Ratio, a first-of-its-kind metric designed to measure the depth, loyalty, and monetisation readiness of a creator’s audience. The metric probes beyond surface-level reach and follower counts. It reveals how variations in creator–audience dynamics across African countries influence content growth, innovation, policies, and monetisation outcomes.

We believe this report and the resources included will help industry stakeholders address the challenge of bridging the gap between potential and actual value captured in the sector.

You can access the full report for free here: africacreatoreconomy.com

• Nigeria’s tax reforms may signal the end of the informal era — creators, freelancers, and digital workers must now prepare for a future where their income is formally tracked, taxed, and regulated.

• As governments across Africa begin taxing creators, the continent is acknowledging the creator economy as a legitimate, measurable industry — one that now requires structure, compliance, and clearer definitions.

• Taxation can either accelerate or stifle growth; how Nigeria implements these rules will shape whether creators gain better protections, infrastructure, and support.

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1. The party’s over?

For years, remote workers, YouTubers, influencers, newsletter operators, and Nigerians earning foreign currency online operated in a grey zone: economically active, but invisible to tax authorities. But that changes in 2026.

The reason? Sweeping tax reforms signed into law earlier this year. The reforms are aimed at expanding the tax net as part of a broader push to increase Nigeria’s internally generated revenue (IGR). The goal is ambitious: to raise the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio from below 10% to 18% by 2027. Now, the digital and creator economy — one of the fastest-growing and historically invisible sectors — is firmly in the sights of the taxman.

To be clear, the reforms do not explicitly target content creators, except those registered as corporate entities, and even then, only when their annual profits exceed 25 million naira ($17,300). But creators have reason to pay attention. The reforms focus on remote workers and freelancers. Anyone earning income, especially from foreign companies or through online monetisation, will now be required to register, file returns, and pay taxes. This is the very category where creators operate, and these new rules bring them closer to the formal tax bracket.

Under the new framework, salaries will be taxed at a minimum rate of 15%, starting with Nigerians earning above 800,000 naira ($553) per year, and capped at a maximum rate of 25% for those earning 50 million naira ($34,580) and above. On paper, this means many in Nigeria’s creator class will technically fall outside the immediate impact of the new rules, not because they are exempt, but because they do not yet meet the income threshold.

According to the Nigerian Creator Economy Report 2025, a comprehensive study on the income structure of creators in Nigeria, 56% of creators earn less than $100 a month from their work. Only a small fraction—about 3.23%—earn above $5,000. For now, this income structure places the majority below the taxable floor.

But this reprieve is temporary. The new laws may not explicitly single out content creators, but they create the infrastructure around them, and infrastructure creates inevitability. What is inevitable is that the Nigerian creator economy will continue to expand and will eventually grow firmly into the tax bracket, a change that all creators should be prepared for.

2. The price of recognition

The new tax policy has sparked widespread outcry. While many view it as an added burden, taxation isn’t only about revenue collection; it also signals that an industry has become economically significant. When a sector starts generating measurable value, governments often introduce taxes as a way of formally recognising its growing role in the economy.

Economic and tax theories, such as the ability-to-pay theory (which suggests that governments should levy tax based on income and capacity) and the neutrality theory (which emphasises that taxation should not distort economic activity or discourage growth), offer insight into how governments approach taxation. From these perspectives, we can identify clear benchmarks that industries generally reach before they are taxed.

A. The industry generates significant income and market value

Taxation becomes logical once an activity produces substantial and reliable income. For most content creators, the beginning of their careers often looked more like a hobby. However, as they grow and become more established, they start negotiating brand deals, receiving payments from platforms, working with agencies dedicated to monetising content, and earning from ads, royalties, subscriptions, merchandise, and licensing. Once an industry generates predictable revenue, ignoring it leaves a gap in the formal economy, widening informality and creating an uneven playing field.

B. The industry begins to replace or compete with established taxed sectors

Taxes often follow competition or disruption. For instance, ride-hailing services like Uber competed with taxis, while fintechs challenged banks, and then regulation and taxation followed. Similarly, creators are now competing with, and in some cases replacing, traditional PR and advertising agencies and broadcasters. When a sector begins to draw income away from taxed industries, governments have a clear incentive to include it in the tax base.

C. The industry gains commercial infrastructure

Industries are taxed only when they develop structures that make compliance measurable and enforceable. For the Nigerian creator economy, these structures are still taking shape, but early signs indicate that we are headed in the right direction as creators are signing more formal contracts with brands, securing representation through talent agencies, and joining industry associations. Once an industry builds the infrastructure to support reporting and accountability, taxation becomes viable and inevitable.

3. Food for thought

Taxation for the creator economy is already on the horizon, but it should not be the first step. Before the government begins collecting revenue from creators, certain preconditions must be in place to ensure fairness, clarity, and compliance.

1. Clear legal definition: We must first define who counts as a creator and clarify when a hobby becomes a business. Without clear definitions, creators risk inconsistent treatment, and enforcement could be arbitrary. Legal clarity ensures creators understand their obligations and know when they enter the formal tax net.

2. Taxpayer education: Before taxation begins, creators should be educated on how to comply with the tax laws. Clear instructions on registration, filing returns, and calculating taxes prevent unintentional non-compliance.

3. Industry-specific deductions and allowances: Creators invest in equipment, software, production, advertising, and other business expenses. Recognising these costs through deductions or allowances ensures taxation reflects actual business profits rather than penalising creators for investing in their work.

4. A continental sweeping wave

The reforms in Nigeria are part of a broader wave sweeping across the continent as governments begin to tax the creator economy. And there’s a clear reason: the money is now visible.

The Nigerian digital agency TIMA estimates that brands spent $159.9 million on creators in Africa in 2022. Statista puts that figure at $137.3 million and projects it will reach $267.5 million by 2028. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise governments want their share.

In 2023, Morocco’s Directorate of General Taxes sent notices to 120 YouTubers and content creators asking them to regularise their tax status for the previous three years. In Cameroon, a ministerial order issued in 2024 now requires creators to pay a 5% tax on digital income from the sale of goods, services, or assets. And in September of this year, the South African Revenue Service officially added influencers to its taxpayer segmentation model, meaning that income, whether in cash or in kind, must now be declared. But the boldest move so far came from Kenya, which introduced a 15% withholding tax on digital creators through its 2023 Finance Act.

Taken together, these shifts signal something new: recognition. The creator economy is being treated as a legitimate sector of the economy. But taxation should not be the next step. For creators, tax is easier to accept when it comes with visible benefits, such as better copyright protection, access to financing, digital trade agreements, and support for creative infrastructure. Now, as governments step forward, the question becomes: will their taxation accelerate the ecosystem or simply extract from it?

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Why this matters

1. There is still an opportunity to create localised, context-specific resources and platforms for the African creator economy.

2. Multiple monetisation paths exist for media businesses, including live events, memberships, courses, reports, and other community-driven products for creators.

3. Community events can help scale brands, becoming revenue streams while strengthening loyalty and positioning brands as key players in the industry.

1. The interview show, recre8ted

The lights are on, cameras rolling, and content creator Salem King and his co-host Adaora Mbelu sit across from chess master Tunde Onakoya as he tells his story for the umpteenth time. It is a story that we have come to know very well: the boy from one of Lagos’s poorest neighbourhoods who discovered chess, became a prodigy, made his way out of the slums, and went on to break the Guinness World Record for the longest time spent playing the game. Beyond the accolades, Onakoya is now using chess to give slum kids like him a shot at education and a future.

Most media outlets frame Onakoya’s journey as a classic tale of triumph against the odds. However, Crea8torium, Salem King's, and Adora Mbelu’s new show takes a different approach. Their conversation with Onakoya isn’t about the thrill of breaking records but the craft of storytelling, how he built an audience that rallied behind his mission, and what lessons other creators with similar ambitions can draw from that journey.

Since 2020, interview shows and podcasts have proliferated, often chasing entertainment value and mass appeal. But Crea8torium flips the script: its audience isn’t the general public, but creators themselves. Where others seek to entertain, King and Mbelu seek to educate, turning conversations with themselves and other creators into a playbook for a generation of up-and-coming African creators trying to make art, build communities, and sustain livelihoods in a fragile ecosystem. If this sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it elsewhere before.

2. The Colin and Samir blueprint

Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry first met in 2012 while individually building YouTube channels around lacrosse content. They eventually joined forces, building (and later selling) a lacrosse-focused digital sports network, experimenting with podcasts and YouTube shows, and even dabbling in consulting and filmmaking. But a couple of years ago, they stumbled on something that stuck: their conversations with other creators. How did they get into the industry? How do they make a living from it? What keeps them going when the money or motivation runs thin?

Those conversations became the backbone of Colin and Samir, their now self-titled YouTube talk show. Each episode pulls back the curtain on the mechanics of creator life: the grind of audience-building, the business models that work, and the emotional rollercoaster of staking your livelihood on content. “We wanted to create a show that provided a sense of community for creators, a place to learn about what it’s like to grow a career and to feel less alone. We feel like being a creator is one of the most sought-after careers, and also one of the least understood. Our goal is to shine some light on how different people are actually pursuing this career,” they said in a Rolling Stone interview.

They have been remarkably successful in pursuing that goal. What started as a niche experiment has grown into one of the most influential creator-focused platforms in the world. Over the last five years, Colin and Samir have sat across from some of the biggest names in the creator economy, including MrBeast, MKBHD, Emma Chamberlain, and countless others, dissecting not just their content but the choices, failures, and strategies behind their careers. Their videos have garnered over 400 million views, and their channel has over 1.5 million subscribers.

The duo has learned the pressures, pitfalls, and promises of building a career as a creator. And that’s where the parallels with Crea8torium begin to emerge. Just as Colin and Samir built a space for Western creators to swap lessons and trade playbooks, King and Mbelu are trying to do the same for Africa’s fast-growing but precarious creator economy.

3. The case for educating African content creators

In Africa’s creator economy, talent is rarely the problem. The continent is bursting with dancers, filmmakers, comedians, gamers, podcasters, and storytellers who command millions of views. But beneath the surface lies a quieter struggle: most creators know how to make content, but not how to build businesses and sustainable careers around it.

The knowledge gap is structural. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have built support systems for American and European creators, but their African counterparts operate with limited or no access to similar structures.

There is no structured process for building a career from content. For example, with monetisation, Western creators receive direct payouts from platforms for their content, but this is not yet widely available in Africa. That leaves brand deals as the primary revenue stream for creators. But these deals are negotiated without standard rates, transparency, or industry data. For every creator who breaks out globally, countless others remain underpaid, undervalued, or unable to scale beyond hustling for virality.

