Six years in, the Communiqué Inner Circle is ready

A note on what comes next, and how you can be part of it.

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I started Communiqué in May 2020 based on the simple bet that Africa’s media and creative economy deserved coverage that took them seriously. Not as subjects of feel-good stories or “Africa rising” shenanigans, but as industries with real economic and sociopolitical importance. Industries with power dynamics, structural conundrums, and operators building things worth writing about.

That bet has remained relevant for six years and has reached tens of thousands of readers across 100+ countries. But what has also remained is the harsh reality of figuring out ways to fund the work without compromising it.

Geographic Spread of Communiqué’s Readers

First a labour of love, then the paywall

At first, all of this was a “labour of love” — an essay a month, based on topics I found worth pursuing. No commercial expectations.

Then it became something more serious — an opportunity to build a new media platform that chronicles the ideas, stories, and strategies shaping an industry. To monetise it, I began accepting ads and sponsorships. A few came in, but not frequently. I had a day job, so I wasn’t really bothered.

Then, in October 2024, I went all in after leaving my full-time job. At that point, I put up a paywall. It was an experiment, and I was open about my scepticism. I’ve long argued that subscription models in African markets compete with basic necessities, and that the pool of readers with disposable income for media is limited. But I needed to figure out a way to fund the growing editorial operation. It was no longer just me.

The walls come down

A year later, we took down the paywall, and I explained why. The short version was that while the paywall brought in a small, loyal core that paid for our editorial work, it narrowed our reach. And we cannot fulfil Communiqué’s mission to connect and amplify Africa’s media and creative economy if our stories live behind walls. It also ran counter to the communal ethos we’d developed with our audience.

So in September 2025, the newsletter became completely free to read again.

In that same essay, however, I described what would replace the paywall: a membership model. One that focused more on community movements and less on economic transactions. We’ve been able to build this connection via our in-real-life events. We are now folding that back into the newsletter through the Communiqué Inner Circle.

What is the Inner Circle?

The Inner Circle is the group of readers who fund Communiqué’s editorial work directly. There are already a handful of them, but we are now formalising the experience.

This is not a paywall going by another name. There’s no gated content or secret Discord group. It’s something simpler and, I think, more honest: an invitation to fund the insights and analysis you love, so we can keep it free for the next reader who finds us.

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry — if our essays have informed a business pitch or decision, if our reports have impacted your work or career, or if a sentence has stuck with you long after you close the page — the Inner Circle is how you return the favour.

What your Inner Circle contributions fund

I want to be specific because vague requests deserve vague responses. The Communiqué Inner Circle contributions fund original reporting and research across the continent — exploratory trips, interviews, document requests and library visits, and long phone calls that turn into a single paragraph. We want to be truly pan-African. They fund the data we license, so you don’t have to chase it down yourself. They fund the expensive subscriptions we have to absorb so that our stories remain ever fresh and relevant to you.

They also fund the things you can’t see on the page: the freedom to kill a story that doesn’t hold up, to pursue one that doesn’t have an immediately obvious audience or angle, to say no to coverage that could compromise our integrity.

How it works

You can contribute monthly or annually, at whatever level makes sense for you:

• $5/month, $15/quarter, or $55/year is the standard contribution

• $10/month, $30/quarter, or $100/year is for readers who want to do more

• Custom options are available for readers, teams, or institutions who want to fund a specific area of coverage

We will acknowledge every Inner Circle member (unless you’d rather stay anonymous, which is fine). You’ll receive an annual letter from me each December reflecting on what your support funded during the year. And occasionally, you’ll get a note from our editorial team — what we’re tracking, what almost made it in, and what we’ve learned from reader replies. You’ll get priority access to the things that make Communiqué tick behind the scenes, and you’ll be the first to know about our events and special reports.

How did we get here?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been going through our subscriber intelligence programme, a structured series of conversations with a cross-section of our readers. Some version of this question came up on several calls: “How do you actually make money?”

It’s a fair question, and it deserves a direct answer.

The largest part of our revenue comes from advisory services — working directly with companies, institutions, and organisations that want Communiqué’s expertise applied to their specific challenges. Media strategy, market positioning, editorial direction, and audience intelligence. These are engagements where we bring our industry expertise to bear on a client’s actual problem, and we get paid for it.

The second stream is research and market insights. The work we do to understand Africa’s creative economy — the mapping, the data synthesis, the pattern recognition — has commercial value beyond our editorial pages and industry. Organisations making investment or operational decisions across sectors need that kind of analysis, and we produce it.

The third is event sponsorships. Communiqué IRL, our city-to-city networking series, creates a room that the right people in this industry want to be in. Sponsors pay to be present in that room. It’s a straightforward value exchange, and when we get the curation right, it works for everyone.

Taken together, these three streams fund a meaningful share of what we do. But they all have their shortcomings. Advisory work is episodic. Research commissions are not rhythmically predictable. Events require significant capital to produce and carry real execution risk.

Reader funding is different. It is recurring and diversified across many individual contributors. It doesn’t end when a project does. And crucially, it changes our accountability structure: every other revenue stream imposes an obligation on someone outside our editorial conversation. The Inner Circle creates an obligation primarily to you.

Why this, and why now

When we removed the paywall in September, we made four commitments about what would come next: positioning Communiqué to reach millions of Africans at home and in the diaspora, expanding our events portfolio, rolling out intelligence products for the people making decisions in this industry, and introducing a membership model to anchor a sustainable, community-driven future.

The Inner Circle is the fourth of those promises kept.

Our commercial revenue streams — however well they perform — don’t give Communiqué the kind of foundation that lets us plan in years rather than quarters. Reader funding does. It aligns our incentives with yours: we get better when you find us more useful, not when an advertiser finds us safer. It lets us say no to the wrong opportunities and yes to the ambitious ones (and boy, do we have a lot of them). It makes the work answerable to you, the readers, which is the only audience that should ever shape what we publish.

If you’ve been reading for a while and have been waiting for a way to show us how much we matter to you, this is your chance. Don’t pass it up.