1. A hidden gem

Over the weekend, I saw a stage play with a twist. The storyline was simple: a wealthy merchant must decide who inherits his business empire. Rather than choose between his two sons, he gives them a challenge. Somewhere in the ‘Valley of Hidden Treasures’ lies a fortune lost over two decades ago. The son who finds it first will inherit the business. But this is not your typical tale of sibling rivalry.

What follows is a live musical performance that collapses the distance between the audience and the stage. It unfolds inside a converted film studio in Ikeja, Lagos, reimagined as a rocky valley, where water cascades down artificial stone walls and wind-blown leaves sweep across the auditorium. The audience does not sit still or stay silent. At key moments, they strike predetermined notes on xylophones to move the story forward. They haggle in a live marketplace, trading with gold pouches purchased with real cash. They pick sides and influence outcomes. By the end of the show, one lucky audience member walks away with an actual treasure.

This is Valley of Hidden Treasures, the latest production from Immersia, Anthill Studios’ ambitious bet on immersive storytelling. Through Immersia, one of Nollywood’s most important production houses is experimenting with live entertainment, a wager that, beyond traditional film, it can build a business on live experiences that audiences engage with and pay for repeatedly.

2. Roots

Driving this experiment is Niyi Akinmolayan, one of Nollywood’s most commercially successful directors and the creative force behind some of Nigeria’s most recognisable films, including Prophetess, The Wedding Party 2, Lisabi: The Uprising, and Chief Daddy. When Amazon’s Prime Video launched in Nigeria in 2022, Anthill Studios, Akinmolayan’s production house, was among the first to strike a licensing deal with the streamer.

But somewhere between streaming deals and box office returns, Akinmolayan grew restless. The mechanics of traditional filmmaking; producing a story, distributing it, and with the advent of streaming, watching audiences consume it passively on mobile phones, began to feel insufficient. “Most of the storytelling we do currently, whether it’s in cinema or TV or the stuff you watch on your phone, is very one-dimensional,” Akinmolayan said to Communiqué.

That dissatisfaction sent him back to the roots of African storytelling. Long before cinema, storytelling here was communal, participatory, and immersive. “We’ve always been people who tell stories under a giant tree where everyone listening has to sing along and participate and play instruments,” he said. “I’ve always believed that an interactive form of entertainment is uniquely African.”

At the same time, he saw what he took to be a craft problem emerging in Nigerian theatre. Productions were becoming increasingly minimal, reduced to a screen, a chair, and a table, while audiences were still expected to pay a premium. He felt the artistry was suffering as a result. The solution, as he conceived it, would need to do two things simultaneously: honour the participatory traditions of African storytelling and raise the production bar high enough that audiences felt they were receiving genuine value. Immersia was his answer.

The idea began to take shape in January 2025, but it wasn’t until September that Akinmolayan developed detailed concept notes, production designs, and a creative framework for the first show. The debut production, The Forest of Talking Drums, opened in December 2025 with modest expectations. The team initially planned for 20 shows, but demand pushed that number to 28, with 26 of them selling out completely. Over a 14-day run (two shows per day), Immersia sold 4,634 tickets, generating about ₦75 million ($54,150) in revenue against production costs of ₦50 million ($36,000). That is ₦25 million in pure profit. More telling than the numbers was the audience behaviour. Guests returned with friends, parents, and colleagues to relive the experience.

3. The Cirque du Soleil playbook

The business of live, immersive entertainment has produced some of the most durable and lucrative franchises in the global entertainment industry. Their trajectories offer a blueprint for what Anthill Studios is attempting to build with Immersia.

The most visible example is Disney Experiences, the theme park and live entertainment division of The Walt Disney Company, which generated over $10 billion in revenue in 2025. Its consistent growth over the last few years helped its head, Josh D’Amaro, claim the coveted CEO role of the larger Disney group, succeeding Bob Iger. It was a signal of how central live experiences have become to the company’s long-term strategy. But Disney’s model comes with a built-in advantage: it draws from a century’s worth of beloved characters and stories.

A more instructive comparison is the Canadian circus company, Cirque du Soleil. Unlike Disney, Cirque built its entire business without preexisting IP, instead creating a new category of entertainment defined by spectacle.

Founded in Quebec in 1984 by a group of street performers, Cirque spent its early years touring with distinctive shows that blended acrobatics, theatre, and music. By the late 1980s, the company had generated enough attention to attract Las Vegas casino operators. Those relationships proved transformative.

Cirque’s arrival in Las Vegas helped reposition the city from solely a gambling den into a destination for premium live entertainment. In 1993, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté partnered with casino magnate Steve Wynn to create Mystère, a permanent show at The Mirage. Five years later, another show, La Nouba, opened at Disney World in Orlando. The shift from touring productions to permanent residencies transformed Cirque from a travelling act into a scalable business with predictable revenues and long-term venue partnerships.

International expansion followed into Europe and Asia, and by 2023, Cirque du Soleil sold 10 million tickets across 40 shows worldwide, effectively making a comeback after the COVID-19 pandemic nearly shuttered the business for good.

4. Immersia’s endgame

This is the trajectory Immersia is trying to replicate, but with a uniquely African flavour. However, the path to building a sustainable business runs through uncomfortable terrain.

The most immediate challenge is structural. Nigeria’s live entertainment industry is, by and large, a seasonal business. The Detty December period—when the Nigerian diaspora returns en masse, with discretionary spending spikes, and the country briefly transforming into one of the world’s most concentrated entertainment markets—accounts for a disproportionate share of annual ticket revenue.

Immersia’s Forest of Talking Drums benefited directly from this dynamic. For many attendees, it offered a compelling alternative to the overpriced Afrobeats concerts that dominated the December calendar. The timing was as much a strategic advantage as the product itself.

Outside that window, however, the calculus changes. Valley of Hidden Treasures, which opened in March, sold less than 50% of available tickets on its opening weekend, a significant drop from the frenzy of December. Ticket sales have since picked up. The numbers do not necessarily indicate a flawed product, but they do raise a pointed question: can Immersia build a year-round audience, or is it, for now, a December phenomenon with premium production values?

Answering that question will require Akinmolayan to think less like a filmmaker and more like an entertainment executive building a scalable business, and to develop a multi-pronged monetisation strategy.

The first lever is touring. Rather than anchoring every production to a single Lagos venue, Immersia could take its shows on the road—to Abuja, Port Harcourt, Johannesburg, and Accra—reaching new audiences. Touring also smooths the seasonal revenue problem by distributing shows across the calendar year.

The second lever is corporate and private performances. Nigeria’s corporate entertainment market is chronically underserved. Companies spending millions on end-of-year parties and client events represent a natural audience for bespoke Immersia experiences—productions that could be customised around a brand’s identity while retaining the core immersive format.

The third lever is residencies. Permanent or semi-permanent venues in high-footfall locations, potentially including partnerships with institutions such as the National Theatre and European embassies across the continent, could give Immersia a predictable revenue base.

The fourth, and perhaps most underestimated, lever is merchandising. When The Forest of Talking Drums closed in December, audiences did not just leave with memories; they also tried to take with them the drums they had been given as props to participate in the show. The instinct to possess a piece of the experience is a powerful commercial signal. A deliberate merchandise strategy, built around each production’s signature instruments and artefacts, could add another meaningful and recurring revenue stream.

Immersia is still early—just two productions in. But it has proven that there is demand for a different kind of entertainment. That said, demand alone does not build a business. The harder task is turning that demand into a system: repeatable productions, predictable revenues, and an audience that shows up beyond the seasonal spikes of December.

That transition will define whether Immersia remains an interesting experiment or becomes something more durable. Because what Anthill is attempting is not just to stage better shows, but to build an entirely new model for live entertainment. If it works, the implications would be far-reaching for Africa’s creative economy.

1. Flipping the year-end playbook

At the end of every year, most media platforms begin a familiar dance. They publish lists: best this of the year, most popular that of the year. These lists are editorial rituals designed to celebrate achievement, measure impact, and, in some cases, shape legacy. The format is predictable, almost ceremonial: a neat packaging of the past twelve months into digestible rankings of success.

But GST (pronounced ‘gist’) decided to do something different. At the end of 2025, the politics and civic engagement media platform released its “Worst Nigerians of the Year” ranking, an unflattering roll call that has become an annual tradition since its 2024 debut. The first edition focused largely on politicians and public office holders, including President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and former Inspector General of Police Kayode Egbetokun, reflecting the platform’s emphasis on governance and accountability.

But in 2025, the list evolved. It became broader, more culturally attuned, and arguably more provocative. Alongside political figures were names drawn from Nigeria’s entertainment and digital public sphere, among them Grammy Award-winning artist Burna Boy, cited for “assaulting a fan”, and social commentator Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan, criticised for his style of activism that “thrives on drama, visibility and opportunism rather than principle”. The Worst Nigerians list was controversial by design. But more importantly, it was instructive. And this is the essence of GST: an attempt to reimagine what media can do for young Nigerians, not just to inform or entertain, but to call out, mobilise, drive policy change, and shape public behaviour in real time.

2. Making politics cool again

If GST feels like a response to something broken, it is because it is. The 2015 general elections marked a turning point in Nigeria’s civic life. For perhaps the first time in decades, a large base of young Nigerians became politically engaged, mobilised by the promise of change and the possibility of unseating an incumbent government. The eventual victory of the opposition felt like proof that civic participation could translate into real outcomes. But the years that followed told a different story.

As the promised transformation failed to materialise, that early enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment. By 2017, a growing sense of apathy had set in, particularly among young people who had once been at the forefront of political conversations. Organisations like Yiaga Africa, trying to fix the problem, launched campaigns such as Not Too Young To Run, pushing for structural reforms to lower the age barrier to political participation and encourage younger candidates to contest for office. But Adewunmi Emoruwa, CEO and founder of Gatefield, approached the problem from a different angle. He asked: “What would it take to get young people to care again?” His answer was a media platform.

“We were going to try and make sure that the news is delivered in a very clear way using content creator approaches, tools from advertising and marketing, and behavioural science, to make politics really cool for people to follow,” Emoruwa said to Communiqué.

In 2017, GST began as Gatefield TV, a pop culture-focused YouTube channel with a sprinkle of politics. Its thesis was that politics could be made more engaging if embedded in the language of pop culture. The format leaned heavily on creator-style content: conversations, lifestyle segments, and social commentary. It worked, just not in the way they expected. Audiences came for the culture, but not necessarily for the politics. Over time, it became clear that the model risked drifting into the very thing it was trying to avoid: another lifestyle media brand competing for attention in an already crowded space. So Gatefield pulled back.

At the same time, the Nigerian media space was growing more repressive. Newsrooms were increasingly entangled with corporate and political interests, shaping not just what was reported, but how it was framed. For journalists who resisted, the consequences could be severe, ranging from imprisonment to harassment.

Gatefield had, up until that point, maintained an investigative journalism fund to support reporters carrying out accountability-driven work. But in 2020, during the End SARS protests, the Federal Government froze the fund. It was a pivotal moment. What had been a structural challenge became an existential one. For Emoruwa and his team at Gatefield, the implication was clear: if independent journalism could be constrained so directly, then relying solely on existing media institutions was no longer viable. They would have to build something they could control, both in philosophy and in execution.

“We said if every other organisation will be controlled, then we probably need to invest in the ecosystem of independent journalism, and then, secondly, we need to invest in something that we have control over; this platform will not be for sale to private or government actors,” Emoruwa said.

As a result, GST does not accept advertisements; its funding has come primarily from a grant by the National Endowment for Democracy, but in recent months, it has launched a crowdfunding campaign.

3. Building an advocacy media platform

The new GST was launched in 2022. This time, it returned to its politics and civic engagement roots. Instead of building around a central website as a distribution channel, GST was designed as a social-first media platform—native to the spaces where young Nigerians already spend their time. Its presence was built across platforms like X, Instagram, and YouTube, with no real dependence on a traditional website. GST recognised a structural shift in how content was being consumed. “One of the theses we had with GST is that people are not going to websites anymore,” Chiamaka Dike, GST’s former editor, said to Communiqué. “You’re getting less traction on your stories on websites. So instead of wasting time building a website, why don’t we just put everything on social media?”

But more important than where GST showed up was how it showed up. From the outset, the platform rejected one of journalism’s most enduring norms: strict neutrality. Instead of simply reporting events as they happened, GST made a deliberate decision to editorialise, to interpret, contextualise, and take positions. “We are not going to be strictly bound by the entire idea of objectivity. So we are going to editorialise from the start. We’re going to give people the truth,” Emoruwa said.

In practice, this means connecting policy decisions to lived realities, for example, showing how inflation figures translate into the cost of living, or how monopolies shape everyday consumption. It also means choosing not to “platform” political actors in ways that could enable misinformation or manipulation.

The result sits uneasily within traditional media definitions. GST operates like a media platform in its distribution, but like a movement in its intent, a hybrid model that blends journalism, advocacy, and community into a single system. Or, as Emoruwa puts it: “We think of ourselves as a news movement of sorts, but really, it is a sort of social justice community.”

Beyond just storytelling, the engine of the “GST news movement” is campaigning. Every piece of content is a potential trigger for action. Where a traditional newsroom might stop at publishing a headline, say, a proposed tax increase, GST goes further, interrogating the underlying implications, particularly where they intersect with rights, policy, or everyday life. Those insights are then translated into coordinated campaigns.

One example is the “Reject Tax Scam” campaign, where GST’s deeper reporting on tax provisions surfaced concerns that had previously gone unnoticed. What followed was not just coverage, but mobilisation, petitions, public debate, and direct government responses.

The pattern is consistent: story → campaign → pressure → response.

In this model, journalism is the starting point of a process designed to convert attention into action, and, ultimately, into change.

What Gatefield has built with GST is an attempt to redesign the relationship between information and participation. In a landscape where attention is fragmented and trust in institutions is low, GST is betting that the future of civic engagement will not be driven by access to information alone but by the ability to translate that information into coordinated action.

That model, however, comes with trade-offs. By choosing to editorialise, to campaign, and to take positions, GST departs from the conventions of traditional journalism and steps into a more contested space, one where influence, advocacy, and accountability intersect. But this is precisely where GST’s advantage lies. In a media system which largely focuses on documenting events, its decision to take positions enables it to convert attention into pressure, and pressure into outcomes.

In the end, GST is asking a different question of the media in Nigeria: not just what people need to know, but what can they be moved to do?

1. Nobel intentions

In December 2025, when a new profile of Wole Soyinka began circulating online, the dominant reaction in many corners of the internet was a quiet sense of intrigue. Not because of what the piece said, but because of what it was. A definitive chronicling of Soyinka’s life, it ran to nearly 20,000 words. It moved deliberately across the literary giant’s lifetime, lingering on his early career, intellectual formation, literary battles, exile, and the long arc of a life lived in public thought. It read less like a magazine article and more like a historical document.

This was striking because, at the time, the dominant story about Soyinka was far smaller: a viral political moment. In the month before, headlines across local and international publications had focused on the Trump administration’s decision to revoke his visa. It was the latest episode in a long-running feud the Nobel Laureate has had with the US president, dating back to his 2016 election, when he tore up his US green card. In the compressed logic of contemporary media, Soyinka had been reduced to a symbol in a political argument.

The longform profile did the opposite. It refused immediacy and resisted the gravitational pull of the news cycle. Instead, it attempted something much harder: to chronicle the full intellectual and historical weight of one of Africa’s most consequential cultural figures.

That ambition to exhaustively document African lives and ideas sits at the heart of Open Country Mag. Founded as a literary magazine and deeply reported narrative nonfiction, Open Country Mag operates on a premise that runs against the structural logic of Africa’s digital media economy: that some stories cannot be told quickly, cheaply, or briefly without losing their meaning.

In a media ecosystem optimised for virality, speed, and short-form consumption, Open Country Mag has, over the last five years, positioned itself as the platform for longform writing that treats African contemporary life not as episodic content, but as something worthy of depth, permanence, and record.

2. Open Country Mag’s literary origins

In 2020, Africa was experiencing what many observers described as a quiet literary renaissance. A new generation of digital literary journals, including Lolwe, Doek, and Isele Magazine, was emerging with a shared ambition: to publish both new and established writers, expand the reach of African literature online, and introduce younger audiences to contemporary literary work. It was within this broader wave that Open Country Mag first took shape.

Its founder, Otosirieze Obi-Young, had until April 2020 served as deputy editor of Brittle Paper, one of the most influential African literary platforms of the previous decade. His departure came after a highly public dispute with the magazine, which fired him after he published a critical piece on the wife of popular author and wife of Former Kaduna state governor, Hadiza El- Rufai. Obi-Young accused the publication’s founder of censorship and editorial overreach, and framed his exit as the culmination of tensions over autonomy, and decision-making power. The episode quickly became one of the most widely discussed controversies in African literary circles that year.

In the aftermath, Obi-Young was clear that he wanted to continue the work he loved. But he was equally determined to build something structurally different. Rather than follow the traditional literary magazine model of opening submissions and publishing short fiction, poetry, and essays, he chose a more unusual starting point: longform, deeply reported profiles of major African literary figures.

For Obi-Young, starting with longform profiles was a deliberate choice to address a critical gap: African writers were increasingly visible internationally, but rarely fully understood. Short coverage often focused on prizes, controversies, or book launches, without situating writers in their broader intellectual, cultural, and historical contexts. “People think that because you see African writers getting international coverage that they have been contextualised,” he said to Communiqué. “That’s not it. I can count probably on one hand African writers who have been covered in the West with real context.” Longform writing gave Open Country Mag the space to do what shorter formats could not: tell stories that capture both the life and the literary significance of Africa’s leading writers.

Obi-Young’s extensive network in the African literary scene, built during his time working at Brittle Paper, and judging some of the continent’s most important literary competitions including the Miles Moorland Fellowship, and The Gerald Kraak prize proved pivotal in shaping Open Country Mag’s early work. Leveraging these connections, he secured interviews with some of the continent’s most sought-after literary figures, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Maaza Mengiste, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, both of whom had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. Even Wole Soyinka agreed to be interviewed in 2021, though the interview didn’t take place until 2025.

By 2023, Open Country’s scope had widened beyond literature to include cultural figures across film, media, and public life, featuring personalities such as Rita Dominic, Chidi Mokeme, Chude Jideonwo, Tunde Onakoya and Cardinal Francis Arinze. “In the process of doing this [literary stories], I realised there were many more use cases for this,” he told Communiqué. “We will acknowledge a person for what they’ve created in culture, which is the whole point. But we will also look at every other thing. We’ll ask you the hard questions.”

“It’s as close as possible to the center of culture. People don’t know that because they cannot see that there is a center of culture. But in time, they will see it. Because when you have a novelist on a cover and you have a prelate on a cover, and you have an actor on the same magazine cover, and you have a sports person on the same magazine cover, there’s something new being built. And literature is the anchor, tying it all together.”