This is the problem Salem King and Adaora Mbelu are trying to solve with Crea8torium, an African counterpart to the Colin and Samir show. However, the context differs: the advice isn’t about maximising YouTube AdSense or TikTok payouts. It’s about how to survive and grow in an ecosystem where platforms don’t pay, brands lowball, and creators have to become their own managers, agents, and accountants.

Every episode is a case study: how to build a brand with storytelling for social impact or how to collaborate properly with other creators. Crea8torium is independent, candid, unfiltered, and built on shared experience, unlike platform-sponsored workshops, which are helpful but often double as marketing.

4. Building out a Crea8torium ecosystem

If the show is the heartbeat of Crea8torium, the next phase is about building out its body; expanding the idea into formats, products, and experiences that serve creators. Salem and Adora have already tested the waters with live watch parties in Lagos and Abuja, bringing together creators for intimate conversations and networking. But that’s only the beginning.

Expansion looks something like this:

1. Community Hub: At the centre is a dedicated online community where creators can exchange advice, share opportunities, and access resources. Think of it as the WhatsApp group every creator wishes they had, providing structured, moderated, and enriched with insights from industry experts. Over time, this could evolve into a paid membership model offering access to exclusive content, workshops, and industry data.

2. Education: The episodes are already masterclasses, but Crea8torium can codify these lessons into structured learning. This means creator playbooks and guides on everything from negotiating brand partnerships to building sustainable production workflows. Packaged as e-books, video courses, or even a full-scale “Crea8torium Academy,” these offerings would serve creators who want more than just inspiration.

3. Data and Insights: One of the most significant gaps in Africa’s creator economy is the absence of reliable market data; how much to charge for a brand deal, what CPMs look like, and how engagement benchmarks differ across regions. Crea8torium could fill that gap by publishing reports and trend analyses from surveys, interviews, and case studies with creators in its community. Communiqué has done its part to provide some of that data. In 2024, we launched the first African creator economy report. But having more than one player provides insight into the creative economy, so it doesn't hurt. A Crea8torium creator economy report would be equally impactful and speak more directly to creators.

4. Expanding Events: In Communiqué 42, analysing Big Cabal Media’s event strategy, we stated that:

“Events provide an opportunity to diversify and increase revenue streams beyond traditional advertising and content monetisation. With ticket sales, sponsorship deals, and branded partnerships, events can become a significant source of income. Second, hosting events allows BCM to strengthen its relationship with its audience by offering in-person experiences that build a sense of community and deepen audience loyalty. These events bring readers closer to the brand, giving them direct access to the people behind the publications and creating memorable, engaging experiences that foster long-term connections. Also, events are a powerful tool for brand building, as they position BCM not just as a publisher but as a key player in driving conversations, cultural movements, and thought leadership within the communities and industries it serves.”

What works for Big Cabal Media could also work for Crea8torium. The early live gatherings can grow into a travelling series across African cities — Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg, Cairo — helping spotlight local creator communities while connecting them to the broader ecosystem. Over time, these could culminate in an annual Crea8torium Summit: part knowledge exchange, part creator festival, part marketplace for creators to showcase their work.

Crea8torium is still in its early days, but its ambition is clear. Where most creator-focused platforms in Africa remain scattered, temporary, or tied to corporate sponsorships, Salem King and Adaora Lumina are building something more permanent, rooted in community. The show may have started as a series of conversations in a studio, but the bigger play is to create an ecosystem where African creators can learn from one another, share data, and begin to professionalise an industry that has long been undervalued.

We just launched the NCC Impact Report

We just launched an impact report on the Nigerian Communications Commission’s policies between 2023 and 2025, and the findings are revealing. From tariff hikes that boosted telco profits (and paid for some much-needed infrastructure upgrades) to how vandalism disrupts telco operations, the report traces where policy has worked and where it’s stalled.

Also, we will be hosting a webinar tomorrow, at 1 PM WAT to discuss the report and how NCC’s policies are shaping Nigeria’s digital future.

Register to attend the webinar here: Bit.ly/NCCWebinar2025

And download the report here: Bit.ly/NCCImpactReport

1. Creators make great business founders: Many African creators use their popularity to launch real businesses, not just promote others. For investors, this shift represents a new type of early-stage venture opportunity—creator-led businesses that already have built-in demand and low CAC (customer acquisition cost).

2. Subscriptions are the future: Selling one-time products like eBooks or courses is hard to sustain. Creative entrepreneurs should adopt SaaS-like recurring revenue models or membership platforms over single-sale products. These models are more complex to pirate, easier to scale, and build stronger lifetime value.

3. Creator holding companies are the next best asset class: The most ambitious creators will build multi-brand companies using their content engine as the marketing infrastructure. Creative entrepreneurs who have found product-market fit in one niche can explore adjacent verticals where their audience’s trust gives them an unfair advantage.

1. Going beyond brand deals.

In his final year as a medical student, Dr. Chinonso Egemba witnessed a young patient die not because of a wrong diagnosis, but because the patient had failed to follow medical advice. It was a stark reminder that access to healthcare isn’t just about doctors and hospitals, but also about information and understanding. That moment marked a turning point. Egemba began creating content to close the gap between medical knowledge and everyday Nigerians.

Nearly a decade later, Egemba is better known as Aproko Doctor, the health-conscious content creator with over six million followers across social media. But he’s gone far beyond videos about blood pressure, carbonated drinks, and hydration. In early 2025, he launched Awadoc, a telehealth platform designed to connect everyday Nigerians with medical advice and licensed doctors at an affordable rate.

Since launching in April, Awadoc says it has served more than 50,000 patients across 13 African countries and is now raising a $500,000 pre-seed round to expand its operations.

Similarly, Ifedayo Agoro, known to her audience as Diary of a Naija Girl, entered the skincare market in 2020 with her brand, Dang Lifestyle, after gathering over a million followers across social media. What began as a simple experiment has now sold over 400,000 product units across Nigeria, the U.S., and Europe. In 2024, the brand opened its first physical location, an experience centre in the upscale neighbourhood of Victoria Island, Lagos.

Also, popular skitmaker Justin UG, a staple of Nigeria’s Instagram comedy scene, is turning his viral humour into a software play. In May, he announced Memora, a platform to help people discover, save, and share memes worldwide.

These creators represent a growing trend of African creators moving beyond simply monetising their influence by endorsing other people’s products to leveraging their reach, trust, and cultural capital to build products, launch businesses, and raise capital to scale these businesses.

2. The MrBeast playbook

To truly understand the growing wave of African creators launching digital products and building businesses around them, it helps to look at the global north star of this model: Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast.

Donaldson, the 26-year-old YouTuber famed for his elaborate stunts and philanthropic giveaways, was already one of the most-watched creators in the world when he made his first major leap into product entrepreneurship. In 2020, he launched MrBeast Burger, a virtual restaurant brand that piggybacked on a network of ghost kitchens across the U.S. Initially, it was a viral success—millions of orders flooded in, driven by MrBeast’s massive online following. But behind the scenes, operational cracks quickly emerged: poor quality control, inconsistent customer experience, and tension with the company he’d partnered with, Virtual Dining Concepts. By 2023, he was embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit over the burger chain, calling the food “inedible” and alleging damage to his reputation. But Donaldson didn’t let that deter him.

In 2022, he launched Feastables, a chocolate brand using the full power of his YouTube platform as a marketing engine. The business exploded: in 2024 alone, Feastables generated $250 million in sales and $20 million in profit, surpassing even the content creation arm of the MrBeast business, which reportedly lost $80 million in the same period.

Feastables’ success has since become the blueprint. MrBeast has quietly expanded into other categories: Lunchables-style snacks under a new brand called Lunchly, and Viewstat, a software company selling analytics and automation tools to other creators. All these entities sit under a holding company called Beast Industries, which has now raised $450 million in funding and was valued at $5 billion as of 2024.

The business model is clear: the content is no longer the business but the marketing engine.

“We have an unprecedented platform in terms of reach and fandom,” Jeffrey Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, told Bloomberg. “We have the opportunity to launch multiple businesses on the back of that centre of reach and distribution.” By 2026, revenue from the content creation arm of the business will account for only 20% of the company’s total revenue.

Other creators have used this playbook with stunning success. Huda Kattan, a former beauty blogger and makeup artist, leveraged her online influence into Huda Beauty, a cosmetics empire valued at $1.2 billion at its peak. Her deep understanding of her audience’s beauty preferences, honed through years of direct engagement on YouTube and Instagram, became the foundation for product development, marketing, and global expansion. Similarly, Australian fitness influencer Kayla Itsines transformed her online workout guides into Sweat, a full-fledged fitness tech platform. In 2021, she sold Sweat to fitness giant iFIT for $400 million.

3. The creator product journey

African creators have always sold products as part of their business. The 2024 African Creator Economy Report found that for 47% of creators, selling digital products such as courses, eBooks, templates, or presets was their most significant source of income. The first wave of this productisation boom was enabled by tools like Selar and Flutterwave Store, making it incredibly easy for creators to package knowledge in areas like beauty, fitness, finance, tech, and freelancing into high-margin, one-off offerings. And to a large extent, this model has worked.

However, cracks in this productisation strategy soon became clear. Digital products like courses or eBooks are one-time purchases and rely heavily on the creator’s ability to market them continuously. That process is exhausting. Worse still, once a course is live, it’s often vulnerable to piracy, with thousands of leaked copies shared freely across Telegram and WhatsApp.

This new wave of creator-led product businesses, particularly for those building digital products, will lean towards the SaaS model.

Instead of selling one-off products, creators will build membership ecosystems that combine content, community, access, and tools that address a specific pain point into a single offering. Awadoc uses this model in healthcare. This approach is more complicated to pirate, easier to scale, and deeply embedded in daily user behaviour.

4. What does the future look like?

In Communiqué 35: The creator lifecycle, David outlined the various phases of a creator’s growth and the final stage; legacy is the hardest to reach:

“This is the final stage for creators. Here, they’ve entered wholly into celebrity status. They’ve gotten rich by leveraging their audience, but they know they won’t be hot forever, so they need to think beyond themselves. Here, the focus is longevity. How can they invest in projects outside the scope of what made them successful? How can they channel their fame into long-lasting wealth? How can they build considerable passive income? This is when we start seeing creators launch venture capital firms, restaurants and hospitality brands, clothing and fashion lines, makeup brands, production companies, creative agencies, etc.”

However, thanks to open-source tools and AI co-pilots, we will see more creators reach the legacy phase as the cost of building software continues to fall. In the coming years, expect more creators to ship tailored apps, such as education, wellness, investing, and design, wrapped in the language of community and powered by creator-led brand affinity.

