Communiqué 71: Can newsletters become a viable media business in Africa?
Publications like Africa Confidential, Tech Safari, Notadeepdive, and Frontier Fintech show the promise and pitfalls of turning newsletters into media businesses.
Key points
📌 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.