3. The longform playbook

On August 31, 1946, readers of The New Yorker were surprised by the content—a 30,000-word chronicling of the devastation the US nuclear bomb had wrought on Japan. The piece, which nearly filled all the editorial space in that issue, would later be published as a book.

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” was a seismic event in American journalism. The magazine sold out all 300,000 copies within hours. Albert Einstein attempted to buy 1,000 copies to send to fellow scientists. Within two weeks, a second-hand copy of that New Yorker issue sold for 120 times its cover price. But the article’s true significance was demonstrating that longform journalism could achieve what conventional reporting could not: not merely inform, but immerse readers in the subject of a piece, whether an event or a person’s life.

This breakthrough laid the groundwork for what would emerge in the 1960s as the New Journalism movement. Writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion pushed the form further, applying techniques previously reserved for fiction, like scene-by-scene construction, full dialogue, and third-person point of view, to nonfiction reporting. Magazines like Esquire, Harper’s, and The New Yorker championed this storytelling style.

The editors were as crucial as the writers. At Esquire, Harold Hayes transformed the magazine into what one former editor called a “literary and cultural proving ground”. He gave writers space to experiment, and they delivered: Gay Talese’s 1966 profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” became a landmark of the form—a deeply reported portrait built entirely around the singer not wanting to talk. At Harper’s, Willie Morris ran Norman Mailer’s “The Steps of the Pentagon,” a 90,000-word story on the Vietnam War protests in a single issue. It was the equivalent of a 300-page book.

The business impact was profound. Esquire’s circulation grew from 500,000 to 2 million during the 1960s. Magazines discovered that longform distinguished them from daily newspapers and created a durable product readers would seek out and keep. This is the tradition that Open Country Mag adheres to, but with a uniquely African flavour.

In Communiqué 93, we observed that African publications were returning to print, signalling a renewed appetite for tangible, lasting media. But a crucial ingredient for a successful print publication is longform writing. Deeply reported, context-rich, and ambitious in scope, this kind of storytelling is what allows magazines to create a durable record, distinguish themselves from ephemeral digital content, and cultivate readership that values depth over immediacy.

Yet the ambitions of Open Country Mag remain difficult to realise. Obi-Young is the only editor at OCM and continues to shape its editorial direction, he has trained a couple of writers in the magazine style, but there is a limited pool of writers across Africa who can consistently produce narrative nonfiction at this scale. Sustaining such output over time demands both discipline and significant institutional support, elements that are scarce in our media ecosystem. Financial constraints, inconsistent reader habits, and the challenge of monetising longform in Africa add further pressure. Editorial infrastructure, fact-checking, and the time-intensive nature of immersive reporting remain luxuries few publications can afford.

Despite these structural challenges, Open Country Mag’s work carries a symbolic and practical significance. It shows what is possible when African publications commit to longform storytelling: that the continent’s writers, thinkers, and cultural figures can be chronicled with nuance, rigour, and ambition. Even if its model is difficult to replicate at scale today, it establishes a blueprint, a proof of concept if you may, that longform in Africa is not only feasible but essential for documenting the intellectual and cultural life of the continent.

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• Behind every major cultural platform is an invisible layer of communications infrastructure shaping how the world sees African creativity. the creative Industries don’t scale on talent alone; they scale on the systems that give that talent visibility, credibility, and organisation.

• Curated experiences and well-run events aren’t just marketing tactics. They are the structural backbone that attracts investment, captures attention and gives the creative economy the legitimacy it needs to grow.

1. Where the art season really begins

Every year, ART X Lagos, West Africa’s premier art fair, begins the same way: with a press conference. It’s where the vision for each edition is unveiled, and where the fair’s organisers outline what audiences, collectors, artists, and partners should expect.

For the 10th edition, the format remained the same, but the atmosphere carried added significance. ART X had reached its 10th anniversary, so when founder Tokini Peterside-Schwebig took the microphone, she looked back on a decade of ambition, experimentation, and cultural advocacy. Then, with the same measured confidence that has shaped the fair’s trajectory, she revealed what this year holds.

The event was polished, intentional, and seamless. Every element, from messaging to media coordination and the pacing of the announcement, felt precise. That precision was the output of a communications engine that is becoming one of the most influential behind-the-scenes forces in Nigeria’s creative economy: Redrick PR.

ART X Lagos is only one stop in an event marathon that has come to define Lagos’ cultural and creative economy season. And this year, Redrick has helmed communications for several key events on the calendar, including Design Week Lagos, Lagos Fashion Week, and Entertainment Week Lagos.

While ART X Lagos spent the last decade building a cultural platform that amplifies African art, Redrick has spent just as long shaping how these conversations reach audiences locally and internationally. First for luxury brands like L’Oréal and Moët Hennessy, and now it’s applying that same muscle to creative economy events.

2. From blogger to brand architect

Before Redrick existed, its founder, Ijeoma Balogun, was a teenager with an early interest in communication. She won speech-writing competitions, wrote for her school press club, and unknowingly ran her first PR campaign when she crafted messaging and rallied support to become head girl in secondary school.

After secondary school, Balogun moved to Paris to study global communications, with a minor in business administration. But her real education began earlier, during a gap year in Lagos. When she couldn’t secure an internship at True Love—the glossy magazine widely seen as Nigeria’s answer to Vogue—she created her own platform: a fashion blog called Naija Fashion Freak. The timing was perfect. Blogging was beginning to shape media globally, and Balogun was among the early adopters.

Her experience running her personal blog led to a role at BellaNaija, then still a fledgling blog. Balogun became the publication’s first style editor. Running the vertical exposed her to another emerging layer of Nigeria’s creative industries: fashion PR. Designers began emailing her, pitching content and requesting placement. It was the first time she saw an opportunity to help brands reach their target audience.

When Balogun returned to Lagos after university, she already had four years’ experience at BellaNaija and was ready for a change. She initially planned to work at a PR agency. But unable to secure a role at her preferred firm during her compulsory national service, she began freelancing.

Her first client came through a referral from BellaNaija founder Uche Pedro, who knew she wanted to work in PR. It was a lifestyle television show on DStv, produced by media entrepreneur Bola Balogun. Shortly after, she secured her second client: former Miss World and fashion entrepreneur Agbani Darego.

From the beginning, Redrick was positioned in the cultural and creative economy. Balogun’s early work in fashion media shaped the agency’s first specialisation: fashion, beauty, and entertainment. The contacts she built during her BellaNaija and blogging years became her first marketing channel. And one of those relationships led to the agency’s breakout account.

Lagos Fashion Week, already a fast-growing cultural platform, needed a more structured communications strategy. The founder, Omoyemi Akerele, had established a relationship with Balogun since her BellaNaija days. That relationship, alongside a recommendation from Bola Balogun, helped Redrick land Lagos Fashion Week as a client. They’ve been together for 10 years now.

3. The experiential playbook

Over the last decade, global luxury brands—from Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford—have expanded into Africa. They have initially focused on distribution, retail partnerships, and the slow build-out of formal local operations. But the real work of establishing presence has happened through cultural positioning, and in Nigeria, that positioning has depended heavily on events.

“When you’re operating in the consumer lifestyle segment in Nigeria, you do events to engage with your target audience, and engage with them in a way that is intimate,” Balogun told Communiqué. In a market where advertising infrastructure remains fragmented, and consumer trust is built socially, events have become the most effective top-of-funnel strategy. The consumer is persuaded not only through messaging but through proximity to brands, community, and cultural gatekeepers.

“As a people, we like to experience brands. You can’t be a brand speaking directly to consumers and not have an experiential element to your engagement strategies. It’s not possible—not in this environment,” she said.

These events are built for influence, not scale. The goal is not thousands of guests, but the right hundred. Invitations are curated with surgical precision. As Balogun puts it: “Ahead of the event, you say, I need these specific 120 people. At the end of the day, a good ratio we judge ourselves by is about 60%. To get that range, you need to invite at least double. And we typically reach 60–80% of our target audience.”

The agency’s early work with Lagos Fashion Week became the training ground for this model. As international beauty and fashion brands entered Nigeria, Redrick was already fluent in the cultural mechanics they needed to succeed. The agency became a bridge: translating global expectations into local execution.

Soon, the model expanded beyond luxury fashion. When Amazon Prime Video launched in Nigeria, it turned to Redrick. Redrick also helped NBA Africa launch in Nigeria, tapping into the creative economy through partnerships with organisations like ART X to grow basketball culture in the country.

4. A game of scale

More than a decade after its founding, Redrick has helped shape how global companies introduce themselves to one of Africa’s most culturally influential markets, landing placements in international publications like Vogue, Airmail, The Business of Fashion, and CNN, and generating more than $200 million in earned media value for its clients. Now, it’s taking that experience and applying it specifically to creative economy events.

In 2021, the agency added Entertainment Week Lagos to its client roster. This year, it added Design Week Lagos and ART X Lagos. The timing isn’t accidental. The creative economy, once treated as a side activity, is now recognised as a meaningful contributor to national economic growth.

“When we started with Lagos Fashion Week, people did not take us seriously,” Balogun recalls. “It was not considered work—people thought we were just having fun wearing clothes. Now there’s a shift. The creative industry has such a low barrier to entry, and it gives a large number of people employment and the opportunity to create something for themselves. And creative industry events are the infrastructure on which the industry has been built.”

Infrastructure may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of fashion shows, art fairs, or cultural festivals. But in practice, they perform much of the same function: they organise activity, concentrate attention, and signal value. Without platforms where talent can be discovered, funded, or benchmarked, creativity remains scattered, informal, and economically insignificant.

Events create visibility, enabling the right audiences—collectors, investors, corporate partners, global media—to find the right creators. They build ecosystems by bringing fragmented industry nodes together in one room: galleries, investors, sponsors, policymakers, and emerging talent. They also help attract investment. The presence of international brands at Lagos Fashion Week or global collectors at ART X signals that the market exists and is worth taking seriously. Standards rise, expectations evolve, and the work becomes more institutional.

Beyond economics, these events have helped reinforce Lagos’s reputation as a cultural capital on the continent. Redrick’s role in that shift is strategic. It ensures the right people hear the right message at the right time. And in doing so, it reinforces the belief not just that the creative economy matters, but that it can scale.

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• SABC+ shows how public broadcasters can reinvent themselves through streaming to reach digital audiences and diversify revenue.

• The platform’s rapid growth to 1.5 million users signals rising demand for accessible, local streaming alternatives in Africa.

• SABC’s digital transformation shows that survival in the streaming age requires more than just content; it demands infrastructure, innovation, and the courage to rebuild from within..

1. Profit and loss

Last month, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) released its annual financial statement for the year ending 31 March 2025, and the results painted a picture of a broadcaster in transition. For the tenth consecutive year, the national broadcaster reported a net loss, as a 3% increase in expenditure outpaced its modest 1.3% rise in revenue.

Yet, beneath the sobering financials lay a far more optimistic story. SABC’s digital platforms delivered high levels of engagement, garnering 1.48 billion lifetime YouTube views and a 290% year-on-year surge in podcast downloads. Meanwhile, its streaming platform, SABC+, surpassed 850,000 registered users by March 2025 and has since crossed 1.5 million, a milestone powered by the addition of new channels and spikes in viewership during major sporting events. The numbers are proof of the success of SABC’s ongoing digital transformation efforts. Central to this effort is SABC+, the broadcaster’s over-the-top (OTT) streaming service.

In Communiqué 74, we noted that: “Reinventing a public service broadcaster rests on two core pillars: content and technology. Content is the heart of any broadcaster’s relevance. For a public broadcaster to survive and thrive, it must invest in programming that speaks directly to the realities, values, and aspirations of its audience. The second pillar is technology. As audience habits shift away from traditional TV, public broadcasters must follow the audience where they are — online. Broadcasters worldwide have responded by building robust digital platforms to serve on-demand content.”

For many public service broadcasters, reinvention begins with content: modernising storytelling, commissioning original programming, and developing new formats for digital audiences. But SABC has taken a different approach. Rather than starting with programming, it began by fixing the plumbing, investing in the technology that underpins digital delivery. With SABC+, the South African broadcaster has chosen to lead with infrastructure: building a platform capable of carrying the institution into the streaming age.

What began as a complementary digital channel is slowly becoming the cornerstone of how SABC distributes content, engages audiences, and experiments with new revenue streams.

2. A broadcaster at crossroads

Like many Anglophone African government services, the SABC was modelled after its British counterpart, the BBC. SABC inherited not only the British public service ethos but also its funding architecture, the television licence system.

Under this model, every household that owns a TV set is required to pay an annual licence fee, the proceeds of which are meant to fund public broadcasting in the public interest. In theory, the system protects editorial independence by insulating broadcasters from political interference. In practice, however, the model has struggled to survive in the digital age.

As South African audiences have migrated online, compliance with licence payments has collapsed. According to the SABC’s 2025 annual report, only around 16% of households pay their licence fees, leaving billions of rands in uncollected revenue each year. The result is a massive and widening funding gap. This structural deficiency makes it difficult for the SABC to invest in new programming, technology, or talent at the same scale as its commercial competitors. To stay afloat, the broadcaster has had to rely increasingly on advertising and government bailouts.

But the SABC’s constraints are not just about declining licence revenues. The broadcaster also operates in a restrictive regulatory environment. Under South Africa’s Broadcast Digital Migration Policy of 2008, the SABC is compelled to use digital terrestrial television (DTT). This system sends TV signals through ground-based transmitters rather than via satellite or internet-based platforms. The regulation mandates that 84% of SABC’s transmission must run on DTT infrastructure managed by the state-owned signal distributor, Sentech. While this structure was designed to ensure universal access to public broadcasting, it has become a burden.

Maintaining DTT infrastructure is expensive, and the policy effectively prevents the SABC from pursuing cheaper, more scalable alternatives, such as direct-to-home (DTH) satellite transmission. This dependency on terrestrial broadcasting has eroded the corporation’s competitiveness, particularly as private rivals like MultiChoice and Netflix have built flexible, multi-platform ecosystems that reach audiences wherever they are: on phones, smart TVs, or laptops. Constrained by dwindling revenues and the limitations of terrestrial infrastructure, the SABC began to see digital streaming as an alternative to diversify income beyond the collapsing licence system and reconnect with an increasingly digital audience that had long drifted from traditional TV.

“What we don’t want to do is lose our linear audience. We actually want to provide them with an alternative viewing option of our content. Instead of losing them, we’re migrating them,” SABC’s former COO, Ian Plaatjes, said to Variety at the launch of SABC+.

3. The devil in the details

SABC’s first foray into streaming began as a partnership. In 2020, the broadcaster teamed up with state-owned telecommunications provider Telkom to launch TelkomONE. The new platform merged the strengths of both institutions. Telkom provided the infrastructure, bandwidth, hosting, and technical support, while SABC contributed the content.

The platform adopted a freemium model. Users could register for free to access a limited catalogue of live news, entertainment, and inspirational content, while premium offerings, such as music, short films, and TV series, were available behind a paywall. But by 2022, just two years in, Telkom decided to discontinue the service, citing a need to refocus on its core telecom operations. SABC took full ownership of the platform and rebranded it as SABC+.

The timing proved fortuitous. SABC+ launched just ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The tournament provided the perfect launchpad, driving massive user sign-ups.

SABC+ adopted an advertising-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) model, instead of continuing with the freemium subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) model that TelkomONE had used. This pivot proved critical. MultiChoice held exclusive rights to major tournaments like the Cricket World Cup and the Rugby World Cup, two of the biggest sports in South Africa. By removing the paywall, SABC+ provided access to premium sporting content to millions of South Africans who had previously been priced out.

A rebrand in December 2023 introduced a sleeker design and enhanced streaming quality to SABC+, resulting in a surge in user growth. By April 2024, the platform had reached 1 million users, up from the 150,000 it inherited from TelkomONE. Then it had to start all over again.

The SABC+ platform was managed by Discover Digital, a South African media company, which had previously managed TelkomONE. For its services, Discover Digital was paid R35 million. However, SABC claimed that its then COO, Ian Plaatjes, Head of digital, Francois Naicker, and Sales Head, Reginald Nxumalo, had hidden a clause allocating 7.5% of the advertising revenue generated on SABC+ to Discover Digital, despite presenting to the board that SABC would retain 100%.

The fallout was swift. The implicated executives were dismissed, and SABC began to rebuild SABC+, this time partnering with Dubai-based streaming technology provider Mangomolo. Mangomolo had helped launch streaming services for platforms like Discovery Networks, Orange Telecom, and Dubai Media.

In July 2024, the broadcaster relaunched SABC+ for the second time. The new platform grew rapidly, hitting 1 million users by May 2025 and 1.5 million by October. Monthly revenue rose from R100,000 in April 2024 to R700,000 by March 2025.

4. The endgame

SABC’s streaming ambitions have also followed closely with those of the BBC. In 2009, when the BBC launched its streaming service, BBC iPlayer, it was a free offering accessible to anyone in the UK with an internet connection. However, from September 1, 2016, a TV licence became a requirement to watch content on iPlayer. Even that has proven insufficient. In January of this year, Bloomberg reported that the UK was considering making households that only use streaming services, such as Netflix and Disney+, pay the BBC licence fee as part of plans to modernise the way it funds the public-service broadcaster.

When the SABC broached a similar idea in 2021, it was met with stiff resistance from streamers like Showmax, who argued that such a policy would unfairly burden digital streamers. Still, the idea speaks to the dilemma facing legacy public broadcasters worldwide: how to sustain a universal service mandate in an era where audiences are increasingly fragmented and consumption habits vary.

Nevertheless, SABC+ sits at the centre of a five-year strategic plan that the corporation hopes will return it to profitability by 2027. For now, the platform remains free, but that may not be the case for long. In the future, the broadcaster may link SABC+ user registrations to the television licence. A move that would compel South Africa’s millions of digital viewers to pay their dues and help close the funding gap.

SABC’s digital transformation has already begun to show signs of success in South Africa. Ultimately, it could provide a blueprint for how public media in Africa can reinvent itself for the streaming age.

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1. African media brands are returning to print not out of nostalgia, but to signal permanence, credibility, and craftsmanship in a digital-first world.

2. This new era of magazines treats print as a collectible object—carefully designed, limited in supply, and built to deepen loyalty while attracting premium advertisers.

3. By pairing print with curated events, publishers are extending their storytelling into real-life experiences, turning audiences into communities and culture into connection.

1. A break from the norm

For over a decade, Culture Custodian has had its finger on the pulse of Nigerian culture—breaking iconic stories, spotlighting emerging artists, and amplifying a generation of creatives redefining what it means to make and move culture. And for the entire decade, the publication has lived online. That is, until a few days ago, when it launched The Custodian, its first print magazine issue, in London.