In this future, expect a wave of creator-founded software platforms that bundle the niche expertise of creators with the interactivity of an AI chatbot in various fields, from parenting to productivity to wellness. These will often be paywalled or use a freemium model.

Also, just as the last generation of influencers moved into brand ambassadorship and endorsements, the next generation will launch actual brands with content as the launchpad, not the product. We’ll soon see creator-backed holding companies that resemble startups launch multiple consumer-facing brands backed by one powerful personality and a shared content, operations, and marketing engine. Think “Aproko Group” launching Awadoc (health), AwaWell (wellness), and AwaStore (e-commerce for health-related products), for instance.

For investors, this is a new asset class. Creator-led companies offer distinct advantages: pre-built demand, low customer acquisition costs, and intensely loyal communities. However, they also require a new investment framework that prioritises attention metrics, audience conversion history, and platform performance over traditional features investors require.

Yet, these models come with unique risks. A business built entirely around a single personality is vulnerable. If a creator falls out of favour with their audience, the brand can suffer collateral damage. The challenge will be decoupling the founder’s face from the company’s future, without losing the emotional trust that made the business possible in the first place.

The continent’s most trusted voices are no longer just building audiences; they’re building businesses. And in doing so, they’re reshaping what entrepreneurship, branding, and product–market fit can look like in Africa. As the lines blur between creator and founder, the most valuable commodity won’t just be attention, but the products creators build with it and the businesses they build around those products.

Keypoints

1. Podcast networks signal a new growth phase. Africa’s podcast industry is shifting from individual-led shows to structured, brand-backed networks. Companies like OkayAfrica and Pulse are consolidating content to boost discoverability, retain IP, and attract bigger advertisers. This model allows for continuity even if hosts leave and creates scale across multiple audience segments.

2. Format innovation is a competitive advantage. While chat-style podcasts remain popular, narrative and documentary formats are gaining ground. Shows like The Republic Podcast and 4th Republic demonstrate demand for deeper storytelling and higher production value. These formats stand out, attract critical acclaim, and open up premium partnership opportunities.

3. Platform strategy is as important as production. African audiences spend most of their time on social and messaging apps, not podcast platforms. The most successful podcasters adapt their content into clips, visuals, and formats that travel well across these platforms. Video podcasts, in particular, perform better in driving engagement and virality.

1. Another podcast network?

Joey Akan’s Lagos apartment is no stranger to public conversations. It’s where the award-winning journalist has recorded classic interviews with some of Afrobeats' most important players. Last week, it also became the unlikely venue for the launch of the OkayAfrica podcast network.

Gathered in the same living room where the new season of Afrobeats Intelligence was taped, a small group of media insiders toasted the launch of OkayAfrica’s podcast network: a new slate of shows spanning music, politics, and diaspora commentary, released in partnership with Okayplayer.

The rollout included a mix of new podcasts and pre-existing ones now brought under the OkayAfrica umbrella, including Akan's Afrobeats Intelligence, one of Africa’s most popular music podcasts; No Wahala, a breezy, transatlantic culture show hosted by Nigerian-Americans Tune Day and Bawo; To Be Clear, a sharp, interview-driven series spotlighting African creatives and changemakers; and Bird’s Eye View, a continental current affairs podcast hosted by musician Seun Kuti and cultural commentator Diallo Kenyatta.

The launch also signaled something deeper: a shift in the African podcast ecosystem from independent, creator-driven shows to more structured, institution-backed networks. Where individual creators once carried the format’s early promise, media platforms like Pulse, Culture Custodian, Eggcorn Digital, and OkayAfrica are laying the groundwork for a more formalized podcast industry.

2. Back in time

On February 15, 2016, Pulse became one of the first African publications to launch a podcast with the Loose Talk Podcast. Hosted by then-music journalist Osagie Alonge, alongside Steve Dede and Ayomide Tayo, Loose Talk offered sharp and, sometimes, combative conversations about music, pop culture, and society. Over more than 200 episodes, the trio cultivated a loyal following and, at times, stirred enough controversy to earn death threats. But their message resonated, and Loose Talk grew to become one of the most popular podcasts.

As Loose Talk found its audience, the podcasting wave was also swelling across the continent. Creators and listeners alike were drawn to its freedom: unlike terrestrial radio, podcasts allowed deeper conversations, niche topics, and fewer gatekeepers. Soon, other companies took note and began to create podcast networks.

An early player was Midas Radio, the first home of the I Said What I Said Podcast. Other companies like Eggcorn Digital, Urbangidi, and Clout Africa would later launch their networks. In 2019, Osagie Alonge left Pulse, taking with him the intellectual property for Loose Talk. He would later relaunch the podcast under Global Village, his own network.

3. Peeling back the layers

In “Communiqué 10: Can podcasts scale in Africa?”, we wrote:

“If people already spend most of their screen time on social media and instant messaging, then podcasters need to do a better job of meeting people where they are instead of just creating for their podcast platforms… The most successful writers and video creators also know to adapt their content per platform and create conversations around that content or insert it into relevant conversations. I’m not just talking about sharing links to your podcast on social media, but also adapting it to each platform to optimise distribution.”

We’ve now seen this strategy crystallize across the continent. While most podcasts vary in focus, they share one key trait: they are “chat casts” — informal, personality- and opinion-driven conversations anchored by their hosts and guests. This format has done particularly well with the Nigerian audience and, when combined with video, has spawned soundbites that go viral. “Nigerians want to watch stuff, which is why video podcasts do better. Among the big players today, some started with audio but quickly moved to video, while others were video podcasts right from the start,” Damilola Dawson, Pulse’s Head of Content, told Communiqué.

This personality-driven chatcast structure made the podcasts vibrant and relatable, but also fragile. As hosts moved on to other projects or left the company, the shows’ continuity came into question. In 2021, Pulse officially launched a podcast network, debuting a new slate of shows: Terms and Conditions, Women Talk Sex, and Life in Naija. While these new podcasts had hosts, they were more publication-driven, and Pulse retained the IP. For instance, when the hosts of Terms and Conditions left the Pulse network, the company simply relaunched the podcast and expanded its focus.

South Africa’s Podcast and Chill Network, founded in 2018, includes a collection of 17 podcasts, most also adopt the chatcast format. The Africa Podcast Network, founded in 2009, has a bit more variety and hosts shows for Daily Maverick and Mail & Guardian. Still, most of the network’s shows are heavily conversation-based.

Platforms like Culture Custodian are doing things differently. In the lead-up to Nigeria’s 2023 general elections, it completely eschewed the traditional chatcast format and embraced the scripted, documentary style. It introduced 4th Republic, a podcast examining Nigerian politics through a cultural lens, with voiceovers, archival tape, and original reporting.

“It’s easy for anyone to share an opinion on a subject,” Mayowa Idowu, Culture Custodian’s Editor-in-Chief, told Communiqué. “But we did not want to do that. We wanted to be detailed and provide the most informed commentary on any topic.”

Despite this, however, one Culture Custodian’s most popular podcast—Submarine and A Roach—still adopts the chatcast format, showing just how deeply they resonate with the audience.

That said, the documentary format has proven most popular with niche publications catering to a non-mainstream audience. For instance, in 2023, culture magazine The Republic launched its self-titled narrative documentary podcast. The podcast has since earned critical acclaim, including a prestigious One World Media Award nomination.

4. The endgame

For African publications launching podcast networks, the Vox Media Podcast Network is the ideal model. Founded in 2013 as an audio extension of the digital-first Vox Media brand, the network grew from a handful of shows into a sprawling ecosystem covering news, culture, tech, sports, and politics. Flagship titles like Today, Explained, The Weeds, and Pivot helped the network cultivate highly engaged niche audiences. As of 2024, the Vox Media Podcast Network had more than 30 actively publishing podcasts reaching a unique global monthly audience of over 10 million.

But the secret to Vox Media’s success isn't just content but the strategy behind it. Rather than rely on a few big-name personalities, the Vox Media Podcast Network built a large, diverse portfolio of shows under a single brand umbrella. This gave them flexibility and scale. With each new show, they deepened their reach across different audience segments.

In the same way, these African publications are expanding their audience reach with podcasts. “Not everyone will read the publication, but with podcasts we can increase the scope of the Culture Custodian audience,” Idowu said.

Also, consolidating the podcasts into one network can drive content discovery, as a podcast can be cross-promoted to another podcast within the network with a similar audience.

The scale the podcast network brings is also beneficial, as it can attract bigger advertising deals, particularly if brands are interested in advertising on more than one show in the network or across all the shows. Vox, looking to take advantage of this opportunity, consolidated all its podcasts into a single website in 2019.

As podcasts continue to grow in popularity across the continent, media companies are likely to expand their networks, either by acquiring promising independent creator-led shows or experimenting with new original content. The goal isn't just to amplify individual voices, but to shape a sustainable ecosystem where content, audiences, and revenue can flow in sync, ultimately building a more resilient creative economy.

Four years ago, we asked if podcasts could scale in Africa, positing that “The world is moving away from linear programming to on-demand content, and podcasting is one way that is happening. Africans may not listen to podcasts often yet, but as we already established, they listen to on-demand audio.”

Four years later, that question is being answered, and our observation is playing out in full flow.

1. A game of chance

In 2021, Olayiwola Isaac was a final-year law student at Bowen University in southwest Nigeria. He spent a ton of his free time between lectures making skits. Then he made one about blocking his mother from viewing his WhatsApp status. It went viral and marked the beginning of an upward spiral. By the end of 2022, off the back of characters like The Professor, Isaac, now popularly known as Layi Wasabi, became a modest online sensation, with over 500k followers on Instagram and a client roster that included brands like Chicken Republic and Flutterwave.

But potential outpaced infrastructure. Layi Wasabi, with the help of a university friend, personally managed his brand and business—a common experience with many African content creators. According to the 2023 Selar African Creator Economy Report, only 24% of African content creators worked with a team of experts to support their work. The lack of experience showed. When Layi Wasabi, then based in Ibadan, a city just a few hours from Lagos, was booked for a shoot in Lekki, Lagos, the client did not arrange for his accommodation.

Enter Olufemi Oguntamu, CEO of Penzaarville Africa, a talent management agency with a reputation for turning viral fame into sustainable business. Earlier, Oguntamu had reached out to Layi Wasabi to ask for his rate card. But, the version he received was not properly designed—the first sign of poor management. Then, Oguntamu found out about the accommodation problem, and he decided to step in. He booked a room for Wasabi at the Lagos Continental Hotel and invited him to dinner.

