Communiqué 63: BellaNaija and Nigeria’s wedding industrial complex
In Nigeria’s attention economy, aspiration is the most valuable currency. And no one trades it better than BellaNaija.
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,” Ahmed Adedimeji, 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.