The debut issue, fronted by filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr.—whose My Father’s Shadow became the first Nigerian film to be picked at the Cannes Film Festival official selection—sets the tone for what The Custodian aspires to be: a chronicle of Nigerian creativity in its most dynamic form. Through essays, profiles, features, and visual art, the magazine captures how young Nigerians are shaping identity, creativity, and survival in real time.

Like Culture Custodian, NAG Mag, a South African gaming publication, also returned to print in 2023, this time with a special edition. After initially shutting down its monthly print edition in 2015, the publication reintroduced an annual special issue and now plans to expand it into a quarterly print cycle.

Across Africa, media companies spent much of the last decade running from print. Rising production costs, shrinking ad budgets, and the seductive promise of digital reach made the medium an easy villain. But as audiences crave more tactile, immersive experiences, publications like Culture Custodian are returning to the medium, while others, like The Republic and The Africa Report, never truly left.

2. The collector item playbook

More than a publishing experiment, this return to print is a branding play. For publications, the move to print is less about chasing mass readership and more about creating something tangible that reflects the care, craft, and cultural authority their digital presence has built over time.

At the heart of this is the collector-item strategy. These magazines are designed to be owned, not discarded. Every edition is treated as an object of value: limited runs, heavyweight paper, meticulous art direction, and slow, thoughtful curation. Each issue becomes both a time capsule and a design statement—a piece of art worth holding onto.

“We want this to be the ultimate collector’s item,” Oluwamayowa Idowu, Culture Custodian’s Editor-in-Chief, told Communiqué. “We are not trying to do a magazine every quarter. For us, this is a once-a-year thing where we’re going to create something that we feel is very representative of where culture is at that time, in that day, in that age.”

With this collector-item strategy, magazines can offer something digital media can’t: a break from the endless scroll. Online, content moves fast and disappears quickly. But print slows things down. Each issue invites readers to sit with stories, flip through pages, and really take in the work. No algorithms or notifications are competing for attention. Instead, readers get a calm, focused experience. For people tired of constant digital noise, print feels like a way to pause, something tangible they can hold on to and return to whenever they want.

While print sales may never again be the primary revenue driver for publications, the medium has found new value as a powerful branding tool. It signals permanence, credibility, and taste. For readers, owning a physical copy feels like belonging to a cultural circle, where the magazine itself is the membership card. This sense of exclusivity is especially attractive to advertisers, who are willing to pay a premium for it.

“In an age of fragmented feeds and programmatic targeting, the carefully edited, tactile experience of a premium print issue gives brands cultural weight and a halo of credibility,” Cherry Collins, Strategy Partner at Havas Media UK, said in an interview with Vogue Business.

3. A global reckoning

This return to print is part of a broader global shift in how publishers think about physical media. Around the world, major titles are reimagining print as a premium experience. Starting in 2026, Vogue will reduce its U.S. print schedule from a monthly cadence to eight issues per year—each one larger, weightier, and tied to cultural moments like the Met Gala and Vogue World. “Our eight issues will deliver more impact—not only for our subscribers, but also for our advertisers who are reaching a deeply dedicated audience and staying with them longer,” said Vogue’s Global Editorial Director, Mark Guiducci, in an interview.

Its sister publication, Vanity Fair, is taking a similar route, producing eight annual editions—four seasonal and four thematic.

Digital-native platforms are following suit. The Cut, which began as a purely online publication, now publishes a biannual print magazine with collectable covers and hosts live reader events, such as The Cut Café during New York Fashion Week. Nylon also revived its print edition in 2024 after seven years online.

4. Building a premium experience

In building a premium brand experience, print magazine issues are just one part of the equation. The second part is premium, well-curated events. These events bring the brand’s aesthetic and community to life.

To launch The Custodian, Culture Custodian hosted a launch party in the UK—an intimate gathering that doubled as the publication’s official introduction to the British audience. It plans a similar event for November in Nigeria, reinforcing the magazine’s connection to its home base.

Similarly, Jeune Afrique Media Group, for example, anchored its 2021–2025 strategy on two pillars: first, shifting from a weekly print edition to a niche quarterly magazine; and second, building out a portfolio of high-end events. In addition to its long-running Africa CEO Forum, the group launched the African Financial Industry Summit in 2021, now one of the leading platforms connecting finance, policy, and technology leaders across the continent. These gatherings deepen audience loyalty and open new revenue streams through sponsorships and partnerships.

For digital publications aiming to build enduring brands, the modern premium media playbook follows a clear sequence. The journey begins online, where digital platforms help build an audience. Print follows to anchor that voice in credibility, craft, and identity. Then come events, which transform that authority into community and experience.

It’s not about choosing one medium over another—it’s about sequencing them for maximum cultural and commercial impact. In a world where attention is fleeting, premium media brands are discovering that sometimes, the most powerful way forward is to slow down—publish less, say more, and make it matter.

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1. For media organisations looking to hire journalism talent, UCJ is a credible talent pool.

2. UCJ’s evolution highlights the power of peer learning, mentorship, and curiosity-driven practice in shaping adaptable, values-led journalists.

3. As media industries across Africa confront questions of credibility and capacity, UCJ offers a model for how passion-driven ecosystems can sustain the future of journalism from the ground up.

1. From Accra with love

For three days every October, Accra becomes the capital of West African journalism. Reporters and editors from across the subcontinent gather for the West Africa Media Excellence Conference and Awards (WAMECA), a yearly convergence that has grown into the region’s most credible celebration of press freedom and journalistic excellence.

The three-day event unfolds through plenary sessions, workshops, and panel discussions that explore the region’s most significant media challenges, from digital transformation and press freedom to the ethics of AI and investigative reporting.

But by the final day, when the lights dim for the awards ceremony, the gathering begins to feel distinctly Nigerian. The red-carpet interviews are dotted with familiar accents, the nominees’ list reads like a map of Nigeria’s journalism ecosystem, and as the winners are announced, you already know which country sweeps home the awards.

This year was no different. Nigerians submitted 47% of the entries and took home several of the top prizes, including the coveted West Africa Reporter of the Year Award. Kunle Adebajo, HumAngle’s former investigations editor, won this award for his story investigating the funding of a secessionist group in Eastern Nigeria. It was the second time in a row that a HumAngle writer had won the award. In 2023 (WAMECA skipped 2024), Temitayo Akinyemi, HumAngle’s former interactive editor, won the prize for his story detailing the environmental damage of illegal oil refining in Port Harcourt, a city in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta.

Apart from being HumAngle employees at the time they wrote the stories that won them the awards, Adebajo and Akinyemi had something else in common: neither had received a traditional media education. Their journalism careers began years earlier, in university, as members of the Union of Campus Journalists (UCJ). This student-led press body has quietly become one of Nigeria’s most effective journalism training grounds.

In the hierarchy of Nigeria’s journalism pipeline, the UCJ sits firmly outside the formal system. It doesn’t confer degrees or run accredited courses. Yet, its alumni have gone on to populate bylines, newsrooms, and editorial desks across local and international media organisations, including Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Guardian UK, CNN, Premium Times, The Republic, Big Cabal Media, and the Associated Press.

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2. The origins of a journalist factory

If you take UCJ as an umbrella term for all campus journalism associations in Nigeria, then the first was established in 1963 at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), then known as the University of Ife. It was called the Association of Campus Journalists (ACJ), a student-led press body created to hold the university administration accountable and promote intellectual debate on campus. But the first union to actually bear the name Union of Campus Journalists (UCJ) was founded at the University of Ibadan (UI) in 1987. From Ibadan, the model spread across the country to Ilorin, Nsukka, Sokoto and beyond. Becoming a network of student newsrooms that mirrored the values and tensions of Nigeria’s mainstream press.

Over the decades, UCJ chapters have become training grounds for some of the country’s most accomplished journalists and editors. Notable alumni include Dapo Olorunyomi, co-founder and publisher of Premium Times, and Fisayo Soyombo, founder of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ).

Yet what’s even more striking about the UCJ’s legacy is that many of its most successful alumni never studied Mass Communication or Media Studies. Dapo Olorunyomi read Literature at Obafemi Awolowo University — a discipline that you could consider journalism-adjacent — but Fisayo Soyombo studied Animal Science at the University of Ibadan, a course far removed from the world of news and storytelling. This pattern repeats itself across generations: some of Nigeria’s finest journalists began as outsiders to the formal study of journalism.

3. The outsider advantage

The idea of the Outsider Advantage helps explain why UCJ members often outperform traditional journalism students. Although not formally defined in academic literature, the concept draws from the ideas Colin Wilson proposed in his book The Outsider (1956). He argued that people who exist outside established systems often possess a unique creative edge. Stripped of institutional conditioning, outsiders tend to see problems differently, questioning conventions rather than inheriting them.

In the context of journalism, this translates into curiosity unbound by classroom theory and a willingness to experiment with storytelling, tone, and investigative depth.

For UCJ members, this advantage is evident in their approach to learning through hands-on experience. Without the structure of a Mass Communication curriculum, they build their craft through self-education, mentorship, and relentless practice; breaking news stories on student governance and editing sharp opinion pieces on university management long before entering professional spaces. This blend of autonomy and pressure cultivates adaptability and critical thinking, qualities that often define great reporters.

“The UCJ UNILORIN workshops, events and congresses are like the muscle that piled up to pivot the kind of journalism I am doing today,” Pelumi Salako said in an interview with the International Centre for Journalists in 2021. Salako would eventually go on to win the 2024 Future Awards Prize in Journalism. By approaching journalism as a practice rather than a prescribed discipline, UCJ members grow into storytellers who are trained by experience, not just instruction. In this way, their outsider status becomes their greatest strength, a source of originality, resilience, and a more profound sense of purpose that often sets them apart from their formally trained peers.

Because they lacked formal training in journalism, UCJ members often grew up outside the traditions of Nigerian newsrooms, and that distance shaped how they learned the craft. Deprived of the local industry’s conventions, they turned instead to foreign publications for guidance. “Because we were not Mass Communication students, we did not know how journalism was practised in Nigerian newsrooms. We were reading publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post and learning from them,” Temitayo Akinyemi told Communiqué. For Akinyemi, this kind of aspirational mimicry became an education in itself, helping refine his taste and sharpen his editorial instincts. His investigation, All Die Na Die, which won the 2023 WAMECA West Africa Reporter of the Year Award, was modelled after The Washington Post’s Africa’s Rising Cities project, a long-form, multimedia exploration of urban transformation across the continent.

4. Only true believers need apply

Another thing UCJ has going for it is that it attracts people who actually want to study journalism. In Nigeria, Law is the premier course for arts and humanities students. However, limited spaces in universities mean that not everyone who applies is accepted. As a compromise, many are placed in other courses, Mass Communication being a common fallback. The result is that Mass Communication departments across the country are filled with students who never intended to become journalists in the first place.

“A lot of Mass Communication students are just there to earn a living, not necessarily because they’re passionate about journalism. And that’s why you find that when many of them leave school, they tend to focus on the PR and Communication part of it, which is more lucrative, rather than public-interest journalism. But UCJ is different because you apply voluntarily,” Adebajo told Communiqué.

There have been efforts to fix this problem. In 2020, Nigeria’s National Universities Commission (NUC) issued a directive to unbundle the Mass Communication degree, breaking it into seven specialised programmes: Journalism and Media Studies, Public Relations, Advertising, Broadcasting, Film and Multimedia Studies, Development Communication Studies, and Information and Media Studies. The goal was to create clearer professional pathways and align academic curricula with industry realities. But implementation has been slow. Many universities lack the resources or faculty to run all seven programmes at once.

Some institutions have made progress. Covenant University has scaled down its traditional Mass Communication programme to make room for newer specialisations. The University of Lagos remains the only institution to fully comply with the directive. In June this year, the university upgraded its Department of Mass Communication into a Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, housing all seven degree programmes.

Still, for most universities, journalism education remains trapped in an outdated model, one where theory outweighs practice, and pragmatism often replaces passion. It’s in that vacuum that UCJ thrives.

5. A double-edged pen

For all its strengths, the UCJ isn’t without its limitations. It leans heavily on opinion writing rather than core news reporting. This helps young journalists develop their voice but leaves many underprepared for the rigour of professional newsrooms, where structure, objectivity, and sourcing matter more than style.

Also, the focus on commentary often brings UCJ members into conflict with university authorities. Kunle Adebajo experienced this firsthand when he was rusticated for two semesters in his final year at the University of Ibadan after publishing an article critical of the school. Unable to proceed to Law School with his peers, he turned to journalism full-time. Fisayo Soyombo, then an editor at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, was helpful in this transition, giving him his first professional newsroom job. It was in this role that Adebajo won his first WAMECA award, for Best Story in Telecoms and ICT Reporting, in 2019.

Another limitation is UCJ’s narrow focus on print and text-based storytelling. Members rarely explore other forms of journalism, such as broadcast journalism. As the media landscape shifts toward digital and cross-platform formats, this gap risks leaving the next generation of UCJ journalists less equipped for the demands of modern storytelling. Some chapters of the UCJ have begun to address this problem, starting YouTube channels where members can experiment with video journalism.

UCJ’s enduring influence raises important questions about the future of journalism education in Nigeria. If the most effective training ground exists outside the official university system, what does that say about how schools teach journalism?

UCJ’s model proves that mentorship, experimentation, and peer-driven learning are crucial to developing competent journalists, characteristics that university departments can incorporate in improving their Mass Communication degree programmes. For UCJ, however, the challenge is sustainability; ensuring that campus journalism receives the institutional support, resources, and protection it needs to continue producing talent.

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Why this matters

• Audience-led evolution: Akili’s transition from Akili Kids to Akili TV shows the power of listening to one’s audience and evolving with them, a critical lesson for any African media brand seeking longevity.

• Solving for representation: Akili’s origin story underscores a long-standing gap, the absence of African children seeing themselves on screen and how addressing that gap creates both cultural and commercial value.

• Building for the future: Akili’s growth proves that Africa can create world-class media brands that nurture identity, strengthen family bonds, and shape the next generation’s relationship with storytelling.

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1. The rebrand

In November 2024, Akili Kids, Kenya’s largest children’s television station, officially rebranded as Akili TV. The rebrand marked the station’s evolution from a children’s channel into a full-fledged family entertainment brand designed to accompany its primary viewers as they grow older.

The decision came directly from the audience. Parents who once tuned in only for their toddlers were now asking for shows they could enjoy together. Teenagers wanted relatable African stories, while caregivers longed for programming that encouraged bonding, not just learning. Akili’s rebrand was an answer to those requests, a realisation that childhood doesn’t exist in isolation, and that the best children’s content is often the kind the whole family can share.

In many ways, Akili’s evolution offers a blueprint for building media products for children and how those products can mature alongside their audiences. It’s a crucial lesson for Africa, where more than 60% of the population is under the age of 25, and where the next generation’s media diet is still forming.

In just five years, the channel has grown into Kenya’s largest provider of children’s television, reaching more than 18 million viewers, a trajectory reminiscent of Nickelodeon’s rise in the US, but rooted firmly in African experiences, languages, and values.

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2. There in the beginning

Akili TV’s story began with two media executives, Jeff Schon and Jesse Soleil, who had spent decades shaping content for young audiences, from television and animation to digital learning. The pair first met at Scholastic, the world’s largest children’s publisher, where they helped pioneer some of the company’s earliest educational technology products.

In the mid-2000s, Soleil began spending time in Kenya, where his wife is from. There, he saw an opportunity. As television ownership was growing in the country, millions of Kenyan children were consuming global networks like Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. Yet, few of those shows reflected African stories or everyday experiences. Recognising the gap, Soleil invited his longtime collaborator, Schon, to join him in exploring what a truly Kenyan children’s media product might look like.

Before settling on television, Schon and Soleil considered different formats through which to reach children — including storybooks and mobile phones, which were growing exponentially across the continent — but ultimately decided that TV offered the broadest and most immediate reach across Kenya. “TV is still the main platform for families to consume content. Especially when you think about the rural areas, which is where the larger population of Kenya resides,” Jeff Schon, Akili’s CEO, told Communiqué.

The initial idea was to create a small programming block for children on one of Kenya’s major broadcasters. But the TV networks would demand advertising revenue and payment for broadcast airtime upfront, even before any content started airing, making the model unsustainable. Around the same time, Kenya was preparing to migrate from analogue to digital broadcasting, a process that opened new television licenses for the first time in years. The Communications Authority of Kenya was intrigued by the idea of a dedicated children’s channel. Even though the licensing process had officially closed, the Authority made an exception, allowing Schon and Soleil to apply.

Akili received its license in 2012, but it would take eight more years for the channel to launch. The Communications Authority of Kenya’s enthusiastic support did not come with capital, and traditional investors were reluctant to back the idea. Most thought it was too risky or too niche. In 2019, Akili finally secured $2.4 million in funding from a consortium that included Geraldine Laybourne, former president of Nickelodeon and Disney’s ABC Cable Networks.

3. A lockdown launch

When Akili Kids launched in March 2020 — just three weeks after Kenya went into lockdown — its timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous. With schools closed and millions of children stuck at home, parents urgently sought ways to keep them engaged. Akili filled that gap perfectly, offering educational entertainment content rooted in local culture and language. Within six months, it reached 4 million Kenyan children, becoming the second most-watched TV station by children in the country, surpassed only by Citizen TV, the country’s largest broadcaster.

Akili carefully segments its programming by age and time of day to meet the developmental and educational needs of children. The preschool block runs early mornings with three hours of literacy, numeracy, and science content, which parents say effectively prepares children for school. Midday programming targets ages 4 to 8, featuring shows that nurture communication, empathy, and confidence, skills that complement formal education.

Among its most popular shows is Akili and Me, an animated series that teaches children numeracy, literacy, and emotional intelligence through relatable African characters and stories. Ubongo Kids, another favourite licensed from Tanzania, blends problem-solving with storytelling. Other shows include Wild Kratts, Super Sema, and Team Umizoomi. Together, these programs have become central to Akili’s identity.

By late afternoon, as older children return from school, the channel caters to preteens and teenagers with relatable shows that explore issues such as bullying, self-esteem, and identity; some of the most pressing issues affecting children of that age group.

This sensitivity to context was most visible during the 2024 Kenyan protests, when young viewers were exposed to scenes of unrest and uncertainty. Rather than ignore the moment, Akili introduced civic-themed segments that explained the protests in simple, age-appropriate ways. “We knew kids were watching and wondering,” Anne Sato, Akili’s head of programming, said to Communiqué. “As much as we don’t do news on our channel, we realized there was need to create awareness of what protests are and how can we make them peaceful. Because children learn through imitating and when they watch news and see what is happening, they think that is how it should be. So our role at Akili was to educate them on what is happening, but also how can it happen in a peaceful and more respectful way.”