Over dinner at Cilantro, a restaurant located in the upscale Victoria Island, Lagos, Oguntamu reviewed Layi Wasabi’s brand. “The conversation that we had felt like a lecture. So, you know, when someone is talking to you and you're like, oh yes, I realize this, I realize that. He's telling you where you have been, where you are as a brand, and where you should go,” Layi Wasabi told Communiqué.

Oguntamu also laid out Penzaarville’s value proposition to him: creative autonomy, a plan to scale his brand, and critically, a profit-sharing model that included Layi Wasabi’s existing manager.

A few weeks later, Layi Wasabi signed a management deal with Penzaarville Africa. Since then, the creator talent agency has added top content creators like lifestyle influencer Tomike Adeoye and travel YouTuber Tayo Aina to its client roster while consulting for many others, cementing its status as a prominent African creator management agency.

2. Penzaarville Africa 1.0

Long before Olufemi Oguntamu became the architect behind the success of several African creators, he was just a university student with a BlackBerry and an uncanny ability to command attention. In the early 2010s, while studying Mass Communication at Olabisi Onabanjo University, Oguntamu amassed a contact list of over 1,000 names on his BlackBerry, a formidable digital footprint in Nigeria’s pre-Instagram era. What began as casual promotions for campus parties (at ₦500 per post) soon caught the eye of brands seeking to tap into youth culture. “I didn’t see it as a career,” Oguntamu recalls. But when brands like Guinness began to approach him to not only promote their campaigns but get other influencers to do so as well, he realized the inherent business opportunity.

After graduation, Oguntamu cut his teeth at Lagos’s elite PR firms—Red Media Africa, where he worked on The Future Awards Africa and later Mediacraft. These stints sharpened his understanding of brand storytelling but left him restless.

In 2015, he launched Penzaarville Africa as a digital marketing and influencer agency, betting on Nigeria’s burgeoning social media boom. Early clients included Wema Bank, Samsung, and the Lagos State Government, but the breakthrough came in 2019 when the agency spearheaded the Nigerian rebrand of ride-hailing giant Taxify to Bolt. The campaign, which leveraged several creators as influencers to promote the service, established Penzaarville Africa as one of the leading marketing agencies in the country.

Penzaarville’s success in influencer marketing sowed the seeds of its evolution into a creator management agency. Oguntamu’s deep relationships with content creators—forged while brokering brand deals—revealed a glaring inefficiency: many lacked professional representation. “They’d land big campaigns but undervalue themselves,” he said. “After negotiating deals for them, they’d ask, ‘Why don’t you just manage me?”

MC Lively, a rising skit maker at the time, was the first to formalize this arrangement in 2018. However, the signing of Broda Shaggi, one of Oguntamu’s friends from university who was gaining prominence as a creator in 2019, marked Penzaarville’s definitive shift from brand campaigns to talent management.

3. A leaf—or several—from the CAA playbook

To properly understand how Penzaarville is growing as a leading creator talent agency, we must look to the global talent management agency, Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Creative Artists Agency (CAA), now a $5 billion behemoth, didn’t become Hollywood’s most powerful talent firm accidentally. Its growth followed a deliberate strategy of consolidation.

CAA's first move was signing not just actors but directors and, later, athletes and musicians. By the late 1990s, it represented over 1,400 artists, making it impossible for any project to be made in Hollywood without them. Having consolidated the market for Hollywood talent, CAA expanded into adjacent industries: sports (CAA Sports), branding (CAA Marketing), and other geographies (India, China, and London), increasing its capacity to broker deals for its clients across industries and borders.

Nigeria’s creative economy—valued at $2.4 billion but historically fragmented—is ripe for a CAA-style consolidator. Penzaarville’s strategy mirrors the Hollywood giant’s, albeit with local nuances. Like CAA in the ’90s, Penzaarville is aggressively signing multihyphenate talent: comedians (Broda Shaggi, Layi Wasabi), travel creators (Tayo Aina), and actors (Tomike Adeoye). The goal? Make brands and platforms depend on the company for access to creators, becoming indispensable in the era of creative commercialization.

Penzaarville is deliberate about the talent it signs—far more than simply chasing metrics like follower counts. The agency targets creators with a clear, scalable growth trajectory, focusing on those with distinct personas, cross-platform appeal, and untapped commercial potential. Once signed, Penzaarville conducts an in-depth brand audit, analyzing the creator’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for expansion. For example, with Layi Wasabi. After signing him, Penzaarville’s analysis revealed that his newly introduced "Lawyer" character, which he had only made two videos with, had viral potential but needed focused content development. The agency advised doubling down on the character. The result? A surge in engagement, and ultimately, the inaugural African Magic Viewers’ Choice Award for Best Digital Creator. Today, the “Lawyer” isn’t just a skit staple; he’s the centerpiece of Layi Wasabi’s content, with two YouTube series built around the character.

The brand audit extends beyond content strategy. Penzaarville meticulously matches creators with commercial partners that align with their personas. For Layi Wasabi, this meant partnerships with brands that valued his sharp wit rather than generic influencer campaigns.

Also mirroring CAA’s global expansion strategy, Penzaarville is methodically introducing its talent to international markets, recognizing that Africa’s cultural influence is a growing global currency. In 2024, Penzaarville organized a U.K. tour for Layi Wasabi, testing his resonance with diaspora audiences and laying the groundwork for future European brand deals. Similar tours have been held for Broda Shaggi in East Africa. The agency is also managing Tayo Aina's transition from an African travel vlogger to an international travel YouTuber, with Penzaarville securing collaborations with global brands like the recent one with Express VPN.

Penzaarville’s approach—part talent incubator, part brand architect, part global distributor—echoes CAA’s rise, but with a critical differentiation: first-mover leverage in Africa’s under-systematized market. Where CAA competed with entrenched rivals, Penzaarville is writing the rules for talent management in the African creator economy, one country at a time.

1. Not all heroes wear capes; some process payouts

While most people have rightfully celebrated the rise of Africa’s digital creators, they’ve paid less attention to the platforms powering this revolution. Among them, Selar has emerged as a quiet force, enabling the continent’s creator class to turn passion into sustainable income.

The numbers speak for themselves: In 2024 alone, Selar paid out 9.8 billion naira ($6.4 million) to African creators, more than double its 2023 disbursements. This marks four consecutive years of doubling both users and creator payouts—a growth trajectory that began during the COVID-19 lockdown but has continued through disciplined execution.

Unlike flashy startups chasing unicorn valuations, Selar’s approach has been decidedly different: scaling sustainably by obsessively solving creators’ most pressing needs.

As Africa’s creator economy matures, platforms like Selar are becoming the invisible infrastructure, making this cultural shift possible. Selar is proving that not everyone has to own a train; some can build the rails instead.

2. A mountain and a molehill

Fresh out of university in 2016, Douglas Kendyson’s first job was as a tech and customer support personnel for a new fintech startup called Paystack—you might have heard of them. Kendyson was at the receiving end of requests from people who wanted to sell digital products. But Paystack only supported registered businesses, not individual customers.

After getting approval from his bosses at work, he and a couple of friends built and launched the first version of Selar in 2016. It was essentially a Gumroad replica—allowing creators to set up an online store in minutes. Initially, five of Kendyson’s friends joined him to build Selar. But as time went on, work and other commitments pulled them away, leaving Kendyson as the sole developer. For the next four years, Selar existed as his passion project.

One of Selar’s first users was a musician named Muyiwa, Kendyson’s former schoolmate, who used the platform to sell his EP, Dear Music, as a zip file. However, its most important early user was the Nigerian Christian movie production company, Mount Zion Films.

In 2017, Kendyson signed a deal to help the production company distribute its films. On paper, the deal made little financial sense: Selar earned just 39 naira (3 cents) per sale, a fraction of its usual take rate. But what the deal lacked in revenue potential, it had in something more valuable—social proof. If a household name like Mount Zion trusted Selar to sell its product, then smaller independent creators could depend on it.

Things with Mount Zion improved a bit when Selar added a custom-built subscription-based streaming feature at 1,000 naira (65 cents) per month, meaning Selar could earn 300 naira (20 cents) per subscription. But the partnership was short-lived. By 2019, Mount Zion had stopped uploading new content to Selar, moving to YouTube as its main online distributor. By this time, Selar had grown to 1,300 merchants. Not bad, but not great, considering that it had been around for four years.

3. Little by little, then all at once

At the start of 2020, Douglas Kendyson gave Selar an ultimatum: The platform needed to transform into something “really, really good”—or he would walk away. Then, a few weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world.

The pandemic arrived at a pivotal moment for Selar, transforming what might have remained a modest side project into an essential platform for Africa’s digital creators. As lockdowns swept across the continent in early 2020, traditional income streams evaporated overnight. Suddenly, teachers could no longer hold physical classes, musicians saw their live performances canceled, and entrepreneurs found their usual sales channels disrupted. This economic upheaval created an unprecedented surge in demand for digital solutions—exactly the problem Selar had been built to solve.

With physical commerce restricted, Africans who had previously hesitated to buy digital products found themselves with little choice but to embrace online transactions. The psychological barrier that had long hindered digital commerce in Africa collapsed almost overnight. Selar’s platform, which enabled creators to sell everything from online courses to music files, became not just convenient but necessary.

But the pandemic merely set the stage—it was a business strategist named TriciaBiz who became the catalyst for Selar’s breakout success. As thousands of newly unemployed professionals scrambled to monetize their skills online, TriciaBiz recognized Selar as the ideal solution. Her endorsement to her substantial audience of aspiring digital entrepreneurs carried immense weight, driving an astonishing 60% of Selar's 2020 revenue. By the end of the year, Selar had processed 100 million naira ($253,000) in transactions—a massive leap from the 6 million naira ($16,700) it processed in 2019.

The focus on creators’ needs has been the real driver of Selar’s success. For example, the streaming functionality, initially developed in 2017 for Mount Zion Films, became the foundation for Selar’s premium course-hosting feature. By enabling streaming (rather than downloadable content), Selar addressed creators’ rampant piracy concerns. A similar pattern of innovation follows Selar’s product development timeline. Its tipping feature—colloquially called “Show Love”—was born from the creators’ need for extra revenue. Likewise, integrations with global payment platforms like WeChat Pay, Alipay, and Apple Pay directly responded to African creators selling to the diaspora.

4. Selar’s aggregator advantage

Another factor that explains Selar’s growth is Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory. The theory argues that in the digital age, value is captured by aggregators—platforms that sit between consumers and suppliers, reducing transaction costs and improving user experience. Unlike traditional businesses that compete on supply-side advantages (e.g., manufacturing, distribution), aggregators win by dominating demand-side economies of scale. Two pillars of the aggregation theory explain Selar’s success:

• Direct user relationships: Selar owns the buyer-creator connection, bypassing intermediaries. Its storefronts and payment tools let customers transact seamlessly, making the platform indispensable to both sides.