Shows on the network are available in English, Kiswahili, and Kenyan Sign Language, ensuring that deaf children are not excluded. A recent GeoPoll survey found that Digital Storytime, a sign language program, was the most-watched show on the channel.

4. The business strategy behind the fun

Over its lifetime, Akili has raised $9 million, with a significant portion — roughly $1.5 million — going into content licensing. At launch, only 15% of its programming was African-made, but that figure has since grown to 50%, thanks to partnerships with regional studios such as Tanzania’s Ubongo Kids, Nigeria’s EVCL studios, and Uganda’s Peripheral Vision International.

The station remains free-to-air, meaning its primary source of revenue is advertising. But Akili is deliberate about the type of products it advertises, maintaining strict standards to ensure that ads align with its educational and family values. “We wouldn’t take advertisement from high sugars or, betting companies.

Beyond advertising, the company is now fundraising for expansion, including plans to launch more digital products that could introduce subscription-based revenue streams.

While children remain its core audience, Akili’s growing focus on family-friendly programming during prime time reflects a deliberate strategy, one that has long been employed by major broadcasters around the world, and most recently by Nigeria’s national broadcaster as it attempts to reinvent itself. The logic is simple: family-oriented content builds trust, loyalty, and sustained viewership across generations.

In Communiqué 37, we noted that “one of the most significant advantages of producing content for kids is guaranteed loyalty. Establish a brand relationship with a kid at a young age, and you can be confident you have their attention for several years.” But that benefit extends beyond the child. By earning the trust and engagement of children, a media brand also gains influence over the entire household. Children are key decision-shapers within families, and Akili TV’s evolution into a family network positions it to deepen that relationship, transforming childhood viewership into family-wide loyalty.

For Akili TV, this next chapter isn’t just about expanding its audience. It’s about proving that Africa can build media brands that grow with their viewers, shape values, and tell stories that reflect the continent’s own realities.

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1. NAG illustrates how legacy media brands can reinvent themselves through strategic pivots, in this case from mass publishing to premium collectible editions.

2. NAG’s trajectory shows the long term value of building community-driven brands on cultural relevance and audience trust.

3. Like NAG, media companies can achieve sustainable growth by diversifying across different platforms including print, digital, and events.

1. The return of the NAG Mag

Every year for the last two decades — except for a brief pause during the pandemic — rAge Expo, Africa’s largest gaming event, has been the heartbeat of South Africa’s gaming ecosystem.

For three days every December, it transforms a convention centre into a temple. The halls are packed with product launches, hardware demos, cosplay parades, and marathon gaming sessions that run late into the night. You can test new games, join tournaments, or meet the people building the next big titles.

But in 2023, the convention offered something different. Amid the energy of demos, tournaments, and tech displays, NAG, South Africa’s foremost gaming publication, made a long-awaited return to print. For the first time in nearly a decade, fans could once again hold in their hands the glossy pages that once defined South African gaming culture.

The comeback was more than symbolic. For many, NAG was where their love for gaming began. Before YouTube and Twitch, NAG told South African gamers what to play, what to buy, and where the culture was heading. Driven by nostalgia, fans lined up to secure their copies, and the limited-edition magazines quickly sold out.

In a space now dominated by streaming and social media, NAG’s return to print felt like a full-circle moment for South Africa, a reminder that before it became digital, the country’s gaming ecosystem was built on paper, ink, and imagination. And for nearly three decades, this niche yet influential publication has been at the forefront.

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2. South Africa’s first gaming publication

When New Age Gaming (NAG) Magazine launched its first issue in April 1998, it filled a gap no one else had thought to address. At the time, there was no local gaming publication anywhere in Africa. The only options were imported magazines, like PC Format from the UK. The problem was that these magazines were expensive and lacked local context; the reviews were of games and gadgets unavailable in South Africa, and prices were listed in foreign currencies. For gamers, it was frustrating to read about new titles and hardware they could never actually buy.

The idea for NAG was born by a group of friends in a Johannesburg internet café, known as Cyber Nation. Gamers would spend hours there playing games and asking about the latest releases. One of the café’s founders, Len Nery, and his team realised there was a need for a publication that spoke directly to South African gamers.

A few months after the first issue hit the stands, Michael James, an avid gamer, came across a copy of NAG while visiting a mall. Inside, he noticed an advert for an upcoming gaming competition and immediately wanted in. But beyond competing, James wanted to be part of the NAG team. He sent a cold email to the editors, offering to write for them. James started as a freelancer, then joined full-time as an editor before becoming editor-in-chief and co-owner of NAG. Under his leadership, NAG began to take shape as the industry’s defining publication.

NAG had one key responsibility: to give South African gamers honest and valuable information in a market that was still taking shape. That meant deep dives into gaming culture, coverage of the early e-sports scene, and sometimes scathing product reviews. “If a product wasn’t worth your money, we said so,” Nery told Communiqué. “That responsibility rested heavily on our shoulders.” In that way, they earned the trust of the local gaming community.

At the time, internet access was slow and expensive, limiting access to games. Each issue of NAG came with a cover CD containing demos of the latest releases. For many readers, that CD was their only gateway to the global gaming world, and it helped grow NAG’s readership. “Our readership basically doubled overnight by adding a CD to the magazine,” James told Communiqué.

Beginning in the early 2000s, local South African gaming studios began to find commercial success abroad. Their focus on making games for international markets—which preferred platforms like PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox, rather than for African mobile audiences—attracted investment, partnerships, and skill development to the local ecosystem. NAG sat at the centre of this growth, connecting players, developers, and hardware makers.

3. A break in transmission

Recognising the role it played in the ecosystem, NAG set out to create a space where gamers, hardware manufacturers, and developers could meet face-to-face. The result was the Really Awesome Gaming Event (rAge Expo). “We wanted to connect the end user directly to the companies that made the products,” Nery told Communiqué. “At the time, there was no direct line between the people who built gaming tech and the people who actually used it.”

The first rAge Expo was held in 2002, attracting around 4,000 attendees. By the fifth edition, the event had become profitable. Today, the rAge Expo attracts over 40,000 attendees annually.

But while the expo thrived, NAG’s print business began to struggle. The early 2010s were tough years for media worldwide, as the internet upended traditional publishing models. For NAG, the challenge was particularly sharp. Its core audience — young, tech-savvy gamers — was among the first to move online, and advertisers soon followed, shifting their budgets from print to digital. At its peak in the early 2010s, the magazine’s monthly print run reached 35,000 copies, but by 2015 it had fallen to around 15,000 as declining ad revenue made it harder to sustain production costs.

In June 2015, NAG published its final print issue, officially transitioning to a fully digital publication. Just a year earlier, PC Format, the UK magazine that once dominated the market, had also shut down. NAG’s closure marked the end of an era, foreshadowing the collapse of South Africa’s broader magazine industry. The crisis peaked in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, when major publishers like Caxton Publishers and Associated Media Publishing closed up shop, taking with them over 20 magazine titles.

For NAG, 2020 was also a challenging year. For the first time in nearly two decades, the rAge Expo did not hold. The pandemic also forced a pivotal shift within the company itself. NAG and rAge, which had operated under one umbrella, formally separated.

The separation came down to a difference in vision. Michael James remained optimistic that physical events would quickly return, while Nery felt the recovery would take years and the business would not survive waiting out the pandemic. The two agreed to divide the company’s assets and audiences. James took Instagram and YouTube, while Nery retained Facebook and Twitter (now X).

Although the assets have been divided, the NAG brand remains unified. On the one hand, Michael James has transformed the NAG YouTube channel into a sleek digital hub for South Africa’s gaming community, complete with MKBHD-style product reviews, interviews with creators, and deep dives into gaming culture. On the other hand, Len Nery has led NAG back to where it all began: print.

4. NAG’s collector item strategy

Today, NAG reaches more than 400,000 gamers across its digital platforms, a far cry from what Nery calls “the dark ages” of 2015–2016, when the magazine nearly disappeared.

After years as a digital-only outlet, NAG’s limited-edition 2023 print issue marked a nostalgic return to its roots. Only 10,000 copies were printed, each designed as a collector’s item.

Len Nery is now betting on the collector-item strategy to rebuild NAG’s print business, a model that treats each issue not as mass media, but as a premium artefact for true fans. By keeping the print run small and focusing on high-quality design, exclusive features, and limited ad space, NAG turns each issue into something worth owning.

Building on the success of its 2023 and 2024 editions, NAG plans to expand from an annual to a quarterly print schedule, giving readers more opportunities to collect and connect with the brand in physical form. However, much of that will depend on the performance of the 2025 edition, set to launch at this year’s rAge Expo in December.

Editor’s Note:
An earlier version of this story did not include the role of shifting advertising spend in NAG’s print decline. This version has been updated to reflect how advertisers’ move from print to digital media contributed to the magazine’s challenges in the early 2010s.

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• The festival is building a community and knowledge base, creating an entry point for startups, investors, and entrepreneurs to shape Africa’s creative economy around AI.

• Early involvement allows stakeholders to shape ethical standards, intellectual property frameworks, and monetization models that will define the future

1. Africa’s AI debut

Earlier in September, hundreds of filmmakers and technologists gathered at Alliance Française in Lagos for a milestone event: Africa’s first AI film festival. The programme featured a global showcase of AI-assisted films, panel discussions on the future of AI filmmaking, a showcase of local AI tools, and an awards night to recognise outstanding work.

The finalists were chosen by a jury that reflected both global expertise and local experience, including international filmmaker Dana Verde, Uche Okiya, senior animation lecturer at the Del York Creative Academy, Anthony Adah, professor of film studies, actress and director Ronya Man, and Moniepoint’s former creative director, Yemi Arawore.

The festival climaxed with an awards ceremony. Godzilla in Lagos, a five-minute short from AI film studio Nirvs AI, took home the prize for Best AI Long-Form Film. The film reimagined Godzilla through a distinctly African lens, blending the spectacle of Hollywood with the chaos and character of Lagos. That fusion hinted at the radical potential of AI for African cinema: to lower barriers in production and allow African storytellers to compete on the same canvas as their global peers without waiting for the budgets or infrastructure typically required for traditional filmmaking. The Naija AI Film Festival was the platform making this potential a reality.

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2. The backstory

Earlier this April, Nigeria witnessed another first. Makemation, the country’s first AI-assisted feature film, premiered in cinemas with a star-studded cast that included Richard Mofe-Damijo, Shaffy Bello, and Jide Kosoko. Within four days, the film grossed ₦32 million at the box office, climbing to third place nationwide, just behind Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Ori: The Rebirth.

But even as Makemation was making waves on the big screen, Obinna Okerekeocha, film producer and convener of the Naija AI Film Festival, was making plans for the future of AI-assisted filmmaking on the continent. Just days earlier, on his birthday, he had quietly launched the Naija AI Film Festival.

Okerekeocha’s journey into filmmaking stretches back nearly two decades, beginning with his work at NN24, Nigeria’s first 24-hour news channel. As part of the pioneer staff, he honed his skills in round-the-clock media production. That early immersion in broadcast television would later serve as a foundation for his transition to the entertainment and film industry.

His most defining stint came at RED TV, where he spent seven years as creative director. There, he worked on birthing some of Nigeria’s most notable digital-first shows, serving as executive and creative producer on titles like The Men’s Club, Assistant Madams, Inspector K, and a range of docuseries and reality programmes. That period established him within Nigeria’s content and filmmaking space.

At the same time, Nollywood was in flux. Streaming platforms were recalibrating their strategies in Nigeria, pulling back from aggressive investments just as AI was disrupting the global film industry. Okerekeocha believed that once the dust settled, AI would play a vital role across the filmmaking value chain, from talent discovery to production and even distribution. Yet there was no platform on the continent to explore this convergence. The Naija AI Film Festival was his answer. He began by building a community of AI filmmakers across Africa before opening submissions for the festival. The first edition of the festival received 490 submissions from across the world.

3. Taking a page from the Runway playbook

In 2023, AI startup Runway launched the world’s first AI Film Festival to showcase films made with generative AI tools. Over the last two years, the festival has grown exponentially. The first edition received only 300 submissions, but the most recent edition, held in June, received over 6,000 submissions with screenings in New York and Los Angeles. Ten films were selected for the festival, including More Tears Than Harm, by Malagasy filmmaker Herinarivo Rakotomanana. Following the success of the festival, IMAX struck a deal with Runway to show the films in cinemas across 10 cities in the US.

Earlier this year, the Oscars officially clarified that it would treat films made with AI the same as traditional films, signalling a global acceptance of AI as a part of the filmmaking process.

But in Africa, despite successes like Makemation, adoption has been more cautious. In Nigeria in particular, a 2024 survey of film and television professionals by DLA Piper Africa, a consortium of law firms, found that 35% already use generative AI tools in their work, while another 35% were considering adoption. The Naija AI Film Festival aims to speed things up.

Film festivals have always been more than film screenings. They serve as laboratories where art, commerce, and culture collide to help enable a particular subculture of filmmaking. For instance, Sundance legitimised independent filmmaking and Cannes positioned cinema as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. The Naija AI Film Festival took its first steps toward establishing a similar framework for AI-assisted storytelling, thereby defining its role in the continent’s creative economy.

At its core, the festival was about showing what was possible. Filmmakers who use AI tools to write dialogue, render characters, and generate worlds were validated. Their works, no longer dismissed as gimmicks, were placed in conversation with human-made films and debated in panels about creativity and ownership. The festival also served as an industry showcase for local AI tools such as Switch Studio and AIstudio.ng. It also included Gen Jam, a training session where attendees were taught AI filmmaking techniques and allowed to create an AI film from scratch within four hours. Similarly, Runway hosts Gen 48, a rapid-fire filmmaking challenge that provides participants with free access to its AI tools for 48 hours to create a short film from scratch.

More critically, the festival created space to debate the policy and ethical issues—such as copyright, labour, and authenticity—that will shape the medium’s future. Media and entertainment lawyer Foza Fawehinmi, speaking on a panel about the ethical use of AI, emphasised the need to incorporate African source material in AI training models before focusing on monetisation. “If our stories are not included, these tools will not serve African creators. It’s not always about who gets what or who gets paid.”

4. The endgame

But beyond the festival, the real work lies in what comes after. For Okerekeocha, that work is rooted in community. Since its inception in April, the Naija AI Film community has grown to more than 500 members across the continent, creating an environment where filmmakers can learn and experiment with AI, supported by shared resources, guest lectures, and weekly portfolio reviews.

Okerekeocha is now moving to standardise that learning experience with a structured training platform. “We are building a portal where African filmmakers can learn AI filmmaking in one month, through modules that touch on the most important aspects of AI filmmaking from an African point of view.”

He wants to unlock the ability for African filmmakers to tell unique African stories. “I tell my community members, you are not learning AI to go and do the next Avatar film or the next James Bond. What are the African stories that have not yet been told that you can make with technology?”

That question—what stories have not yet been told—is what gives the Naija AI Film Festival its significance. It is less about the novelty of a new technology and more about its potential to widen the canvas for African storytelling. The festival was just the beginning; the real story is in what comes after.

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1. In a country where history was once erased from schools, projects like Archiving safeguard collective memory and help Nigerians reconnect with their past.

2. Archiving is moving beyond preservation to interpretation—transforming static records into living knowledge that can break cycles of political, social, and economic mistakes.

3. With growing demand for digitised archives in AI, research, and cultural storytelling, Archiving could position Nigeria firmly within the global memory and knowledge economy.

1. The August Event

“We will devote the next two years to studying and understanding Nigeria’s cycle of repetition and then try to figure out how to interrupt it.”

This was Fu’ad Lawal, co-founder and executive director of Archiving, a non-profit organisation working to digitise old Nigerian newspapers and magazines, laying out the focus for the next phase of the project, pointedly titled “The More Things Change,” at the maiden edition of its flagship event, The August Event.

Held inside a Lagos art gallery, the two-day event was equal parts Apple-style showcase of new products, graduation ceremony for the inaugural cohort of the Archiving Fellowship, and exhibition of the fellows’ work.

Since its launch in 2023, Archiving has captured the zeitgeist with its mission to preserve Nigerian history by scanning old newspapers. It has grown from a crowdfunded experiment into a full-scale non-profit safeguarding the country’s collective memory.

But for much of its existence, the project has been focused on preservation: scanning old newspapers and making them available to the public. The next act is about interpretation: building the tools and frameworks to uncover the patterns buried in those archives. The idea is simple: if you can trace how crises like fuel subsidies, currency devaluations, or ethnic tensions have recurred across decades, then you create the possibility of breaking the cycle rather than repeating it.

And Nigeria, for all its potential, is a country so prone to repeating historical mistakes that this project is almost a no-brainer. To make this more imperative, Nigeria took out “History” from its list of school subjects in 1982 and only began reintroducing it in the 2010s.

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2. The foundations of a national archive

In October 2023, Archiving went live with its first collection: digitised copies of PM News newspapers. For the first time, Nigerians could digitally access old newspapers. But the journey to that milestone was anything but linear.

Archiving started in 2020 with Fu’ad Lawal, former editor-in-chief of the youth and pop culture publication Zikoko, who had struggled to find historical context for contemporary stories. That frustration sparked a seemingly impossible mission: to locate and archive one Nigerian newspaper for every day between 1960 and 2010. Within five months, with the help of friends, he had tracked down 95% of the target collection.

However, finding the papers was only the beginning. Navigating Nigeria’s government bureaucracy to register as a non-profit, without which Archiving could not access national archives and crowdfunding to secure an industrial-grade scanner, proved much harder. Add in a global supply-chain crisis, which delayed the arrival of the scanner that the entire project rested upon, and immigration bottlenecks. Things were looking dire. But, against the odds, Archiving pushed through, scanned its first pages in April 2023 and launched its searchable archive six months later.

3. How memory projects evolve

Many studies have examined the development of memory projects like Archiving, from Jan Assmann’s cultural memory theory to Maurice Halbwachs’ idea of collective memory. Broadly, the evolution of such projects tends to follow five stages.

The first stage is conception, when a community, institution, or individual recognises the urgency of safeguarding a story, tradition, or experience at risk of being forgotten. This spark often comes from cultural loss, political upheaval, or a desire to preserve identity.

Next is research and documentation, where testimonies, artefacts, and records are gathered.

The third stage, preservation and archiving, ensures materials are stored securely and made accessible—whether through physical repositories like museums and libraries or digital platforms and databases.

Once preserved, the project moves to interpretation and storytelling. Here, memory is given context and shared meaning through exhibitions, documentaries, performances, or online narratives that frame how audiences understand the past.

The fifth step is public engagement and education, where memory becomes active in schools, communities, and public debates. This stage ensures it informs identity and dialogue, not just storage.

Archiving launched at a critical moment in Nigeria’s history. The current president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, had just taken office following an election riddled with irregularities, and public distrust was high. Almost immediately, the platform’s search data reflected the anxieties of the time. “When we launched, the number one search query was Tinubu. We were scared the government was going to shut us down, but that didn’t happen,” Lawal recalled.

But politics was not the only obsession driving people into the archives. Sport was another major subject of interest. Requests poured in from as far afield as Brazil, where researchers and fans wanted records of Brazilian football clubs touring Nigeria in the 1980s.

No matter how vast a newspaper archive is, it is only as powerful as the meaning people can extract from it. Nigerians searching for “Tinubu” were not simply looking for headlines but patterns of behaviour to understand their new president: what he had said in the past, what had been said about him, and the scandals he had been involved in. These early queries pointed to Archiving’s need to move to the next stage in the evolution process: interpretation.

4. Giving context to the archives

In August 2024, Archiving launched The Archivist, a quarterly digital publication designed to help interpret the vast trove of data it was gathering. Shortly after, it introduced the inaugural Archiving Fellowship, aimed at multi-disciplinary creators eager to use the archives to reinterpret Nigerian history across formats. Samson Toromade, former editor-in-chief of Pulse Nigeria, joined the team as head of storytelling and community to lead this new phase.

The fellowship’s projects premiered at The August Event. They included No Way Home: The Genesis of the Exodus, a documentary on Nigerian migration patterns; The Ordinary Nigerians Podcast, chronicling everyday lives from pre-amalgamation to post-independence; Yellow Sunset, an animated short about the Nigerian Civil War; and Documenting the Stories Behind Black Orpheus, a series of essays on Nigeria’s first literary magazine.

But Archiving’s ambitions extend beyond the fellowship. The platform is also launching Context by Archiving, an AI chatbot that makes it easier to search and understand Nigerian history using natural language processing, and an Oral History Project to capture memories of older people before they are lost.

“Our belief is that people’s personal history is also national history. People exist in the context of what we consider national history. So we want to talk to as many people as possible—people with stories that feed into what becomes history,” Toromade told Communiqué.

Archiving’s oral history push joins a growing ecosystem of similar efforts. In 2024, the Nigerian Wikimedia Foundation began documenting indigenous languages through oral storytelling, while AI artist Malik Afegbua, building on the success of his Elderly Series, launched an oral history project in Ikorodu to preserve the voices of Nigerians aged 80 and above.

5. Funding the future

Archiving initially relied on crowdfunding to fund all this work, raising $38,000 across different campaigns. In 2024, it received a $160,000 grant from the Luminate Foundation. Now, the non-profit is developing a funding strategy that blends international grants, corporate CSR funding, private philanthropy, individual donations, and community or membership contributions.

There is still one source Archiving has not yet tapped: partnerships with international tech companies. With the growing adoption of AI, platforms are searching for data to enrich their large language models. In July 2023, the Associated Press signed a deal with OpenAI, granting access to its archive going as far back as 1985 to train its models and provide ChatGPT responses. OpenAI has also signed similar deals with other publishers, including Vox, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, the Financial Times Group, News Corp and The Atlantic. The Information reported that these deals range between $1 million and $5 million. This could become a significant revenue source for Archiving.

But there is a caveat: Archiving is only an aggregator, not a publisher, so it cannot directly license the newspapers on its platform. If it does, it will have to figure out a revenue split with the paper publishers.

Archiving is in the fourth stage in the evolution of memory projects, where data becomes usable knowledge. Without this stage, archives risk becoming static museums: impressive, but inert. But with it, they can transform into dynamic tools for sensemaking, helping societies understand their past, confront their present, and perhaps interrupt the cycles they seem destined to repeat.

If Archiving succeeds, old newspapers will no longer be just a record of what happened; they will help determine what happens next. And they will colour the stories we tell about the future.

1. Even well-funded, politically connected media houses aren’t immune to ad declines and digital disruption.

2. Capital alone doesn’t guarantee survival—execution and adaptability matter.

3. Mediamax’s decline is a cautionary tale on scaling without sustainable, audience-first models.

In an internal memo sent to staff members on July 14, Nairobi-based Mediamax Network announced a planned restructuring exercise that would result in an undisclosed number of redundancies within the company.

It was Mediamax’s sixth round of layoffs in just four years. The network’s most prominent shareholder is the family of Kenya’s former President Uhuru Kenyatta. It operates several media brands, including K24 and Kameme, two of the country’s largest TV and radio stations, respectively.

In the July 14 memo, the group CEO Ken Ngaruiya blamed the layoffs on declining ad spend, digital disruption and unfavourable government policies. It’s not hard to imagine. Nation Media Group, Standard, Radio Africa Group, and Capital FM—some of the country’s largest media companies—have all undertaken multiple layoffs in recent years and pointed to similar factors.

“Media houses relied heavily on advertisements, but with poor economic performance, fewer firms are advertising with mainstream media as it’s more expensive than social media,” Kevin Rotich, an editor at Nairobi-based Capital FM, explained to Communiqué. He also observed that younger audiences had moved away from traditional news sources with the rise of social media and influencers.

But, depending on who you ask, Mediamax’s slow decline has been exacerbated by many of its own decisions.

1. The takeover

Rose Kimotho is one of Kenya’s most legendary media figures. She started off her career as a print journalist in 1978, before moving into public relations, where she ran multiple agencies. But it was in the broadcasting business that she made her mark. In the late 90s, Kimotho spotted an opportunity as Kenya’s government liberalised broadcasting airwaves after decades of state monopoly.

The emerging radio stations, such as the iconic Capital FM, catered to upmarket audiences and broadcast in English. The market leader at the time, state-owned Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, did so in English and Swahili, the country’s two official languages. Kenya, however, has 42 unique ethnic communities, each with its own language. Kimotho launched Kameme FM, a pioneering vernacular language radio station targeting the populous Kikuyu community by broadcasting in their language. It quickly gained popularity among Kikuyu speakers and set the stage for the explosion of vernacular radio in Kenya, as each community sought to have its own station.

As of 2024, Kameme FM was Kenya’s second most popular vernacular radio station and the country’s seventh most popular radio station, according to the Media Council of Kenya. Although Mediamax does not publicly disclose its reports, Kameme remains the most valuable asset in the network’s portfolio, as confirmed by current and former employees who spoke to Communiqué.

In 2007, having succeeded in radio, the ever enterprising Kimotho saw a new gap in television and moved to establish K24, styled as Kenya’s first all-news 24-hour channel à la CNN. She hired big names, including Jeff Koinange, the Kenyan presenter who had left CNN a few years earlier under a cloud of allegations. But at the end of 2007, disaster struck as Kenya witnessed one of its darkest moments ever.

Alleged rigging of that year’s general election sparked ethnic violence around the country. Ironically, vernacular radio stations were among those blamed for the violence. Radio and TV ad revenues plummeted. Kimotho’s company could no longer service a ballooning bank overdraft. The loan was taken from CBA (now NCBA), a bank associated with the Kenyatta family, which would eventually take over the media business Kimotho had built. As of 2024, K24 was the country’s third most popular TV station with 28% of TV viewers tuning in weekly, according to a survey by the Media Council of Kenya.

“The saddest thing in the history of the country and the history of K24 is the Post Election Víolence (PEV). Because after that, we had no advertisers. We didn’t have the deep pockets that Nation had,” Kimotho said on a podcast in 2022.

2. More money, more problems

Now under the stewardship of the Kenyattas, Mediamax rebounded in the 2010s. Kameme’s performance remained healthy. And on TV, K24 was gaining a foothold as shows such as Jeff Koinange’s talk show, The Bench, proved popular. Mediamax was now truly competing with media giants such as Nation Media Group, Standard and Royal Media Services. And with their new wealthy and politically connected owners, no one was ruling them out.

The network grew quickly in the 2010s, hiring hundreds of staff and opening bureaus around the country. It launched several more vernacular stations targeting different communities – Meru, Maasai, and Mijikenda. It also launched Kameme TV. In 2014, it unveiled its free newspaper, People Daily, which was distributed to motorists and newspaper stands for free. Uhuru Kenyatta was elected president for the first time just a year earlier, and some critics viewed the paper as a government mouthpiece.

But as the 2010s neared their end, the cracks in Mediamax started to show. Salaries were often delayed, and some staff members complained of a general lack of professionalism and wrongful dismissals. “You would expect every month to get your salary around 15 days late, it even feels like an advance instead of your salary,” said one employee who left the company in 2020 and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Ken Ngaruiya, now CEO, was the CFO at the time. According to current and former employees, people could also be let go on a whim if they got on the wrong side of senior executives.

In October 2019, the company also began a practice that would become somewhat of a tradition – mass layoffs. It axed 160 employees, including senior editors and reporters, as part of a restructuring effort ostensibly to reduce operational costs. The company cited a challenging economic environment. But this was only the start of its woes.

3. The Text

Joseph, a seasoned K24 studio operator, was among the employees who received an ultimatum in 2020, soon after the pandemic began in March. It came from the CFO turned CEO, Ken Ngaruiya. Accept a lower salary, or lose your job. Considering the economic impact of the pandemic, some employees accepted the offer. But others, like Joseph, who were already concerned about the delayed payments, chose not to accept lower salaries. They were soon issued with redundancy notices in yet another restructuring effort.

On July 21, Joseph, whose name has been changed to preserve anonymity, and numerous other employees received a text from HR. “I am contacting you with regards to the redundancy notice issued on 21st May 2020. The notice period has expired. Unfortunately, your position has been affected by way of redundancy. I would like to invite you to Emory Hotel in Kileleshwa tomorrow, Monday, 22nd at 9:30 am to discuss what this means to your employment,” it read. After nearly 10 years at the company, Joseph and around 100 of his colleagues were let go by Mediamax.

The firing through text caused a storm with organisations, including the Kenya Union of Journalists (KUJ), calling out the company. Affected employees, many of whom were still owed their salaries, moved to court as the Kenya Union of Journalists (KUJ) filed a petition for unfair dismissal. “The company eventually came up with a bad plan where, regardless of what they owed you, they would pay you a little bit every month, but some people had huge deficits and they were getting just Kes10,000 per month,” he told Communiqué.

Within a year, at least 260 employees had exited the company. The macroeconomic environment at the height of the pandemic didn’t help matters either, and also affected their competition, like Nation and Standard, which undertook layoffs in 2020. The expectation among some observers that then-President Kenyatta and his family would bankroll Mediamax through harsh economic times was quickly shattered. Another similar restructuring effort would take place in 2021, and yet again in December 2022, when it fired an undisclosed number of employees, including news presenters and anchors.

4. Power play

The high turnover made it difficult for Mediamax to maintain a strong growth trajectory, with strategies disrupted and the people running them constantly changing. But in 2022, something else happened. William Ruto, the deputy president who had fallen out with Uhuru in his second term, was elected president. His winning campaign message? “Hustlers versus Dynasties,” which was meant to pit the masses against Kenya’s legacy political families, such as the Kenyattas. Ruto claimed to be a “hustler” who pulled himself up by the bootstraps and understood the pain of regular Kenyans. He won by just over 200,000 votes, defeating veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga, who had Uhuru Kenyatta’s backing.

Several moves made by the new Ruto administration would push Mediamax further into the doldrums, as was evidenced by Ngaruiya’s internal memo in July. Among them was a decision to take away government advertising contracts from the likes of Nation, Standard and Mediamax’s People Daily. In his memo, Ngaruiya pointed to factors including “delays in the settlement of pending bills from both the national and county governments.”

In March last year, it emerged that some Mediamax journalists were owed salary arrears of up to a year, highlighting the increasingly dire situation at the company. “Kameme is the only thing that’s making money,” said one executive. K24 is losing money, he said, and so was its print publication, People Daily, which it stopped printing in November 2024.

People Daily, which had been distributed free for 10 years, in November 2024 announced that it would cease printing physical copies and move entirely online. Ngaruiya framed it as a move to reduce the company’s carbon footprint and adapt to evolving media consumption habits. But really, things were changing all around Mediamax. Long-feared shifts in media consumption habits were crystallising, and companies such as theirs were losing ground. Amid its constant downsizing and office politics, Mediamax was slow in following its audience online and adapting its offering to them. Some of the numerous talented journalists and producers who passed through the company never got a chance to see their ideas flourish, as they were affected by layoffs.

5. And now

The latest round of layoffs in July only accentuated the challenges that have become a big part of Mediamax’s story in the 2020s. But the company now remains in limbo, and its employees are uncertain about their futures and the company’s. Interestingly, the company has continued to advertise several roles, including key editorial positions.

Kameme remains the golden goose. K24 is Kenya’s fourth most popular TV station, but media revenues are declining across the industry. The station is tailoring new shows for young audiences, hoping to win them over with political conversations on issues that matter to them. It’s also making a streaming push with its K24 Plus service, which includes pay-per-view options for local content as well as live Mediamax channels.

Some, including former employees, say that the layoffs are a calculated effort to phase out more experienced and higher-earning employees, including editors, producers and presenters, in favour of younger and more affordable workers.

Mediamax, which was once seen as a potentially successful challenger of Kenya’s media companies, is no longer vying to take over. It’s fighting to survive. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

1. Target affordability gaps in established markets: When traditional pricing models exclude large segments of the population. Creative entrepreneurs can create accessible alternatives that serve underserved audiences, rather than focusing solely on premium segments.

2. Build Full-Stack Creative Ecosystems: Rather than single-point solutions, Fusion built an integrated stack—content delivery, ticketing, reporting, and venue operations. Creative startups should adopt this approach to unlock multiple revenue streams and increase user retention.

3. Leverage Policy Shifts and Local Partnerships: Fusion benefited from licensing waivers and partnered with co-working spaces and distributors. Creative entrepreneurs should monitor policy changes and collaborate with existing networks to scale quickly and reduce setup costs.

1. The community cinema detour

In August, Red Circle, the film debut of maverick director Nora Awolowo, will begin screening at four Café One co-working locations across the country, including Owerri, Kaduna, Uyo, and Enugu.

Red Circle debuted in June to rave reviews and a ₦25 million opening weekend gross. By the third week, it had crossed the ₦100 million mark. Previously, for most Nigerian films, an impressive cinema run like that would typically be followed by a streaming deal months later. But before that, Red Circle is taking a detour: a community cinema run powered by Fusion Intelligence, a Lagos-based technology solutions provider for the hospitality industry.

Fusion Intelligence launched FilmHub, its flagship community cinema initiative, earlier this month with a screening of Omoni Oboli’s Wives On Strike 3. FilmHub offers the features of a traditional community cinema, including low-cost projection technology, locally adapted programming, and grassroots partnerships, to provide a more inclusive alternative to the normal cinema multiplex model.

But rather than targeting only rural or hard-to-reach communities, which has long been the default purpose and strategy for community cinema, Fusion Intelligence is betting that the model can also thrive in Nigeria’s bustling urban centres, where large populations exist outside the reach or affordability of conventional cinema.

2. From Filmhouse to Fusion Intelligence

The primary reason for Nigeria’s underwhelming box office performance in the international market is affordability. In 2019, total box office revenue reached a record 6.9 billion naira, equivalent to $17.7 million at the time. Five years later, that figure had nearly doubled in naira terms, reaching 11.4 billion naira in 2024; however, due to steep currency devaluation, that amounted to just $7 million. For context, the Superman movie released earlier this month grossed $125 million in its opening weekend.

This currency mismatch placed cinema operators in a bind: most of their major expenses, including licensing, software, and equipment, are priced in dollars. Global-standard cinema management software, such as Vista Cloud, could cost as much as $80,000 annually. To survive, cinemas passed these costs on to their audiences. Over the last decade, the average cinema ticket price in Nigeria surged by more than 300%, from 1,080 naira to 4,380 naira, effectively pricing out the majority of Nigerians.

Kolade Adewoye, founder of Fusion Intelligence, first became aware of this problem in 2019, during his compulsory national service, when he worked at Filmhouse Cinemas as a business intelligence analyst. “I felt we could have a low-cost alternative for Nigerian cinemas. Maybe within three months, we could have a prototype,” Adewoye told Communiqué. But he would not start building a solution until a few years later.

Following his stint at Film House, Adewoye joined Step Inclusive, a startup that builds payment software for the Lagos State transport sector. When that startup failed, he took what was left of the technical team to start Fusion Intelligence. Fusion Intelligence’s first iteration was as a web development agency, building websites and mobile apps for companies such as Sterling Bank and ABC Transport.

However, the 2023 economic downturn forced the company to rethink its strategy. Instead of running an agency business model with one-off clients who were easily affected by Nigeria’s rapidly changing economic headwinds, it would build digital products that generate recurring revenue. Armed with ₦100 million (around $200,000) raised in a friends and family round, Adewoye began pivoting the business to focus on digital products for the hospitality sector.

Fusion Intelligence launched REACH, a cinema management software similar to Vista Plus, providing ticketing service for Nigerian cinemas, and Kudos, a box office reporting software for cinemas, enabling them to dispense royalties to distributors the next day. By early 2025, REACH was powering 49% of West Africa’s cinemas, including Ebony Life Cinema, the region’s highest-grossing location. Fusion Intelligence also launched Foodease, a restaurant management software with clients like Pannarottis Pizza and King Lace Ice Cream.

However, with REACH approaching saturation in the Nigerian market, Adewoye began to consider ways to expand the market. That was when he settled on the community cinema model.

3. Nigeria’s community cinema roots

Community cinema in Nigeria dates back to the early 20th century, during the colonial era, when film exhibition first arrived as a form of entertainment and education. The medium began with peephole viewing devices in the late 19th century, then evolved to motion picture screenings by the early 1900s, with some of the earliest films showing at Lagos’s Glover Memorial Hall in 1903.

During the 1930s and 1940s, cinema houses became key social venues in cities like Lagos, operated mainly by companies like the West African Pictures Company. However, the films shown were mostly foreign productions, with little Nigerian content. To counter this, the Nigerian Film Unit, with the aid of mobile cinema vans, began playing educational and health-themed films across the country, screening to millions for free and slowly increasing indigenous Nigerian content. However, as the cinema industry continued to develop, the community cinema model slowly died out, used only during periods of health crises to drive awareness in highly remote areas.

Elsewhere in Africa, the community cinema model has found some success. In 2016, Canal+ launched Canal Olympia, a chain of eco-friendly cinemas across Francophone Africa, which improved on the community cinema model. Instead of just having a cinema hall, Canal Olympia incorporated live performance venues at its locations, turning the cinema into a cultural centre for the community. The model has become very popular, with Canal Olympia opening 18 locations across 12 countries in Francophone Africa, including Benin, Ivory Coast, and Togo.