• Near-zero marginal costs: Digital products—ebooks, courses, films—require little to no additional inventory cost. Each new creator who uses Selar to sell their product brings new customers to the platform, helping drive exponential growth at minimal cost.

The result? A self-reinforcing loop: More creators on the Selar platform attract more buyers, and the more buyers view Selar as a reliable means to buy digital products, the more creators it draws in.

In 2025, Selar has set an ambitious goal of paying out 20 billion naira ($13 million) to creators—more than double the 2024 figure. This ambitious goal will be powered by enhancements to its product suite, including a new booking system for service-based creators and an event check-in app to complement its existing ticketing features.

These additions, developed in response to creator feedback, underscore Selar’s unique advantage: a deep understanding of African creators’ unique needs. A focus that has fueled four consecutive years of 100% revenue growth. In an industry often obsessed with vanity metrics, Selar’s quiet, creator-led growth offers a blueprint for success in Africa’s creator economy.

1. Reintroduction

On October 24, Layi Wasabi, a popular Nigerian skitmaker, posted his first video on YouTube. This, in many ways, was a departure from the style and format that the creator had become known for. His videos hardly ever lasted beyond 3 minutes. But this time around, he was pushing boundaries to create a series of short films over 7 minutes long.

The video series features his popular character, The Law, a bumbling lawyer who often finds himself in outrageous situations. But Wasabi’s switch to YouTube isn’t just about trying out new material; it’s a move to a platform that several creators believe offers greater monetization potential, creative freedom, and stability.

Layi Wasabi, whose real name is Isaac Olayiwola, got his start posting skits on Instagram while studying Law at Bowen University in Southwest Nigeria. In 2021, a skit he made about blocking his mom on WhatsApp went viral, bringing him into the limelight. Building on this initial success, he created characters like The Law, Officer Robert, and Mr. Richard, whose comical misadventures and exaggerated personas repeatedly captured audiences. His popularity surged, leading to industry recognition with awards at the Trend Up Creator Awards—one of Nigeria’s first influencer award shows— in 2023 and the African Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA)—the continent’s top movie industry award show—in 2024.

Wasabi’s move to YouTube aligns with a broader trend of Nigerian creators who got their initial breaks on short-form video platforms like Instagram and TikTok now gravitating toward YouTube. Fellow Nigerian creators like Shank Comics, Gilmore, Broda Shaggi, and Justin Ug have also started making YouTube-native content, taking advantage of the platform to reach more global audiences. YouTube also comes with promises of a different kind of revenue stream.

2. Show me the money

“YouTube offers Nigerian skit makers access to ad revenue—once you hit the threshold to get into the YouTube partner program, which is 4,000 hours of watch time and 1,000 subscribers, it allows you to earn money directly from views, and this is a consistent thing,” Adetutu Laditan, a former senior product marketing manager at YouTube, told Communiqué. “Some creators are already captivated by that opportunity. It’s also paying them in foreign exchange, on a monthly basis.”

Laditan helped build out the platform’s marketing strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade.

Already, creators can monetize through brand deals and sponsorships. However, this has severe limitations. From Communiqué 16: How to think about Africa’s creator economy:

“Creators are only as relevant as the buzz they generate, and every serious creator knows they won’t be hot forever. Depending on brands for sponsorship deals also means creators have no ownership or equity. They are entirely at the mercy of the entities that pay them for promoting their products and services.”

This promise of financial reward beyond brand deals is how YouTube sets itself apart, at least for now. The platform’s monetization options through AdSense and its partner program, available in Nigeria since 2013, offer creators the chance to earn more consistently compared to other platforms, where direct monetization is more limited.

In 2023, for instance, Nigerian comedy content creator Mark Angel made $4.3 million in YouTube earnings alone, making him the third-highest-earning YouTuber in Africa. By contrast, Meta only announced in July that it had enabled monetization options for Nigerian and Ghanian creators. Not much has been heard about this since. TikTok, on the other hand, still does not have a direct monetization program for content creators in Africa.

3. For the love of freedom

Laditan believes that YouTube’s support of longer video formats gives creators more freedom to experiment with storytelling and character development in ways that other short-form video platforms do not.

With longer video formats, creators can develop their content beyond short skits. Rather than cramming several punchlines and jokes into an Instagram reel, YouTube videos allow content creators more time to set up scenarios and build suspense, creating new avenues for creative expression. For example, Justin Ug has been making Instagram skits about his secondary school experiences since 2018. In 2020, he developed the series into a short film on YouTube and is now planning to create a full-length TV series.

4. The connected TV trend

Connected TV refers to the practice of using TVs and streaming devices to access digital content at home. This trend enables viewers to stream movies, shows, and live events from platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube directly on their televisions instead of on mobile devices.

Smartphones remain a major tool for content consumption, but so are smart TVs. There’s been an upward tick in the number of people watching online videos on smart TVs, especially for longform content.

According to Laditan, “A lot more people are watching digital content on their TV screens. Even if you don’t have a smart TV—which a lot of homes are now getting—there are streaming adapters like the Chromecast or Airtel Smart TV. If creators want to tap into this new trend where living room content viewership is growing, [they] need to be thinking of YouTube as a platform for distribution.”

Unlike Instagram and TikTok, which are mostly mobile-oriented and favor short, vertical videos, YouTube’s streaming options are optimized for larger screens. Creators are taking advantage of this trend to reach a new category of viewers on their TV screens.

5. A nod to YouTube’s support system

Compared to other platforms, YouTube has cultivated a strong relationship with content creators on the continent. It has developed a support system with programs like the Black Voices Fund and YouTube Next Up, which provide analytics tools, training, and educational resources to help creators grow their channels.

“We started intentionally finding opportunities to engage with skit makers and filmmakers,” Laditan said. “We have all these skitmakers come into the office, where we do one-on-one sessions with them on their content strategy or the business of YouTube because it is a business. And what we then started doing was unlocking opportunities for them to find new audiences.” Other platforms are only just beginning to catch up, with Meta establishing its Creator Lab Live program in Nigeria last year.

This trend of content creators starting to create content for YouTube is also positioning them to reshape Nigeria’s traditional film industry. As creators gain skills in storytelling, character development, and production techniques to create long-form, high-engagement content on YouTube, they’re acquiring the very tools that drive the traditional film industry. This crossover potential allows them to produce content that resembles mainstream cinema or television, blurring the lines between skits and professional filmmaking.

It also reflects a shift in the psyche of the average creator, who is now becoming more business-minded, investing in higher production quality, and engaging storytelling. It shows a growing focus on professionalism, where creators are refining their production skills to meet higher audience expectations for long-form content on YouTube.

As a result, Nigeria’s content creation industry is maturing, encouraging more aspiring creators to view content creation as a viable career path and contributing to the country’s growing digital economy.

Not all creators turn out fine. Not all become successful. But as with many things in life, success often fuels the narratives of history and innovation. Few remember the failures. We canonise the success stories because they’re more attractive, but they lure us into confirmation bias.

This bias tilts our gaze towards the Mr Beasts and Sisi Yemmies of this world and makes us wonder, what if more people could be like them? We don’t ask ourselves enough, how many people can be like them? Do we have enough attention, the currency with which the creator economy is built, to go around? Can our finite collective bandwidth accommodate all that is possible to create?

These questions have interesting implications, some of which we will get to later. Chief among them is that we cannot effectively build longstanding structures for the Creator Economy if we don’t understand the possibilities and potential size of the market. And we can’t fully understand either until we consider the creator lifecycle.

Hugo Amsellem, a VP at Jellysmack, divides the creator lifecycle into four stages: Attention, Trust, Commerce, and Ownership.

At the Attention stage, the goal is to create content that reaches as many people as possible. Here, the creator is growing and renting their audience via their own channels (website, newsletter, community) or third-party channels (social media, video hosting platforms, etc.). The main ways to monetise at this phase are advertising, brand deals, and affiliate marketing.

In the next stage, Trust, the goal becomes owning and retaining the audience. This allows the creator to potentially monetise via memberships, patronage, and donations (I’d add subscriptions here, too). The next stage is Commerce, where the creator has built a trustworthy relationship and connection with their audience that allows them to sell physical or digital products. (At this stage, the creator is no longer just running a media entity but also an e-commerce firm.) The final stage in the lifecycle is ownership. Here, Amsellem says the goal is to share future financial upsides with their audience, including monetising through equity, stock options, and tokens. 

Amsellem’s examination of the creator economy leans toward video creators and already influential figures, as we can see in his examples, like Mr Beast, Kylie Jenner, Tim Ferris, and Portugal. The Man. While I don’t think this is the best lens through which to view the creator lifecycle – because it skews reality and shapes the narrative to favour the roars – it’s still useful for helping us think through this subject conceptually.

However, to see this more specifically, we need to consider the possible outcomes of creators’ careers and then use that to chart the course of their lifecycle. Once we do this, we get a sense of what anyone building for this industry needs to consider in the long term.

The creator lifecycle

For the sake of this conversation, we’re charting the course for a creator whose path to success is primarily content creation, not creators who were first influential or successful for other reasons and then leveraged that fame to build an adjacent career. This is also limited to creators whose mediums are primarily digital.

Phase 1: Inception

Every creator’s journey begins when they decide to test the waters. At this stage, they’re most concerned with figuring out what they want to create, what the audience likes, and how often they need to serve that audience. Most beginners never continue, or they start but can barely keep up. Eventually, they fall by the wayside.

For those with the fortitude to keep going, their focus is on getting the flywheel in motion. Their goal is to grow their audience and gain more traction and credibility. While some at this stage attempt to monetise and are lucky to, this is hardly their biggest concern.

Very few make it past Inception. They quickly discover that getting anything off the ground is challenging, especially in a world where everyone thinks they can do it.

If one million creators started this journey with us, only 100,000 make it past the first stage.

Phase 2: Growth

Now, the flywheel is in motion, and the creator’s work is gaining more traction. More people are noticing and supporting them. They finally have some credibility with their community.

This stage presents a different set of problems: audience retention (in addition to the constant need to grow) and monetisation. The better they get at growing and retaining their audience, the more likely they are to monetise.

Most creators remain stuck in this phase because they think it’s all there is. Some stay here for as long as possible because moving forward requires more than they’re willing to give. It also requires asking questions such as how long they want to be creators, how big they want to become, what the potential size of their market is, and how far they’re willing to go to break new ground.