But when Canal Olympia tried to expand in Nigeria using the traditional community cinema model, it faltered. In December 2020, it opened its first location in Mararaba in Nassarawa State, near the outskirts of Abuja, in a grand ceremony attended by the Governor of Nassarawa State, the French Ambassador, and the Director of the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board. But the opening fanfare did not translate to steady patronage. Four months later, the cinema manager, Aminu Yahaya, was complaining about the location. “A cinema entertainment of this nature is alien to the people of Mararaba, as they are used to clubs, joints, and beer parlours. We are taking our time to understand the environment to reach out to the people effectively.” In 2023, the location was shut down.

Now Fusion Intelligence is adopting the community cinema model, but instead of rural areas, it’s betting on urban areas. Specifically, locations with already existing foot traffic, such as restaurants and co-working spaces, can be provided with film screenings as an added feature.

4. Fusion Intelligence’s community cinema playbook

To do this, Fusion Intelligence will have to solve another problem: low trust. One of the main reasons community cinema has failed to catch on with commercial distributors and major studios is the fear of piracy. Conventional cinemas are equipped with Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI)-compliant projectors, which encrypt films using a secure digital key system. These projectors are part of a global anti-piracy infrastructure that ensures a movie can only be played in authorised locations, at pre-approved times. However, DCI projectors are prohibitively expensive, typically starting at $40,000 and reaching as high as $150,000, which presents another barrier for small businesses or community-led initiatives seeking to screen films legally and securely.

To address this bottleneck, Fusion Intelligence built Convoy, a secure cinema distribution technology that allows filmmakers and studios to deliver encrypted films to non-traditional screening locations without compromising copyright protection.

Rather than requiring expensive hardware, Convoy is designed to work with a wide range of projection systems, including lower-cost projectors used in co-working spaces, restaurants, and pop-up venues. According to Adewoye, this opens the door for hundreds of previously unviable screening venues, no longer constrained by DCI hardware requirements, to become cinema outlets. “We are targeting hotels, lounges, restaurants, places where people can go for the cheap tickets and then stay and spend on food and drinks because they believe that they are getting a deal on a night out.”

With Convoy, Fusion Intelligence makes a compelling pitch to both filmmakers and exhibitors: show your film in more places safely, and earn revenue from an entirely new class of venues. Fusion Intelligence will also provide ticketing and box office reporting services for these locations through REACH and Kudos.

“To combat piracy, we have content protection. To combat low trust, we have next-day disbursement of royalties. So with all of that technology and infrastructure in place, we can start meeting people to open up community cinemas.”

Fusion Intelligence’s business model for FilmHub is a hybrid of software licensing and revenue sharing. Locations pay an annual fee of 1 million naira to access Fusion Intelligence’s full suite of products. In addition to licensing, Fusion Intelligence operates a revenue-sharing arrangement in a 40:40:20 ratio—40% of ticket revenue goes to the film distributor, and another 40% to the location operator. Fusion Intelligence takes the remaining 20% cut as the platform provider.

Nile Entertainment has already come on board as a distribution partner, giving FilmHub access to an impressive film library that includes Wives on Strike, Radio Voice, Makemation, and Red Circle. Talks are also underway with other leading distribution companies such as FilmOne Entertainment and Tribe Nation Theatrical Distribution to expand the content catalogue available across FilmHub-powered venues.

A favourable shift in government policy is backing the rollout. In October 2024, the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) announced a licensing waiver for investors interested in establishing community cinemas nationwide. This is part of a broader push by the Ministry of Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy to revitalise the local exhibition sector.

Previously, exhibitors had to pay ₦250,000 for a national license and an additional ₦200,000 per film location. Fusion Intelligence was among the first entities to benefit from the waiver, enabling them to open multiple FilmHub locations without the burden of upfront regulatory fees.

Despite its promise, many remain sceptical about the viability of the community cinema model. However, Fusion Intelligence has a few factors working in its favour: secure film distribution through Convoy, flexible infrastructure that lowers costs for exhibitors, and a supportive policy environment. The company is betting these will be enough to make the model work at scale. And Adewoye is optimistic.

“Some people think, maybe this might not make the money we think it would make. Maybe the ticket price is too cheap. And for us, the only job that we have to do is to market it as hard as possible. It’s a make-or-break moment for us. We have to make it work.”

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Key points.

1. Local Voices Matter: Audiences connect more deeply when content is produced and presented by people who understand their culture and context. Invest in local talent to build trust and loyalty.

2. Think Mobile-First: Sporty’s success shows that mobile is the gateway to scale in Africa. Distribution strategies should prioritise phones, not just traditional TV or desktop screens.

3. Pair Content with Smart Monetisation: Sporty TV uses free sports to drive ad revenue and cross-sell betting. Creative businesses should explore hybrid models that link free content to strong revenue streams.

1. A sporting spectacle

The 2025 Club World Cup final in New Jersey had just about everything football fans have come to expect from a major tournament final, and then some. On the pitch, Chelsea delivered the stuff of fairy tales, clinching a dramatic win as underdogs against PSG. After the match, a brief scuffle broke out, adding a touch of the chaos that football finals often serve up.

But other parts of the spectacle felt distinctly un-football-like. At halftime, thousands of fans in the MetLife Stadium and millions more watching worldwide were treated to a mini concert headlined by Tems, J Balvin, Doja Cat, Emmanuel Kelly, and Coldplay; more Super Bowl than World Cup. And when the medals were handed out, there was Donald Trump, grinning on the podium as Chelsea’s players lifted the gleaming trophy to ecstatic cheers from supportive fans and a chorus of boos from the president's detractors.

The tournament as a whole had been very different. In a bid to make the Club World Cup truly global—despite stiff opposition from some of football’s most powerful federations and leagues—FIFA had revamped the tournament into a quadrennial, 32-team showpiece with a staggering $1 billion prize pool. Africa, long starved of representation at the highest level of club football, now had four guaranteed slots in the expanded format.

Yet the most significant shift for the continent wasn’t on the pitch, but in how millions of Africans watched the tournament. By the final whistle, more than 17 million YouTube views had been logged for Sporty TV’s live coverage of the tournament. That figure was just a slice of the total audience. Across free-to-air channels and partner stations, Sporty TV had brought the competition into millions of more African homes for free.

Over the past three years, Sporty TV, a subsidiary of Sporty Group, the company behind SportyBet has quietly built a reputation as the continent’s new home of live sport. Its growing portfolio of free-to-air rights now spans some of the world’s biggest competitions, including the English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, the Olympics, the Euros, and even the upstart Baller League.

In a region where access to premium sports has long been locked behind expensive paywalls, Sporty TV is betting that bringing top-tier action to anyone with a TV set or a mobile phone could be its most significant win yet.

2. Betting big on mobile.

Sudeep Ramnani was still a student at the London School of Economics when he attended a guest lecture about how quickly mobile phones were spreading across Africa. Sensing an opportunity to use this mobile revolution to drive financial inclusion, Ramnani launched I-Cash, a pin voucher system that let people pay for goods and services online by redeeming unique codes bought offline. I-Cash didn't take off, but his next venture would be a massive success.

In 2013, Ramnani launched SportyBet. The betting platform rode Africa’s mobile wave to massive success, thanks in part to a savvy deal with Transsion, the Chinese smartphone maker behind the Tecno, Infinix, and Itel brands. By getting the SportyBet app pre-installed on millions of Transsion smartphones, it put itself right in the pockets of Africa’s growing generation of mobile-first consumers. While there are no exact numbers of SportyBet users, PalmPay, the fintech venture Ramnani co-founded in 2019, would repeat the same playbook—reaching 30 million users within four years.

Building on the success of SportyBet, Sporty Group launched Sporty TV in 2022, signalling its ambition to become more than just a betting powerhouse. For Sudeep Ramnani, the move into media wasn’t entirely new territory. He had already dipped his toes in Africa’s digital broadcast industry as an early investor in Iroko TV. (He was also an investor in Paystack and Chowdeck.) But running a sports channel of his own had always been the real prize.

To bring the vision to life, Ramnani turned to Oluchi Enuha, Iroko TV’s former Head of Data and Analytics. In his time at Iroko, Enuha had played a pivotal role in some of the company’s key initiatives, including the launch of Iroko X, an early short-form video platform for African creators. This experience gave him a deep understanding of both the digital infrastructure and the audience dynamics needed to scale an African media venture.

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3. Breaking Africa’s sports paywalls.

The current model for sports viewing in Africa is largely exclusionary. Take Nigeria, for example: MultiChoice, the continent’s dominant pay-TV operator, boasts around 7.5 million subscribers in the country. Yet surveys show that as much as 67% of Nigerians, (over 120 million people) want to watch live football matches. The gap between desire and access is stark, and it’s driven by one thing: the steep cost of satellite subscriptions. For many families, premium sports packages are simply unaffordable luxuries.

This paywall problem is the reality in most African markets, where live sports rights have long been locked away behind expensive decoders and monthly fees. This leaves millions of die-hard fans resorting to illegal and unreliable streams, overcrowded viewing centres, or missing out entirely. To fix that, Sporty TV focused on free-to-air rights, which had been largely underutilised on the continent.

To launch, Sporty TV picked Nigeria as its first market. These decision came with its own challenges. Decades earlier, in the wake of the Nigerian Civil War and the propaganda threat posed by Biafra Radio during the war, the Nigerian government, through the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), had imposed strict limits on how far private and regional stations could broadcast. Under this system, only the federal government retained the right to operate truly nationwide broadcast stations over the country’s analog terrestrial network.

In 2006, Nigeria signed on to the International Telecommunication Union’s global mandate to migrate from analog to digital terrestrial broadcasting a move meant to expand access, free up spectrum, and modernise the broadcast sector, creating the opportunity for a truly nationwide broadcast station. But the transition did not begin until 2015 when a government white paper laid out a phased implementation plan.

While the digital switch-over looked promising on paper, in practice it stalled badly, bogged down by bureaucracy and missed deadlines. By 2023, despite spending over $500 million on the project, only 8 out of Nigeria’s 36 states had partial digital coverage; the rest of the country remained stuck on analog, meaning true nationwide reach was only possible through satellite, an expensive route that clashed with Sporty TV’s free-to-air promise.

Sporty TV found a workaround. To stay free and accessible, it struck a strategic partnership with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), the national broadcaster with a sprawling network of over 100 stations that collectively cover the entire country.

Sporty TV launched in Nigeria with the English Premier League. But Sporty TV didn’t stop at showing the games free of charge—it invested heavily in local production too. Instead of simply rebroadcasting foreign feeds, Sporty TV ensures that commentary and match analysis are done by African voices who understand the audience and local context.

“It is important to us that a match be locally produced. We take these matches and present them to our people in an African way. That familiarity should be there at all times,” Enuha said to Communiqué. “As we evolve, we would give more opportunity to our audience to be part of the conversation. The same way that when I'm in Europe and I'm watching Sky Sports, I see they have more and more audience interaction between presenters, pundits, and fans.”

This local-first approach has become a hallmark of the channel’s strategy, even as it expands across Africa. Since 2022, Sporty TV has launched in three more countries. In 2023, the channel went live in Ghana, tapping respected sports journalist and former Head of Sports at Ghana’s Multimedia Group to lead Sporty Ghana’s content operations.

This year, Sporty TV went live in South Africa and Kenya. In Kenya, Sporty even doubled down, launching Sporty FM, the country’s first 24/7 English-language sports radio station.

Meanwhile, the channel’s content arsenal keeps growing. Beyond the Premier League, Sporty TV has secured free-to-air rights for the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, the Saudi Pro League, the Carabao Cup, the Olympics, and the just concluded FIFA Club World Cup, where it broadcast 24 of the tournament’s available 63 matches live across YouTube, its website, and partner stations.

4. The African sports rights opportunity.

Globally, the ways in which the world watches sport have been shifting fast. Streaming giants have realised that live sports is the crown jewel for retaining subscribers, and they’re paying handsomely for it. This arms race has driven the global market for sports rights to a projected $64 billion by 2026, up from $51 billion in 2019.

In 2018, Amazon Prime grabbed headlines when it secured the rights to stream 20 Premier League matches per season for three years at around £30 million per season. By 2022, Apple TV+ got in on the live sports game, clinching a 10-season, $250 million-per-year deal to stream Major League Soccer. YouTube, too, is now a major player, securing NFL Sunday Ticket games for an eye-watering $2.5 billion per season for seven seasons, and the big streamers are already preparing for the inevitable bidding war when FIFA’s World Cup rights come up again.

Yet amid this global scramble, Africa’s sports rights have remained largely on the sidelines. During the 2021 African Cup of Nations, some matches were streamed on YouTube on the Confederation of African Football (CAF) channel with no publicly disclosed rights deal between the platform and CAF, potentially leaving millions of dollars on the table.

Now Sporty TV has embraced YouTube as a core part of its distribution strategy, and the focus is on driving accessibility while the potential revenue from the continent’s sports properties comes second.

“We had over 17 million views across four countries in Africa. That is 17 million views that may have never existed because people couldn't afford to pay.” Enuha said to Communiqué

For Sporty TV, the revenue model leans on advertising and, crucially, serves as a powerful marketing funnel for SportyBet. During the Club World Cup broadcasts, match commentators didn’t just analyse the play they also dropped live betting odds at intervals, seamlessly weaving SportyBet into the viewing experience.

But for Sporty TV, it’s about access. By putting top-tier football on free-to-air TV, mobile, and YouTube, it is testing whether a continent that has long been locked out of premium sport can finally have a seat in the front row. For Sporty TV—and the millions who tune in—that might be the biggest win of all.

1. The notion that a media company should solely be a media company is outdated, just as the idea that anyone can become a media company is more true today than ever.

2. The future media entrepreneur is not building a publication — they’re creating a platform for experimentation, monetization, and expansion. The product isn’t always the content; sometimes, the content is just the gateway.

3. Most people view media as a product. However, for the smartest entrepreneurs, media can serve as a foundation for testing, launching, and scaling new business lines.

1. Everything is everything

It used to be much easier to define what a media company is. If you produced content, packaged it (however you saw fit), and distributed it to an audience, you were a media company. Ideally, you’d have a defined set of equipment and resources (cameras, radio masts, printing presses, etc.) and a specific group of people (journalists, production crew, studio engineers, etc.). What you were was never in doubt. Who qualified as “media” was never a question.

But that’s all in the past. We are in a new era. You hear things like, “Anyone can be a media company.” Or, “Everything is media these days.” Often, this is backed by clichés: anyone with a smartphone can become a media company, media is now decentralized, everything is democratized, and so on. None of these statements is false.

In today’s world, content production and distribution have become commodities. While it is sometimes possible to strike gold with content ideas, the general concept of content creation has become so ubiquitous that it is increasingly challenging to convince consumers that it is worth paying for. And so, you find media companies stretching the boundaries of what is possible as businesses. Events are the lowest-hanging fruit. Then you have agency services (consulting, content marketing, etc.). With time, however, this has become a crowded house. Walk into a room full of media professionals, and you will bump into someone whose company offers one or both of these services.

As the definitions of media expand and the parameters for who or what qualifies as a media company stretch beyond elasticity, one must wonder what is next. We know what the past and present look like. But what does the future hold?

2. Paystack’s media threat, revisited

I spent most of 2021 obsessing over the idea of media as a growth lever for corporate entities.

It first culminated in an essay titled “Paystack’s media threat.” The central idea was that tech startups with more resources and dynamic problems to solve could build in-house operations to rival the media companies that covered them, to the point of competing on talent, production, and distribution.

At the time, Africa’s tech ecosystem was flush with cheap and foreign capital. Business fundamentals were less of a priority to investors in lieu of growth potential. VCs were more likely to invest in startups purely based on how fast and large they claimed they could grow, rather than on how they would actually achieve it.

This push for growth sparked several background conversations, one of which was the possibility of in-house media teams producing content solely as a means to an end: driving business growth.

In that essay, I wrote:

If a company with little to no pressure to monetize its media properties begins to tread deeper into the territory that was erstwhile occupied by traditional media companies whose livelihoods depend on reporting news and creating content, what happens then?

I added that:

For companies like Paystack, this is one more upside to the Internet. It allows them to bypass traditional middlemen and go straight to customers. The advent of the Internet means they can now achieve the same scale of engagement previously attainable only by the media. Now, individual organizations can, in theory, wield just as much influence as the media has on how people think and behave.

During that period, there was an uptick in vacancies for editorial and content strategy leads at tech startups. Even I was so compelled by this idea that I joined a startup to test it out. Since 2021, however, that wave has subsided. Cheap capital has dissipated and been replaced mainly with tougher investor relations and more challenging pre-investment conversations.

But the idea that media could serve as a growth engine for other business interests remains fundamentally true. What has changed is how that idea manifests itself.

3. Platform or product

In 2017, Big Cabal Media’s then-CEO, Seyi Taylor, made an interesting announcement. The company was launching its own content management system (CMS) and moving away from WordPress because the team was “spending so much time and energy modifying it to fit our purposes and dealing with performance issues.”

In theory, the idea was great: the system would allow users to experience content based on their format preferences, location, browsing history, time of day, and other factors. So, Formation was born. Zikoko, Big Cabal Media’s prized possession at the time, was growing at a geometric rate, almost like BuzzFeed had been doing globally. It required a CMS that could meet its many dynamic editorial and distribution needs. The business strategy was also straightforward: test Formation on Zikoko and then adopt it for TechCabal. If successful, it would be easier to onboard external clients and partners.

While Formation never really took off, the underlying concept was sound. The notion that a media company can look around and find opportunities to build products or services that turn its default state into a competitive advantage is more valid today than ever, especially with the industry’s dwindling fortunes.

In 2021, Axios, the U.S.-based new media company, launched Axios HQ, marking its entry into the SaaS business. Its flagship product, Smart Brevity, generated $1 million in licensing fees within the first eight months. But software products aren’t the only proof of concept here: Barstool Sports owns betting platforms, and The Skimm expanded from a newsletter into a lifestyle brand. In Africa, Multichoice has invested significantly in sports betting, fintech, and insurance over the years.

The notion that a media company should only be a media company is outdated, just as the idea that anyone can become a media company is significantly truer today than ever.

4. What would Bloomberg do?

The concept of media as a means to an end is simple: media companies can use the skills they’ve developed in audience engagement, trust, and distribution to test, build, and scale other business ventures. It is the idea that content doesn’t have to be the final product. Instead, it can serve as a platform — a lab, if you will — for testing ideas that have the potential to scale.

For most of us in this industry, Bloomberg is the north star: a successful media company with a successful consumer-facing product.

But what makes this possible? What does it take to become a company where media is not the end, but a means to a portfolio of successful business outcomes?

I. A mindset shift: The most significant transformation is philosophical. The notion that media is a self-contained end must give way to a more expansive view: Media is the engine, not the destination. This concept won’t apply to everyone, nor should it. However, for those who believe it is possible, it is worth ruminating upon.

Take Bloomberg, for example. It primarily produces content as a signal to its audience that it understands the markets. The terminal — the actual revenue driver — rides on top of that trust.

II. Audience intelligence: Media companies possess a unique advantage: they live inside the cultural and intellectual minds of their audiences. However, in most cases, this insight is underutilized.

For those who play their cards right, the audience is the biggest source of market insight and consumer patterns.

The goal is to transition from publishing for an audience to building for a community, informed by the kinds of insights that most startups pay a premium to extract from third-party data firms.

Everyone who consumes content has a need — a problem they’re trying hard to solve. Perhaps there is a business opportunity there. However, if you don’t engage with them, you wouldn’t know.

III. Owned distribution: Owned distribution grants media companies the power to launch anything. It’s why newsletters have quietly become one of the most effective channels for audience engagement. They enable media companies to connect directly with their audience. Beyond that, they provide a platform for understanding what that audience wants.

When executed correctly, they also create an avenue to seed ideas, products, and services without relying on external gatekeepers. Email lists with segmentation and intent tagging, community platforms where ideas can be incubated and refined, and multiformat reach (text, video, audio) enable more exhaustive experimentation and testing — all of which are only possible through an owned distribution strategy.

IV. Content as R&D: At Bloomberg, the terminal evolved directly from a deep understanding of financial professionals’ daily pain points. At Axios, the SaaS product Axios HQ emerged from their obsession with brevity and clarity in business communication. At Big Cabal Media, initiatives like Formation stemmed from content-led workflow bottlenecks.

Media companies don’t need to stop at just writing or talking about problems; they can build solutions for them.

Every comment section, open rate, or community thread presents a chance to ask: What are we learning that no one else knows? Then: How do we turn that into a product that only we can build?

5. Neatly in a bow

The idea that anyone can be a media company is now mainstream. However, what is less appreciated is that media companies can be anything — if they choose to be.

The opportunity now lies with those who are bold enough to ask: What else can we build with this audience, trust, and influence?

How can we turn our audience relationships from a finish line into a runway?

1. Legacy institutions can be revived with the right talent. The appointment of industry-savvy leaders, such as Tari Taylaur, at the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), demonstrates how strategic hires can reboot legacy organizations. Creative entrepreneurs can learn from this about the importance of experienced leadership and cross-sector experience. Investors, meanwhile, should not write off old brands too quickly; with the right talent and strategy, even stagnating assets can be turned into growth engines.

2. Great content needs great tech: Despite improved programming, NTA’s lack of digital infrastructure shows that great content means little without modern distribution. Entrepreneurs should prioritize digital accessibility, streaming, mobile-first platforms, and online engagement to stay competitive. Content and tech must grow hand in hand to succeed in today’s media landscape.

3. Authentic stories are the next big opportunity: NTA’s renewed focus on authentic Nigerian storytelling highlights a powerful truth: there is enduring value in content that reflects local realities, values, and cultures. For entrepreneurs, this reinforces the opportunity in creating culturally resonant media. The next big media hits might not come from copying global formats but from intensely local, well-told stories.

1. NTA courts Nollywood

Earlier this month, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) hosted a select group of Nollywood producers at its headquarters in Abuja. The occasion was a deliberate outreach by the state-owned broadcaster to court a new generation of Nigerian filmmakers who could produce content for the network. In return, NTA offered access to its sprawling network of over 100 stations across the country, still one of the most far-reaching broadcast footprints in Africa.

The meeting was an implementation of a larger, more strategic shift underway at the NTA: a renewed focus on original Nigerian programming. After years of stagnation and declining cultural relevance, the broadcaster was reintroducing itself not just as a government mouthpiece, but as a platform for authentic, locally made stories.

Some of those efforts are already on air. Temi and the Labalaba Band, a children’s musical drama licensed from Anthill Studios, now airs every Saturday morning, while Las Gidi, a co-production with X3M Ideas and Acon Media, brings a Lagos-set sitcom to NTA’s prime-time slot. Both shows reflect NTA’s evolving strategy: a blend of new originals, licensed Nigerian content, and the revival of classic titles from its storied archive.

If successful, this strategy could address one of the Nigerian film industry’s biggest challenges: profitable distribution.

2. When NTA ruled Nigerian TV

For every Nigerian born before 2000, this is a familiar sight: a family of four gathered in front of the TV to watch Super Story on Thursdays, just before the 9 pm Network News. And for Nigerians born before 1980, the gong of The Village Headmaster was a familiar sound and an unmistakable cue that it was time to sit down for one of the most beloved drama series ever produced on Nigerian television.

This deep cultural imprint is no accident. The Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), founded in May 1977 from a loose coalition of regional television stations, had a clear founding mandate: to inform, educate, and entertain the public. Backed by the federal government, it became the only authorized body for television broadcasting in Nigeria at the time.

While its news programming consistently toed the government line, it was NTA’s drama offerings that truly won over Nigerian audiences. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, NTA became the platform for a golden age of Nigerian television storytelling, featuring shows such as The Village Headmaster, New Masquerade, Cock Crow at Dawn, Behind the Clouds, and Mirror in the Sun.

These programmes entertained and helped define what local content meant in post-colonial Nigeria. NTA also served as a launching pad for generations of acting talent, including Pete Edochie, who rose to national prominence after starring in the TV adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s famed novel, Things Fall Apart.

However, this era of vibrant local storytelling began to fade in the 1990s, the result of a controversial directive from management that banned NTA staff from acting in drama productions. The rationale? The BBC didn’t allow its staff to participate in drama, and neither should the NTA. Peter Igho, a former Director of Programmes at the network, explained the consequences of that decision in this Nairametrics article: “It was cheaper and easier to use the staff for production,” he recalled. “Also, if a staff member is cast, he knows he has to show up since his job is on the line.” With few actors willing to resign their salaried positions to pursue uncertain acting roles, the network abruptly shelved many iconic programmes.

Imported content, especially South American telenovelas, filled the void left by these canceled shows. By the early 2000s, NTA’s programming had deviated significantly from its founding mission. Local content gave way to dubbed foreign soap operas, and the broadcaster increasingly relied on licensed material rather than homegrown stories. In 2013, at the height of its popularity, NTA signed a deal with the U.S.-based Viacom to rebroadcast some of its programmes, particularly from the MTV Base brand.

NTA’s government ownership also became a double-edged sword. While it guaranteed funding and reach (NTA now operates over 150 stations across Nigeria), it also meant the network would never stray from the official line dictated by whichever government was in power. In contrast, audiences increasingly viewed private stations such as Channels TV and AIT as more credible sources of independent news.

Without the original Nigerian dramas for which it was known and with its inability to provide unbiased news, NTA’s cultural credibility declined, and its audience along with it. In 2014, it was still the most viewed TV station in Nigeria. But by 2023, it had fallen to fifth place behind Channels TV, BBC, CNN, and TVC News. Once the nation’s unchallenged broadcasting titan, NTA had become a shadow of its former self.

3. Back to basics

New management at NTA is working to change this. In September 2024, President Bola Tinubu appointed a new executive board for the Nigerian Television Authority. Among them was Tari Taylaur, a media professional and politician, who assumed the role of Executive Director of Programmes. With nearly two decades of experience in Nigeria’s media and creative industries, Taylaur brought a fresh, industry-savvy perspective to the institution.

Before joining NTA, Taylaur ran Content Factory Global, a production company she founded in 2012. She worked on high-profile adaptations like The Apprentice Africa, Dragons’ Den Nigeria, and Desperate Housewives Africa. She also worked closely with state governments and agencies to create documentaries and campaigns aimed at public education and civic engagement.

Now at NTA, Taylaur is returning the network to its roots of authentic Nigerian storytelling. “We’ve told some of the finest stories this country has ever seen over the last five decades,” she said to Communiqué. “From Behind the Clouds to Mirror in the Sun and Basi and Company, these stories shaped generations. We want to go back to that.”

One of the flagship programmes in this return to form is a reimagining of Tales by Moonlight, the iconic children’s programme that once blended folklore with moral instruction.

Additionally, as part of this new direction, NTA is prioritizing family-friendly content; programming that parents and children can watch together, just as previous generations did. The network’s leadership believes that wholesome, intergenerational storytelling can help rebuild trust with Nigerian audiences and reestablish NTA as a central fixture in the country’s cultural life.

4. What works elsewhere

Reinventing a public service broadcaster rests on two core pillars: content and technology.

Content is the heart of any broadcaster’s relevance. For a public broadcaster to survive and thrive, it must invest in programming that speaks directly to the realities, values, and aspirations of its audience. A compelling case study is Denmark’s public broadcaster, DR. Faced with declining viewership in the early 2000s, DR adopted a bold strategy: investing in original, high-quality drama that engages with contemporary societal issues. The result was a wave of globally acclaimed series like Borgen, The Killing, and The Bridge. These were wholly Danish stories, crafted to meet the highest standards of storytelling and production. DR’s strategy is clear: every program must be original, socially relevant, and of high enough quality to air during prime time. Borgen was licensed to Netflix and went on to become a massive hit.

The second pillar is technology. As audience habits shift away from traditional TV, public broadcasters must follow the audience where they are — online. Broadcasters worldwide have responded by building robust digital platforms to serve on-demand content. The BBC launched iPlayer in the UK, CBC introduced Gem in Canada, and in France, France.tv has become a hub for public service content. Much closer to home, South Africa’s public broadcaster, the SABC, launched SABC+ in 2023. In May 2025, the platform reached 1 million registered users, a milestone driven mainly by its strategic use of live sports content to attract and retain viewers.

Despite its efforts to reclaim cultural relevance through fresh, family-friendly Nigerian storytelling, the NTA still lags in one crucial area: technology. The content revival is well underway, but the infrastructure that delivers this content remains outdated.

Between 2011 and 2021, the NTA received 65 billion naira in government funding. Yet, despite this significant investment, the picture and sound quality of its broadcast content still struggles to match that of local, privately owned competitors like Channels TV or Arise News, let alone the global players with which it must truly compete. Additionally, the IMF denied a request by the previous government for a loan of 1.92 trillion naira, of which 181 billion naira ($500 million) was intended for the digitization of NTA.

But change might be on the horizon. According to Tari Taylaur, a streaming strategy is in development. “We recognize that a lot of people stream everything. How do you reach them if you don’t stream?”

But she is clear-eyed about the challenges. “We’re not just trying to launch an app for the sake of it. We want to understand the market, why some platforms have failed, what others have done right, and how we can build something sustainable.”

Still, if the network can match its creative reinvention with a meaningful technological leap, it may just reestablish itself, not just as the nation’s oldest broadcaster, but once again as one of its most relevant.

📌 Personality and trust are the real assets: Creative entrepreneurs must understand that audiences subscribe to people, not just content. A strong, consistent editorial voice builds trust, and that trust is what unlocks opportunities.

📌 Domain expertise attracts the big bucks: Once a writer establishes authority in a sector, they become valuable as a commentator who can monetize their expertise through consulting services, events, and strategic brand partnerships.

📌 The Africa Confidential blueprint: Paid subscriptions remain a challenge in Africa, where cultural resistance to paywalls and years of free content have made monetization difficult. However, Africa Confidential is a rare success, charging premium rates for deep, exclusive reporting largely aimed at a global audience with higher purchasing power.

1. A riveting second act

On May 16, 2025, African business analysis newsletter Notadeepdive announced a sponsorship deal with Credit Direct, a digital finance company that reported over 12 billion naira ($7.5 million) in pre-tax profit last year. For an independent Nigerian newsletter, this kind of partnership is highly unlikely—a rare alignment of the right audience, a distinct editorial voice, and now commercial backing.

Notadeepdive, known for its sharp takes on Nigerian tech and business, had gone quiet for over two years while its founder, Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega, led TechCabal’s newsroom. In March this year, after leaving TechCabal, Olowogboyega returned to publishing the newsletter.

Notadeepdive’s announcement got us thinking about the prospects of building a sustainable newsletter business in Africa.

This question of sustainability looms large over the continent’s growing newsletter ecosystem. In recent years, journalists, analysts, creators, and even media publications have embraced newsletters to bypass traditional media constraints and connect directly with readers.

As dire as it was for the planet, the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that followed opened up new opportunities for creativity. Substack was taking off globally, and writers, stuck at home with abundant time, started experimenting with newsletters, drawn by the promise of creative control. Alongside Notadeepdive, other African newsletters like Afridigest, Afrobeats Intelligence, Frontier Fintech, West Africa Weekly, and Communiqué took off. They were not the first, but they showed what was possible.

But while Substack success stories have been abundant in the West, the African context lags seriously. Smaller addressable audiences and limited advertiser appetite make the economics tricky.

Still, people are trying. From niche tech digests and political analysis to entertainment recaps and cultural commentary, newsletters have become a small but vibrant part of Africa’s media landscape. The big question is whether they can become sustainable businesses that rival the old guard. Can they become viable options for journalists and writers who have grown weary of the status quo and desire deeper, unique outcomes?

2. The personality premium

A simple but powerful idea is at the heart of the newsletter boom: people don’t subscribe to topics, they subscribe to personalities. Whether it’s tech, culture, or finance, a newsletter’s appeal often comes down to voice, perspective, and trust. Readers want to feel like they know the person behind the byline. And that connection becomes even more valuable in an age of increasing AI-generated content.

As AI continues to automate information packaging at scale, the only reason to keep reading a newsletter is because you care who’s behind it, and you trust them not to bullshit you. It’s why a newsletter like Fintech Frontier resonates. Readers aren’t just looking for updates; they’re tuning in for analysis, tone, and worldview.

Even publications like TechCabal and Egypt’s The Enterprise, which have built out successful newsletter operations at scale, have done so on the back of personality-driven writing. “The newsletter would change in content at different times, but we created a voice that everybody became familiar with,” Timi Odueso, TechCabal’s former newsletter editor, said of the publication's flagship daily newsletter. “So, it was like one person was really writing it, even if we had four different writers contributing stories, and two editors editing, it still had the same voice.”

But beyond personality, the cost of building a relationship with readers is expertise. Unlike in more developed markets, reliable public data is often missing or outdated in Africa. This means newsletter writers can't just “Google it” and write a quick take. They must interpret incomplete information, source details from insider networks, and triangulate what’s happening. That requires domain expertise. For example, the last edition of the Notadeepdive newsletter analyzed e-commerce major Jumia’s latest earnings report. But instead of focusing on the company’s quest for profitability, the narrative that other publications ran with, it focused on the its expensive cloud bill as a yardstick for measuring financial health.

3. What does success look like for African newsletters?

For many African newsletter creators, consulting has become a natural extension of the trust and authority they build through regular publishing. By consistently showing that they understand a sector, be it fintech, media, or climate, companies in that space start to see them as people who can help shape their strategy or sharpen their messaging. Their insights become products. This is often the lowest-hanging fruit.

Beyond consulting, there’s value in community. A newsletter doesn’t just build an audience; it cultivates a relationship with readers who show up every week (or day), engage with ideas, and start to see the writer as a curator of what matters. That relationship is valuable, and it encourages more creators to monetize through events.

Take Tech Safari, for example, where Odueso now heads growth and editorial. The company organizes curated offline events for its community. Brands that want access to that community pay Tech Safari to host events in specific regions. Suppose a fintech company wants to launch in Kenya or expand in Lagos, for instance, they can sponsor a Tech Safari event that brings their ideal users into the room. This isn’t just for brand awareness, it’s for direct, meaningful engagement. The newsletter builds the relationship. The event deepens it. And the brand gets more than just impressions; it gets a committed audience.

Other traditional monetization paths, however, remain difficult. Advertising is a major challenge. While newsletter ads are excellent for building awareness, most African brands are focused on conversion (sales, signups, and other similar metrics). But newsletter advertising is a long game, built on trust. That’s a mismatch in expectations, and it means creators often have to educate potential sponsors on what success actually looks like. This is incredibly difficult to do in this market.

Paid subscriptions are also yet to scale. Many readers remain reluctant to pay for content because they believe they can find similar information for free elsewhere. There’s a deep cultural resistance to paywalls, shaped by years of free access and a scarcity of exclusive reporting.

That said, there are a few success stories. Chief among them is Africa Confidential, which was founded as a print newsletter in 1960 to analyze Africa’s “rapid decolonization.” Working with a network of correspondents, whose identities are often hidden, the publication has dug deep into monumental stories and events in African politics and economic development over the past 65 years. It has cultivated an extensive list of high-value readers, most of who are in the upper echelons of power.

Some would argue that Africa Confidential is a British publication (and they are right), but it covers Africa so extensively that thousands of subscribers are willing to fork out £876 annually or $34 per article. But perhaps the nature of the publication’s success (providing insights about a region of interest to an international audience with high purchasing power) is a blueprint for those looking to scale their newsletter businesses in Africa.

It’s tough to conclude that newsletters can become viable media businesses in Africa, but publications like Notadeepdive, Frontier Fintech, and Tech Safari have thrown their hats into the ring. They are proving that the reward is in long-term relationships; for interested investors and partners, it is in backing voices that shape conversations and build communities.

Newsletters may not scale as fast in Africa as they do in the West, but they can go deep and inspire other lucrative businesses when done right. That, we believe, is just as valuable.

1. Full circle with Chimamanda

“I’m not one of those people who will come and start crying on your show,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said with a laugh to Chude Jideonwo on Sunday night in front of a captive audience at The Palms, Lekki. She was explaining why it had taken her so long to be interviewed on his show, alluding to Jideonwo’s reputation for getting his guests to open up with uncommon vulnerability.

Adichie was the headliner for Jideonwo’s latest venture — a live edition of his #WithChude talk show, billed as Africa’s first “talk concert.” Part live talk show, part book reading, part concert, the evening featured conversations with some of Nigeria’s biggest cultural figures, including actress Funke Akindele, comedian Bovi, and preacher Jerry Eze. It also previewed an excerpt from Jideonwo’s forthcoming book, “How depression saved my life,” set for release later this year.

The show saw guests share deeply personal stories in front of an audience that ranged from Nigeria’s minister of culture to university students: comedian Bovi spoke candidly about his son’s challenges with learning, and Afrobeats artiste Teni revealed why it had taken five years to release her now trending single, Money.

The event was also the beginning of a new chapter for Joy Incredible (Joy Inc.), a media company Jideonwo founded to spread the message of happiness and emotional well-being through storytelling. Over the last eight years, Joy Inc. has launched several products, including the Joy Masterclasses, Joy Retreats, and the #WithChude talk show, on the back of which a thriving subscription business has been built. Now, it is adding live experiences to its growing portfolio of media offerings.