Of the 100,000 creators who made it to this stage, 95,000 either remain here or fall off, and only 5,000 make it to the next stage.

Phase 3: Expansion

Creators who get to this point have grown and are making a significant income, but they have the urge to be bigger. They want to feel more secure. They’ve done well so far, but they realise they now need to bring more people into their process. Video creators will hire production assistants. Writers will hire researchers and junior writers. Podcasters will hire more writers and producers, and so on.

They have a new, unfamiliar set of problems: talent acquisition and human and financial resource management. They either become full-blown business managers or get some help. Then they have more people to worry about and, ideally, need help handling organisational functions like sales, accounting, HR management, etc.

Most of our 5,000 creators remain at this stage until they run out of gas, drop down the pecking order, are replaced by hotter prospects, or pivot into other career paths. For many, this is the final step in their career. For a select few, it is the penultimate.

Phase 4: Legacy

This is the final stage for creators, at least for those who choose to get here. They’ve entered wholly into celebrity (and, sometimes, cult following) status. They’ve gotten rich by leveraging their audience, but they know they won’t be hot forever, so they need to think beyond themselves.

Here, the focus is longevity. How can they achieve more (or more of the same) with less effort? How can they invest in projects outside the scope of what made them successful? How can they channel their fame into long-lasting wealth? How can they build considerable passive income?

This is when we start seeing creators launch venture capital firms, restaurants and hospitality brands, clothing and fashion lines, make-up brands, production companies, creative agencies, etc.

Of the one million creators who started this journey with us, only ten (or fewer) make it to this stage.

The implications

Now that we’ve examined the creator lifecycle, what are the implications? What does this mean for creators and the companies building for them?

1. Companies building for multiple phases of the creator lifecycle will win

Each phase of the creator lifecycle comes with different pain points, each pain point presents different economic opportunities, and all these opportunities hold a variety of potential returns on investment. 

Companies building for only one phase are more prone to market instabilities, all of which are determined by supply and demand. For example, because it has become easier to create content, there is minimal upside for products whose only function is helping creators produce content. Therefore, the hard work isn’t in creation. It’s in distribution and monetisation.

So, companies lowering the barriers to content creation must also think deeply about helping their creators distribute, grow their audience, and possibly monetise. This is why I’m a massive fan of Substack’s recommendation feature, Ghost’s variety of platform and community-building options, YouTube’s advertising revenue programme and network effects, Twitch’s platform and audience-building opportunities, and ConvertKit’s sponsorship programme. One can essentially build entire media companies on the infrastructure and mechanisms these platforms provide. They're all building to cover the first three phases of the lifecycle.

2. There are opportunities to help creators evolve, but…

Creators evolve when they outgrow one set of problems for another. Each new phase comes with different priorities.

A creator who needs to expand their operations isn’t in the same category as one who wants to grow their audience and monetise. One faces a functional capacity problem, while the other faces distribution and revenue problems.

The creator who has to worry primarily about operational expansion already generates more revenue than the creator who just wants to grow their audience and make money. Therefore, it makes economic sense for a company to focus more on the former than on the latter. However, is there a compelling case for any platform to devote its product development resources to this? I don’t believe so. The companies that identify and attempt to solve this problem do so by creating knowledge banks or capacity development programmes.

YouTube might not be able to help creators scout and hire new talent, but it can create programmes that give them the knowledge required to make those business decisions. ConvertKit might not be able to connect individual creators with potential sponsors, but it can create a sponsorship programme they can easily plug into. This particular point is why I understand Substack’s decision to scale back on its writer benefits, at least until they can be more favourable to its bottom line.

There are opportunities to help creators evolve, but those opportunities are sometimes unaligned with a platform’s core operations and business model. Still, not catering to those creator needs could lead to potentially losing them to direct or indirect competitors. It's client relations 101.

Conclusion

There are many more implications of thinking about the creator economy from the perspective of this lifecycle, and these are just a few.

What a creator needs at the beginning of their journey is hardly what they need in the latter stages. What they need three years into their career is probably not what they need by year seven. Understanding this influences how we account for the size, heterogeneity, and possibilities of the market we’re building for.

☝🏾 One more thing

I've published Communiqué at no cost for over two years now. In that time, it has grown to over 32,000 subscribers worldwide. The beauty of the newsletter is the quality of insight it provides, and I'd like to keep publishing it at this level. Your support makes that possible.

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My biggest fear launching this newsletter in April 2020 was how it would end. I’ve played out several scenarios in my head, often with a tinge of fear.

In one scenario, I’m many months into a premium model where everyone pays to read most of the essays, but I’m at my wit’s end. I’m jaded, and my brain is scorched as desert sand. Still, I can’t stop. I must keep going. I have an obligation to the people who pay me to churn out insights.

In another scenario, the newsletter remains “free”. I put free in air quotes because is anything ever really free? Every ten minutes someone stops to read the newsletter is ten minutes of their life they could’ve spent doing something else. That’s not “free”. Every edition of the newsletter I publish is at least ten hours of my life I could’ve spent doing something else. That’s not “free”. But for now, let’s stick with the word. In this scenario where the newsletter remains “free”, I’m a prisoner to the schedule. Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, it doesn’t matter. A schedule is a schedule, and it ruthlessly demands commitment.

In the third scenario, Communiqué evolves. What was once a newsletter grows into something bigger, something that requires more hands than I currently have. In this scenario, Communiqué exists in multiple forms – as a newsletter, videos, podcasts, illustrations, the whole gamut of content formats, most of which are produced by people not named David Adeleke. This is, perhaps, the likeliest outcome. But arriving at that point won’t be easy, and until then, there’s a cross to carry.

Creators and the cross of burnout

Like me, every creator fears the day their creative juices run out. One of my favourite examinations of creator burnout happens in this New York Times piece by Taylor Lorenz.

She opens with quotes that perfectly sum the conversation up: “I feel like I’m tapping a keg that’s been empty for a year,” says Canadian TikToker and model Jack Innanen. “I get to the point where I’m like, ‘I have to make a video today,’ and I spend the entire day dreading the process.”

Creator burnout is a problem that many don’t often admit publicly. In 2018, several major YouTubers became victims of burnout and had to step away from the platform for a while, primarily for mental health reasons. In 2016, PewDiePie briefly quit vlogging on YouTube for the same reason. The pressure to constantly create and put out content weighed heavily on him. He eventually returned, but still, his public admission of burnout was a landmark event.

Another TikToker, Zach Jelks, told The New York Times, “I do worry about my longevity on social media. People just throw one creator away because they’re tired of them.”

And I know a few creators in my circle who’ve had to give up what they love doing so much or at least are on the edge of giving up because their tank is empty.

Why do creators burn out?

Creator burnout is the flip side of the Internet’s coin. On one side is the abundance of opportunities that the Internet’s borderlessness creates. On the other side is the insatiable appetite for content that comes with this absence of borders.

In 2020, YouTube saw a 43% surge in video consumption on its platform. The numbers have risen steadily, on mobile especially, in recent years. This consistent demand for content, coupled with the transience of attention, puts creators under pressure to produce constantly. As Olga Kay famously told Fast Company in 2014, “If you slow down, you might disappear.” And many have, for better or worse.

Furthermore, because creators often have to keep producing content to earn income from their work (that is if they want to be successful), this could lead to anxiety over income sustainability, which could very well result in burnout.

The obvious solution is for creators to either reduce the frequency with which they publish or outsource some of the work to capable hands. Still, if, as a creator, you reduce how often you put out content, your audience size will likely drop, and so will your income. The alternative, which is to outsource some of the work, also requires money. How can you make more money if you aren’t producing as much? Or, framed another way, how can you make more money without needing to tie yourself to producing so much that your creative juices run out?

Ideas for dealing with burnout

I’m not quite sure if we can ever eliminate burnout. But I think we can handle it better. I think we can set up structures and roadmaps that help us chart the course for a sustainable creator economy where we’re less prone to burnout.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Income diversification

I think this is the lowest-hanging fruit and perhaps the most popular option. We’ve already seen it play out as more creators explore social commerce, merchandising, consulting, paid communities and events, etc. Any option beyond sponsorship deals and subscriptions is worth considering.

2. Ownership and equity

Much like athletes, musicians, and actors, there’s not a single creator who will be hot forever. Therefore, it’s sensible for us to think about ways to formalise and standardise our practice to the point where we can either transition into investors or, instead of always taking fees and commissions, request some slice of ownership from the brands that approach us for deals. This is particularly important for African creators who have built large followings.

Studying global marketing trends will help us understand that we’re at a tipping point in history where influencers (and creators) are becoming essential cogs in the engine of brand marketing. So, it might be a good idea to ask brands for stock options instead of simply accepting cash all the time.

3. Creators as investors

In 2020, Harry Stebbings, host of The Twenty Minute VC podcast, launched a micro fund for $8.3 million in what is one of the most popular creator-to-investor transitions globally. Earlier this year, Stebbings raised an additional $140 million. While there is no guarantee that his skills as a podcaster will serve him well as an investor, his transition does point out what is possible.

Creating content and making money from it doesn’t preclude you from leveraging your network and using that to build a more sustainable financial future for yourself. There are many more examples of creators becoming investors, and we will likely see more in the near future. I’d particularly like to see more examples in Africa. Beyond investing as a venture capitalist, you can become a talent scout for more creators, provide them with seed funding, and earmark a portion of their revenue as your return on investment.

4. Intellectual property commercialisation

Data will increasingly influence the movies and TV shows of the future. (It already does now, but even more so in the coming years.) Right now, this plays out in the form of studio remakes and influencer-driven casts. But I imagine there will be a time soon where movie studios will resort to taking skits and creator ideas and building bigger storylines around them. Or perhaps a time when we see podcasts and newsletters grow into larger experiential concepts than their initial artform. Before that time comes, however, creators (again, particularly those in Africa) need to invest more in intellectual property protection. As Western corporations have shown us, nothing is too ridiculous or insignificant to copyright.

5. Non-Fungible Tokens

There’s no better time in history to be a creator than now, especially if you live in an emerging economy. You’re no longer bound by geography and the stringent economic realities of your market. We’ve recently seen African digital artists make thousands of dollars by listing their art as NFTs (examples here and here). But digital paintings and images aren’t the only things that can be minted as NFTs, articles can be too. This opens up a new world of opportunities that scarcely existed on such a massive scale before. To understand what NFTs are and why they’re so revolutionary, start with this explainer.

Final notes

I don’t intend to shut down this newsletter anytime soon. But I’m seriously thinking about its sustainability. For something that relies heavily on the quality of insight, I plan to spend the next few weeks trying to answer some of these questions: How do I keep up Communiqué + my day job without burning out? How do I preserve the essence of this publication so I can continue serving you to the best of my ability, even if it means shedding most of the load? Thankfully, this process will become easier with Substack’s help through its Grow Fellowship, which I’m a part of.

As 2021 winds down, allow me to ask you for a favour, please. Reach out to all the creators that have made your year worth it. Send them “Thank You” notes. Send them kind and gentle messages of encouragement. And if possible, buy them gifts.

Being a creator is hard, even if it doesn’t always look like it, but it’s worth it when the people we create for appreciate us for what we do.

Thank you, and see you in 2022!

It’s May 2021. I’m watching a gadget review video on Marques Brownlee’s YouTube channel, MKBHD, when I notice an icon beside the “Subscribe” button. It reads “Join”. Curious, I click.

Up pops a window asking me to “join this channel” and “get access to membership perks”. One of those perks is access to behind-the-scenes content from one of the most excellent YouTube channels. MKBHD has accumulated a massive audience, so I imagine many of his 14.8 million subscribers will be interested. Just not me.

MKBHD already makes money through YouTube ads, affiliate marketing, brand sponsorships, and selling merchandise. This membership feature is another way for him to monetise his channel. If 1% of his subscribers sign up, he’ll generate additional monthly revenue of nearly $200,000. Even if only 0.5% sign up, that’s close to $100,000 a month. But MKBHD is unique because most YouTubers won’t make nearly as much from all their income sources combined.

Yet, YouTube is one of the more generous platforms for creators. It gives them 55% of revenue from ads placed in their videos through Google AdSense and has paid out $30 billion in the last three years. In May 2021, it announced a $100 million creator fund for YouTube Shorts, its Tik Tok rival feature.

But as generous as YouTube is, it’s still not the most lucrative income source for African creators, many of whom cannot subsist on ad revenue from their videos alone. They have to depend on brands for sponsorship and advertising deals or funnel their audience into other businesses.

Unequal outcomes

One of the most significant determinants of YouTube ad revenue is the country where the audience is from. As Nigerian YouTuber Tayo Aina explains, if you make a travel video where most of the audience is in the US, you’d generate far more income than if most of the audience is in Nigeria.

In theory, the Internet gives us access to a global audience. In reality, this isn’t always the case. More often than not, for African YouTubers (and creators), their content will mostly be consumed by a local audience. That means they can’t generate as much as they’d like from ad revenue because of their audience’s location. It also means they’ll need to amass large followings before brands even consider them for partnerships.

This over-reliance on brands for money got me thinking about the evolution of the creator economy in Africa. (The creator economy is an ecosystem of writers, videographers, social media influencers, gamers, podcasters, skit makers, etc., and the software tools and platforms that enable them to build an audience and potentially make money.)

The conversation about this ecosystem is happening worldwide, but there’s a conspicuous omission of its formulation in emerging markets. Despite its global implications, the conversations are louder in some regions than in others.

We’ve seen this happen before. It happened with the creation, evolution, and monetisation of mass media. It happened with the creation, evolution, and monetisation of the Internet. It’s happening with the creation, evolution, and monetisation of social media and creator platforms. It doesn’t have to continue.

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Africa is an afterthought in conversations about the creator economy

In this essay about the Latin American creator economy, Julio Vasconcellos, managing partner at Atlantico, a Latin America-focused VC fund, writes that independent creators and influencers have become a force in the region. But it’s still tough for them to translate their social capital into cash. He references a survey of more than 5,000 creators in Brazil, which showed that half of them made less than $100 per month, and nearly 25% of them didn’t monetise at all.

This assessment sounds somewhat similar to the plight of creators on this side of the world. But while there is already a sizeable amount of successful creators (YouTubers, online comedians, beauty vloggers, etc., who make money from their craft), there is no systematic path to success.

Still, the creator economy, already worth over $100 billion, is taking off globally. But it seems like Africa is an afterthought in formulating the frameworks for thinking about it.

There are extensive conversations around monetising and standardising the business ecosystem for creators. But these conversations happen predominantly in the West.

If these critical conversations happen predominantly in the West, it follows that innovation will mainly happen there. As with many other things, the products of that innovation will eventually trickle down to this part of the world. But by then, the ideas and solutions will account primarily for Western cultural and economic contexts while excluding the nuances of being a creator elsewhere.

The challenges of being a creator in Africa

Let’s use Substack as an example. I’ve been publishing on this platform for a year and a half now and have made no money from it. But assuming I wanted to monetise this newsletter, I’ll face two problems.

The first is payment-related. Substack is a universal platform, but its payment processor, Stripe, isn’t available in Nigeria (yet). Even if I wanted to accept payments from my subscribers right now, I wouldn’t be able to. I’d have to get an American bank account as Joey Akan, publisher of Afrobeats Intelligence, did.

Payment is essentially a regional play, and it’s difficult to build a universal solution because government regulations can be restrictive. (Crypto solves this problem, but that is a conversation for another day.)

The second problem is that of economic reality. As I explain in ‘The subscription playbook’, “By asking your audience to pay for content, you are competing with the necessities of life – food, shelter, health, leisure, etc. It’s tough when most people don’t have substantial disposable income. What’s more? The number of people who do is paltry.”

So, while Substack solves my publishing and distribution problems, it poses a different challenge once monetisation comes up. The same goes for millions of other African creators. Creating and distributing content is easy. Monetisation is hard.

Furthermore, because disposable income is low in many African countries, it is difficult for creators to directly make money from their audience.

For this reason, they have to depend on brands for advertising and sponsorship deals. This is not necessarily bad, but it is fragile. Creators are only as relevant as the buzz they generate, and every serious creator knows they won’t be hot forever. Depending on brands for sponsorship deals also means creators have no ownership or equity. They are entirely at the mercy of the entities that pay them for promoting their products and services.

In summary:

1. Monetising content as an African creator is hard, partly because several payment-related problems exist.

2. It's also hard because disposable income is low in many African countries. This makes it difficult for creators to monetise their audience directly.

3. Creators have to depend on brands for advertising and sponsorship deals. This option is fragile because it means they have no equity and their income is tied directly to their output, putting them at the mercy of the entities that pay them.

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Local solutions to local problems

To open up Africa’s creator economy, we must expand the pool of financial resources and empower creators to think more strategically and deliberately about their business. We must make it easier for them to make money and for people to invest in the creators they care about.

But how do we do that?

1. Fix the payment problem.

According to Paystack’s Storefront data, in the first half of 2021, eight out of the top 20 bestsellers on the platform were digital products or professional services and courses. Also, 10% of the 100 bestselling merchants on the Nigerian Storefront were consultants or content creators who sold digital products.

This is just one use case out of many which prove that fixing payment problems opens the gateway to infinite opportunities. In this case, it provides a platform for creators to layer several things on.

Think about how Paystack now helps local merchants to collect payments from Apple Pay users. Or how Flutterwave helps African merchants collect and send money through Paypal. Creating local solutions like these connects us with global opportunities that make it easier for African creators to make money from their work. It also encourages global platforms to partner with proven local players.

In 2020, fintech funding in Africa crossed the $1.3 billion mark. Some argue that the market for fintech startups is oversaturated. Others say that we need even more funding to solve all payment-related problems. I fall in the latter category. There are gaps for local and niche payment solutions that will ultimately be consolidated as the market expands.

2. Build more creator-friendly commerce infrastructure.

One of the things I talk about in ‘The subscription playbook’ is that content is not enough. Africa is a heavily utilitarian market, which means most people are more concerned about the benefits that come with paying for something than they are with the intrinsic value of that thing.

Most creators won’t make money purely from their content. They will need to integrate other benefits or businesses. An example is South African fashion content creator Lesego Legobane (also known as Thick Leeyonce). Legobane creates content to promote body positivity and has a large following online, which she then channels into her fashion line, LeeBex.

Creating content and running a business require different kinds of expertise. Therefore, there is room for platforms that take most of the burden of commerce off the creator’s shoulders. Selar and Africreators solve a part of this problem by building platforms for creators to sell digital and physical products, but there can be more.

Expense tracking, process automation, and logistics are all hurdles that need crossing. Currently, there are primarily fragmented solutions, but perhaps there is a gap for an aggregator.

3. Standardise the creator economy.

The next step is standardisation, and this requires us to think of creator ventures as actual enterprises, not hobbies. Creators should be able to track every part of their business, from cash flow to analytics, logistics, human resource management, and order fulfilment.

This opens up them to new opportunities. It makes it easier for investors and funds who might be interested in certain creators to be able to track or forecast their return on investment. We’ve seen how much more money is coming into the ecosystem and how willing people are to invest in the best creators.

Standardising the ecosystem also requires creating or amplifying specialised knowledge that helps creators better understand the demands and complexities of running a business and optimising operations. All these make them more attractive to investors.

4. Create access to credit facilities and funding.

Imagine if African creators had access to a fund or unique loan facility that could allow them to build extra layers of business operations on their creative abilities and audience. Imagine if venture funds could incubate creators how record labels incubate musicians (under less draconian conditions, of course). There are many ways to think about this, but all the most viable ideas require a standardised creator ecosystem.

5. Explore social tokens.

I currently work with the African Tech Roundup, a tech analysis platform, and one of the ways we’re thinking about community building is through social tokens. We’re launching the $ATRU token to reward our most active and engaged community members with exclusive benefits.

There are several other use cases for social tokens. But at their core, social tokens are a way to reward creators directly for their work and strengthen their connection with their audience, making it easier for people to put their money where their mouth is.

In conclusion

There are many other ways to think about the creator economy in Africa. We must begin to have these conversations more openly and loudly. My goal here is not to be definitive but to highlight where the opportunities exist and offer perspective into a movement that is still nascent before it grows too big and leaves us behind.

PS: A big thank you to Fu’ad Lawal and Ope Adedeji for helping me edit and refine this essay.

Despite being around for more than 20 years, podcasts have still not caught on in Africa. The industry is worth more than $11 billion (up from $9.28 billion in 2019), but that value is concentrated in the US and North America. This is unsurprising; podcasting kicked off in that part of the world in the early 2000s and has seen heavy investment. Significant innovation around content, monetisation, and technology have also contributed to its growth.