In 2005, when Chude Jideonwo first interviewed Chimamanda Adichie, he was a young journalist profiling the emerging writer for a cover story in ThisDay newspaper. At the time, Adichie had just burst onto Nigeria’s literary scene with her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus. Two decades later, Jideonwo built one of Africa's most successful public relations companies, and Adichie had become Africa’s most celebrated novelist. Now it was time for another conversation, but this time in front of an audience of over 5,000.

2. When success is not enough

In 2016, Jideonwo was at a career high. StateCraft Inc., one of the subsidiary companies of Red Media Group, which he co-founded with longtime collaborator Adebola Williams, was leading the media campaign for Nana Akufo-Addo’s successful presidential bid in Ghana. This followed the successful media campaign that brought Muhammadu Buhari, then an opposition candidate, to power after Nigeria’s 2015 presidential elections.

For his work in media, Jideonwo received numerous prestigious awards, including a Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition, the CNBC Young Business Leader Award, and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellowship. Yet, despite the public acclaim, he was privately battling severe depression. In the first quarter of 2016, he tendered his resignation to the RED Media board and accelerated the company's succession plan, eventually leaving in 2017.

After weeks of therapy, Jideonwo emerged from his battle with depression with a new sense of purpose: to help others find joy. That mission led him to found Joy Inc. The business initially focused on offering masterclasses for corporate executives, teaching leadership teams how to build joyful, resilient work cultures. It later expanded with the Joy Retreat, a weekend-long experience where participants paid roughly $750 to put into practice the principles from the masterclasses. But the masterclasses carried the familiar tinge and the occasional cringiness of most motivational and inspirational content. To achieve real impact, Chude was going to have to return to his first love—storytelling.

In 2018, he started recording interviews with popular personalities. Instead of telling people how to find joy, he was going to show them through other people’s stories. “We were not going to be preaching to the audience, but allowing them to decide for themselves the lessons they're going to take from what we were discussing,” Jideonwo told Communiqué.

The timing couldn’t have been better. Across the world, there was a growing appetite for wellness storytelling and creator-led media products. In 2016, Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, left the company to launch Thrive Global, a startup that claimed to offer science-based solutions to combat stress and burnout. By 2019, Thrive had raised over $37 million in VC funding and launched a podcast that blended first-person storytelling with meditation prompts and original music to create what it described as a “mindfulness experience” in audio. At the same time, long-form conversational podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience — where popular personalities shared deeply personal stories and life philosophies — were exploding in popularity, signaling a cultural shift toward raw, unfiltered storytelling as a means of connecting with audiences.

Although recording had started in 2018, it wasn’t until 2020 that Jideonwo finally released #WithChude to the public. Drawing from his early experience at RED Media, where he produced shows like Rubbing Minds for Channels TV, one of Nigeria’s biggest broadcasters, Jideonwo initially chose the traditional TV distribution route he was most familiar with. The show quickly built a loyal following on TVC, but it wasn't until an interview with veteran actor Richard Mofe-Damijo went viral on social media that Jideonwo began to rethink the distribution model. He decided to make episodes available on Vimeo, which, unlike YouTube, allowed him to offer a paid subscription model.

Censorship considerations were also a factor: several TV stations syndicating #WithChude had refused to air sensitive episodes, like the ones with Nigerian internet personality Bobrisky and LGBTQ activist Pamela Adie. By handling distribution directly, #WithChude was not only able to bypass traditional gatekeepers but also cultivate a growing, engaged community of viewers. This audience is made up primarily of women in their mid-thirties to late fifties, who watch the shows and pay for the events. The last Joy Retreat held in December of 2024 had a 100% female attendance. Studies show that women within these age groups experience a higher prevalence of mental health concerns, particularly depression and anxiety, due to a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors.

Since launching on Vimeo, subscribers have grown year-on-year. But in 2024, Joy Inc. decided to own its distribution completely, building out a streaming platform for the #WithChude show and documentaries and crime specials the company has started producing.

3. The method to the madness

At its core, the #WithChude show is built on a simple but powerful format: invite a celebrity or cultural figure to tell their story once, with no interruptions, no judgments, and no preconceived notions of right or wrong. Jideonwo acts less like an interviewer and more like a listening companion, creating a space where guests feel safe enough to share their most intimate experiences. This approach has helped the show distinguish itself by offering a glimpse into the unfiltered humanity behind public personas.

Behind the scenes, a well-oiled machine powers the production. The team maintains a master list of over 2,500 personalities, tracking their careers, public moments, and personal evolutions to determine when and whether to invite them on the show. Twice a year, for about a month each time, the #WithChude team records interviews with these personalities, which are then edited and scheduled. New episodes are released twice a week, every Sunday and Tuesday. Thanks to this meticulous system, the team has already recorded enough interviews to last through the end of the year.

Last year, as Joy Inc. looked to deepen its connection with its growing audience, the team began brainstorming new products that could offer even more value. They decided to revive the Joy Retreat, which had been dormant since 2018. But they also knew they wanted to go bigger with the live show. Last Sunday's event in Lagos is just the beginning; Joy Inc. plans to take the #WithChude live experience on tour, across Nigeria and Africa.

At the same time, Joy Inc. is doubling down on its ambitions to become a full-service content company. In addition to #WithChude, the company is expanding its slate of original content for its paying subscribers, with a new focus on documentary storytelling and true-crime specials. With these moves, Jideonwo and his team are betting that the hunger for raw, affirming, and thoughtfully crafted stories is only just beginning.

1. The heat of the moment

On Sunday, April 13, in a match that encapsulated the raw emotion and unpredictability of South African football, Kaizer Chiefs, the country’s most popular football club, overturned a 1-0 deficit to beat Mamelodi Sundowns 2-1 at the packed FNB Stadium. This victory secured Kaizer Chiefs’ place in the Nedbank Cup final. The match saw a 57th-minute equalizer from 19-year-old forward Wandile Duba, followed by a clinical 89th-minute winner from substitute Ashley Du Preez, which sent Chiefs’ 16 million+ supporters into euphoric celebrations.

Less than 24 hours later, celebrations shifted from the pitch and the streets of Soweto to the airwaves on Kaizer Chiefs Radio, the club’s new digital radio platform launched earlier this year in partnership with Gresham Media Group, a Johannesburg-based media and entertainment company operating at the intersection of sports and music.

Monday’s 2 PM broadcast featured commentary on standout performances and analysis of the strategic decisions of the Chiefs’ technical team that propelled them to the final. It was repeated twice that evening, with additional slots the next day for those who missed the earlier broadcast.

Traditional sports coverage in South Africa has long leaned on third-party media outlets, but Kaizer Chiefs’ partnership with Gresham Media Group reflects a shift in how major sports clubs think about audience ownership and content monetization. The digital radio station, accessible via the club’s official website, has grown rapidly since launch, reaching over a million listens within its first three months. Its blend of matchday coverage, player interviews, music programming, and lifestyle content designed to keep fans engaged beyond the 90 minutes of play could be the future of sports media in Africa.

2. Records, royalties, and radio goals

Two years after Kaizer Chiefs was founded in 1970, David Gresham, a young musician who gained fame as South Africa’s first television DJ, established his record label, David Gresham Records. In the early days, the label made radio jingles for extra revenue. But things took off when Gresham signed Sean Rennie, a rising talent whose song I’ll Walk With You became an unexpected hit, climbing into South Africa’s Top 10 charts in the mid-1970s. The song’s success not only put Rennie in the spotlight but also introduced Gresham Records, now one of the subsidiaries of the larger Gresham Music Group, as a serious player in the country’s music industry. Soon, other artists began flocking to the label, drawn by its growing reputation.

But it was the company’s early experience producing radio jingles that laid the foundation for its most lucrative business: music licensing and royalties. Having crafted countless jingles for brands and broadcasters, Gresham Records had developed a deep understanding of publishing rights and royalty distribution, especially for music played on the radio. And it leveraged that experience for its artists, ensuring they could receive payments whenever their music was played on the radio or TV. This expertise allowed the company to dominate music licensing in Africa.

Eventually, Gresham expanded internationally, securing licensing agreements with major global rights holders, including Ultimate Music and the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC). In 2020, Gresham signed deals with SESAC, The Harry Fox Agency, Mint Digital Services, and Swiss agency SUISA Digital Licensing to manage and collect the royalties earned in Africa for their artist portfolios. This deal expanded its catalog to over one million songs, representing global superstars such as Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, and Bob Dylan.

Also, through its subsidiary Gresham Media, it collects royalties on background music played in gyms, shopping malls, hotels, and restaurants. But it was in Studio 88, one of South Africa’s largest sports clothing, footwear, and accessories stores and an official retail partner for Kaizer Chiefs, that Gresham spotted the opportunity for a club-owned radio station. Gresham noticed that the customers were engaged with the music played in Studio 88 stores and realized there was an opportunity to work with a bigger, dedicated sports fan base.

“We did a deal with Studio 88 to create a music playlist that wasn't only playing in store, but that customers could also stream. On that model, knowing in South Africa and the rest of Africa football is the number one sport, we realized there's a massive opportunity to work with football clubs and other bigger sports teams,” George Dearnaley, Gresham Music Group’s head of football, told Communiqué.

Gresham Group considered sports like cricket and rugby, which have a massive following in South Africa, before eventually settling on football with Kaizer Chiefs, which has a fan base of over 16 million in South Africa.

Gresham Group tapped George Dearnaley, a former Bafana Bafana striker who had become a media executive post-retirement, to help develop the radio concept. Dearnaley had launched Kick Off magazine, one of the country's most influential football publications, and had managed Media24’s coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup hosted in South Africa. After almost a year of negotiations with Kaizer Chiefs, the platform launched quietly in December 2023.

At first, the platform only featured music playlists curated from top hits across South Africa's 11 official language stations, deliberately reflecting Kaizer Chiefs' nationwide appeal. Initial listener numbers remained modest, reaching only 40,000 by the end of January. When Kaizer Chiefs officially announced the station on March 3 this year, sharing it with their 2.5 million-member WhatsApp group and over 4.5 million Facebook followers, listenership exploded to 850,000 that month alone.

Now, the station has added more content to its lineup, including two weekly pre-recorded football shows featuring former Bafana Bafana and Chiefs players as analysts, along with club statistician Yusuf Mohamed. The Monday review show breaks down weekend matches (like the dramatic Nedbank Cup semifinal victory over Sundowns), while Thursday's preview show builds anticipation for upcoming fixtures. There are plans to add more shows featuring player interviews, lifestyle content, and live coverage of the matches. Gresham Group intends to replicate its success with other clubs and sports across Africa.

3. When football teams go Hollywood

Sports and media have always gone hand in hand in a symbiotic relationship that has sports teams creating content for media properties, while those properties, in turn, generate revenue for the teams. But in the late 1990s, English football clubs began to recognize the commercial opportunity in owning the distribution of original content created by their teams. In 1997, Middlesbrough became the first club to launch a TV channel. But the most successful club-owned media property is Manchester United’s MUTV, which launched a year later.

MUTV provides fans with exclusive access to the club’s activities, including full match replays, highlights, post-match shows, and behind-the-scenes content. This launch coincided with a period of great success for Manchester United, notably the treble-winning 1998–1999 season. Over the years, MUTV has chronicled every major on-field triumph and off-field story, making it an important avenue for maintaining fan engagement worldwide.

In 2017, MUTV began to move away from traditional television to embrace digital platforms. The launch of the MUTV app and availability on connected TV have made the channel accessible to a broader international audience. Much like Kaizer Chiefs’ partnership with Gresham Group, MUTV forged strategic alliances, such as its deal with Sina Sports in China, to deliver localized content and penetrate key international markets.

MUTV is also a significant part of Manchester United’s commercial strategy. In 2024, it helped the club rake in over £221 million in broadcasting revenue. This income supports the club’s operations, including player acquisitions and salaries. Other clubs, including Man City and Arsenal, have followed in launching their own media properties across different platforms and formats. Most recently, in 2020, Barcelona launched a new media property, Barça Media, to oversee the club’s digital and audiovisual production efforts. The new company was valued at $1 billion at launch.

This playbook has been extremely successful for European clubs. Now, one of Africa's largest and most successful clubs is developing its own media property in partnership with Africa’s largest music licensing company, starting first with a club-owned radio station. This model could become a blueprint for other African clubs looking to evolve beyond just sports operations to actual media brands.

Kaizer Chiefs has set an example, betting on content and community. How much will it pay off?

1. Flashing lights

In March 2024, the world watched in awe as Anant Ambani, son of Asia’s richest man, married Radhika Merchant in a wedding extravaganza reportedly costing $600 million. The event, attended by global celebrities, politicians, and business moguls, was just the latest in a series of ultra-luxurious Ambani weddings. Anant’s sister’s 2018 nuptials had already set a high bar with a $100 million price tag.

These spectacles are part of the booming $250 billion global wedding industry, where high-profile weddings drive romance and entire economies. When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tied the knot in 2018, their royal wedding added an estimated $2 billion to the U.K. economy through tourism, merchandise, and media coverage.

Media companies have long recognized the lucrative potential of documenting these grand celebrations. Publications like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar have built empires covering celebrity weddings. In Nigeria, the wedding media industry is no different, thriving within a larger ecosystem obsessed with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In the late 1990s, a group of soft-sell magazines dominated this space, including Ovation, City People, and Encomium, offering glossy spreads on high-society weddings, high-fashion events, and A-list parties.

Their dominance lasted until the 2000s. In 2006, 22-year-old Uche Pedro (then Uche Eze) launched a blog that would soon upend the old guard’s dominance and usher in a new generation.

Almost two decades later, that blog has become Nigeria's most prominent lifestyle publication, shaping how citizens and foreigners consume weddings, fashion, and aspirational content.

This is the story of BellaNaija.

2. A campus blogger’s dream

In 2006, Nigeria had not yet come online. There was little to no online information about the country’s growing culture and entertainment scene, and Uche Pedro wanted to change that. While rounding up her studies at Western University, Ontario, she started posting stories about music and entertainment and magazine clippings of interviews with celebrities and popular Lagos events to an anonymous blog called BellaNaija. She hoped the blog would introduce a new global narrative about Nigeria.

The blog quickly took off, drawing thousands of visitors within months. Most of those visitors came from outside Nigeria, but as internet adoption increased, its Nigerian audience grew, eventually becoming one of the most followed entertainment websites in the country. Three years later, BellaNaija was drawing over a million visitors monthly, and Uche, now living in Nigeria, revealed herself as the personality behind the blog. She also resigned from her HR job at Cadbury to run BellaNaija full-time, hiring a team to work with her.

The blog continued to grow in leaps and bounds, eventually launching a dedicated fashion vertical led by popular fashion blogger Eki Ogunbor in 2017. But of all the topics it covered, nothing drew more eyeballs than its weddings.

3. The Nigerian wedding industrial complex

Nigeria’s wedding economy thrives on excess. Lavish ceremonies are not just romantic celebrations but social statements of status and class. In 2017, prominent wedding planner and founder of Zapphaire Events, Funke Bucknor estimated that a Nigerian wedding could cost anywhere from 5 million naira ($15,000 at the time) on the lower end to 20 million naira ($60,000) on average. For the higher-profile weddings that BellaNaija tends to cover, costs could get as high as 100 million naira ($300,300).

In a country with one of the world's highest poverty rates, these weddings are a world away for most of the population. BellaNaija became a window into that world.

The platform recognized that these events were not private affairs but public theater, and positioned itself as the leading chronicler. It exhaustively covered high-profile weddings, complete with designer gowns, multi-tiered cakes, and celebrity guests. For instance, when the son of Africa’s richest woman tied the knot in a historic British castle, a BellaNaija feature on the wedding garnered millions of views, not just for the romance but for the voyeuristic thrill of partaking in the luxury lifestyle, albeit through a phone screen.

BellaNaija’s focus on weddings was part of a larger editorial philosophy—centered on feel-good, aspirational content. While much of Nigeria’s media landscape fixated on the country’s relentless challenges—corruption scandals, terrorist attacks, economic instability—BellaNaija offered an escape. It became where readers could indulge in beauty, fashion, love stories, and success narratives, a digital oasis of optimism in a news cycle often dominated by despair.

“The first detail with BellaNaija is positivity, which, in hindsight, is solutions journalism. BellaNaija wants to be [a] happy place for everyone. If you visit most traditional media, you will always be greeted with gory news—embezzlement, killings, sad news that [punches] the heart. BellaNaija wants to be where you read inspirational and glistening stories,” Ahmad Adedimeji Amobi, senior features writer at BellaNaija, told Communiqué.

BellaNaija didn’t ignore Nigeria’s realities. It understood that its readers craved balance. While other media platforms focused on grim headlines, BellaNaija reminded everyone that joy, creativity, and ambition still thrived in Nigeria. In doing so, it didn’t just attract an audience—it built a devoted community.

BellaNaija has also thrived on its ability to balance exclusivity with accessibility. While its wedding spreads showcase society’s upper crust, its lifestyle content caters to the upwardly mobile middle class. A feature on a billionaire’s daughter’s bridal shower might sit alongside a budget-friendly makeup tutorial. This dual approach ensures that even those who cannot afford luxury can still partake in the fantasy—or a scaled-down version.

BellaNaija’s real coup was its early embrace of social media. Although founded before most social networks, it quickly caught on to the game, dominating Instagram and Twitter (now X) with its viral coverage of wedding parties. Hashtags like #BNBridals became cultural markers, while user-generated content fostered a sense of community. The social strategy has paid off—today, BellaNaija commands a combined Instagram audience of over 9.2 million followers across its pages. BellaNaija Weddings leads the pack, accounting for 62.93% of the total audience with 5.8 million followers. The main BellaNaija page accounts for 28.21% (2.6 million), while BellaNaija Style and BellaNaija Beauty contribute 7.43% (685K) and 1.43% (132K), respectively.

BellaNaija built a business engine to sustain its editorial operations. Twelve years after it published its first wedding feature, BellaNaija launched BellaNaija Weddings, a dedicated vertical for its wedding coverage. The BN Weddings section helps spotlight photographers, caterers, decorators, and other players in the wedding economy for prospective couples, acting as an informal marketplace. Sponsored content from brands eager to connect with BellaNaija’s loyal audience helps generate revenue. Also, events like the BellaNaija Bridal Fair and the BellaNaija Digital Summit help the company maintain a healthy bottom line.

In a media landscape rife with misinformation and bad news, BellaNaija’s consistency has bred trust, making it the go-to source for credible lifestyle content. But having conquered weddings, BellaNaija has expanded its coverage to include topics like travel and the creative economy. The lesson remains the same: in Nigeria’s attention economy, the most valuable currency isn’t money but aspiration. And no one trades it better than BellaNaija.