In the last decade, podcasts and podcast production have experienced a growing interest in Africa. These podcasts are often inspired by successful shows in the West and adapted for the local audience based on the host’s interests and/or profession. In South Africa, there’s Alibi, the investigative journalism series, and the African Tech Roundup, among others. In Zambia, we have Leading Ladies, an animated podcast series dedicated to women in the country’s history. In Kenya, there’s Cut the Foreplay, a comedy series; Legally Clueless, which is focused on the presenter, Adelle Onyango’s journey as an African woman; and Surviving Nairobi, a podcast based on the lives of its hosts, DJ IV and Hafare. Then there’s Ugandan radio and TV presenter Lee Kasumba’s Africa State of Mind (also defunct).

But despite the moderate success of some of these shows, anecdotal evidence suggests podcasting is still far from popular in Africa. Why?

According to Abe Adeile and Osagie Alonge, both involved in making the famous Loose Talk Podcast and are now co-founders of Visual Audio Times, a podcast network and production company in Lagos, Nigeria, podcasting’s biggest hurdle in Africa is inadequate infrastructure. Unlike radio which is cheap and requires no extra cost to access, podcasts need additional data and specific phone features that many Africans cannot afford.

Alonge parallels podcasting with music streaming:

“It costs you N900 to pay for Spotify or Apple Music for a month. But it’s probably going to cost you two or three times that amount to stream from those platforms because you have to buy data, and data is expensive. That’s why [many] people will not download Spotify because they can’t keep streaming repeatedly. You can always bring up the option of downloading. But then you have to address the questions: “What kind of phone do I have? How much space do I have on my phone?”

Justin Norman, producer and host of The Flip, a podcast that explores "contextually relevant insights" from entrepreneurs in Africa, echoes Alonge’s views. He says:

“If we’re talking about a mass-market African consumer, listening to a podcast takes a lot of data. So it might not be the best means of distribution in comparison with radio or something text-based.”

So, podcasters in Africa have to deal with the high cost of data and inadequate phone features. These challenges affect distribution. But there’s more. Podcasts also have to compete with more accessible media and formats. Most people who listen to podcasts do so on their phones. But if you observe phone usage data, you’ll likely find that people spend most of their time on social media and messaging apps. They interact with videos, images, and short-form text on these social media and messaging apps more than any other format.

I’ll use myself as an example. Here’s what my screen time looks like:

Nevertheless, it’s still worth asking if there are ways around these challenges for the sake of the opportunities that podcasting presents. Think about it:

• The industry is already worth more than $11 billion and is expected to cross $60 billion by 2027. That value will end up somewhere. Some of it might as well come to Africa.

• Massive investments have gone into podcasting in recent years. Since 2015, we’ve seen huge acquisitions and licensing deals. As I mentioned in the previous edition of Communique, Spotify spent $600 million on podcast-related investments between February 2019 and 2020 alone.

• Podcasts present a chance to tell important stories at a fraction of the cost. It costs less to record a podcast than to produce a movie, video documentary, or even publish a book.

• If a podcast is thriving and has a large audience, it can be adapted into other formats. Aaron Mahnke’s ‘Lore’ is a classic example. He struggled to sell his books, so he recorded a podcast telling historical tales of the dead. They were low-budget productions that attracted 5 million listeners per month. The podcast was eventually adapted into a TV series. Of course, this is just one example, but it embodies what could be.

• Finally, the future of audio is on-demand, and podcasting is currently the most popular form. Even if podcasting is not the future itself, it plays a significant role in how we get there.

Writing about Spotify’s entry into Africa, I suggested that we focus instead on its overall gameplan:

“If you think about Spotify purely as a music streaming service, I can excuse you for failing to see why its entry into the market is a big deal… But this goes past just another music streaming platform entering into the market. Spotify’s real gameplan is owning your passive media experience via audio. It is gunning for the whole nine yards—music, podcasts, audio advertising, audiobooks, and whatever else technology can conjure.”

In the past, it was harder to discover podcasts if you weren’t already a consumer because podcast apps were standalone. More people listen to music than podcasts, and to do this, they often have to use separate apps. Spotify has blurred the line between what people love listening to and what they can be listening to. Now, you have podcasts and music on the same platform, and that significantly increases discoverability. YouTube does the same for video podcasts.

So, knowing all this, we have to explore realistic ways to grow the podcasting audience in Africa. And the foundation of this is to understand user behaviour better.

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A trip back in time

It’s 2017 (or 2016, I forget which exactly). I’m sitting in a danfo. Beside me is a man with the base of his phone to his ear. He’s been listening to something for over 10 minutes now. If I pay closer attention, I might hear every word, but I don’t. I only hear enough to recognise what it is — a voice note. Not just any voice note; it’s a type I’m all too familiar with and have grown to hate. My parents send it to me occasionally. Yours probably do, too.

I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten voice notes from my mother warning about impending doom. This is how it happens: someone creates these lengthy recordings saying something controversial and distributes them through the WhatsApp groups our parents belong to. Our parents, thinking they have stumbled on something prophetic or some secret information the powers that be are hiding from us, forward it to as many people as they can. Unfortunately, we are on their contact lists, so we suffer the ignominy of getting these funny messages. Unless, of course, we dare to block them. We don’t have the audacity, though, do we?

Anyway, sitting beside this man for the duration of our very uncomfortable trip, I am fascinated by how at ease he seems with what he is doing. Beyond my fascination, though, I don’t think too much of it. However, years later, as I research more about how to scale and monetise different content types, my mind goes back to that day. Seeing that man so conveniently listening to a voice note the length of a podcast episode in a crowded bus prompts me to look closer at how user behaviour should influence content creation and distribution.

How to scale podcasts in Africa: Meet people where they are

Looking at the challenges podcasting faces is essential, but they don’t tell the whole story. They don’t explain why the man sitting beside me on the bus that day was so comfortable listening to what is essentially a podcast episode on WhatsApp. They don’t explain why so many Africans stream/download church sermons, which also are essentially podcast episodes. Podcasting’s limitations in Africa go beyond just the infrastructural deficit.

If people already spend most of their screen time on social media and instant messaging, then podcasters need to do a better job of meeting people where they are instead of just creating for their podcast platforms. Writers and video creators do this well. They make their videos and publish their articles on native platforms, but they know that isn’t enough. They have to share their content on social media, where most of their audience spends their time. This is not all, though. The most successful writers and video creators also know to adapt their content per platform and create conversations around that content or insert it into relevant conversations.

I’m not just talking about sharing links to your podcast on social media but also adapting it to each platform to optimise distribution. This plays out in the following ways:

• Create visual snippets of your podcast and include subtitles in the video. (Here is an example from The Economist.)

• Create WhatsApp or instant messaging groups around your podcast and share short audio clips as voice notes (much like our parents already do). This works perfectly if you already have a sizable audience. (An example is Uk’shona Kwelanga, a South African drama series shared exclusively via WhatsApp.)

• Build a newsletter community around your podcast. Newsletters are one of the easiest ways to engage directly with your audience, especially when you send show notes in the email so people can quickly see what each episode is about before deciding if/when to listen.

However, all of these must lead back to your primary content, the podcast, and a platform you own. Your social media audience is not yours, it belongs to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., and anything can happen to your account at any time. But if you own the platform and your database, the odds are in your favour.

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Radio’s secret sauce: content and engagement

Podcasting can learn from radio’s success. It’s the most popular medium in Africa now, but it was not always the primary way humans consumed audio. In the 1880s, people listened to the news, music, weather reports, etc., via telephones. Radio transmission began in 1906, and the first radio station started broadcasting ten years later. The first recording of a radio broadcast in Africa was in South Africa in 1923 — Felix Mendelssohn's ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ (On Wings of Song). Since then, the medium has adapted to meet the needs of mass audiences in Africa.

Over the years, radio became the most significant medium in this part of the world for the following reasons:

1. The barrier to entry is low. As I mentioned earlier, radios are cheap and require no additional cost for access. Once you buy a radio set, you don’t need to spend anything extra to listen to broadcasts with it. This enables the high level of distribution and deep penetration that no other medium has.

2. Radio stations (and presenters) have figured out how best to engage their audiences. Through local language broadcasting, which breaks down linguistic barriers, and community programming, which covers issues that hit close to home, radio offers a particular type of content that people can’t get anywhere else. This makes it so personable that audiences tune in and feel like their radio station “gets” them.

3. Finally, because radio stations are so connected to their audience and the grassroots, they know the importance of creating programmes that resonate with people. For example, radio dramas that discuss community-related issues are a big hit and help deliver important messages in engaging ways.

How do we adapt these factors to podcasting in Africa?

1. Look away from the West and focus instead on what your people want. Many of the early podcast creators in Africa were either inspired by Western content or the success of certain podcast types and formats in the West. This is understandable. But learning from radio’s success demands that we instead look closer to home. We must understand what our people are already listening to and build on that. Perhaps podcasting in local languages may not be the way to go, but creating content relevant to people’s quotidian activities and hits close to home will be far more effective.

2. Build on successful radio programmes. We can build on successful radio programmes with massive local audiences by turning them into podcasts and directing people to listen to those podcasts. Nigeria Info FM does this well by converting some of its most successful talk shows into podcasts that people can listen to on its website.

3. Make possible through podcasting the things that are impossible with film. According to the veteran broadcaster Lindsay Barrett, in the years after Nigeria’s independence, radio dramas were considered an “innovative and exciting medium of creative expression”. But their popularity has waned because they’re capital intensive. Despite their cost, they were cheaper to make than films, and they told the same kinds of stories. With podcasting, they can regain their social status (this time as audio dramas) and share with the world the African stories that we have for so long desired to tell.

Finally, do podcasts really need to scale in Africa?

I can’t shake this question off my mind: do podcasts really need to scale? Are they that important?

The answer is complicated. Podcasts are a way to broadcast on-demand audio, which is what is really important here. The world is moving away from linear programming to on-demand content, and podcasting is one way that is happening. Africans may not listen to podcasts often yet, but, as we already established, they listen to on-demand audio. (Remember that man sitting beside me on the bus? Yes, he is a sample size of one, but he represents the majority.)

On-demand audio is the future, and the earlier we begin to build towards that future (with deliberate investments into content distribution, Internet infrastructure, and understanding user behaviour), the better. If podcasting is how on-demand audio will scale, then we have to pay more attention to it. But if it isn't, if other channels align more with preexisting behaviour, we should pay closer attention to them.

Remember: radio was not always the primary way we consumed audio content. It will not always be the primary way we consume audio content. The future may seem far off, but it really is closer than we think, and we must be ready for it.

PS: I’d like to thank the people who helped make this essay what it is. Thank you to Akachi Ogbonna, Hassan Yahaya, Fu’ad Lawal, and Ope Adedeji for helping me edit and strengthen my points.

Thank you to Osagie Alonge, Abe Adeile, and Justin Norman for lending their expertise and sharing their experience with me.

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