1. Brave new world
On 23 May earlier this year, Funke Akindele released Omo Ghetto: The Saga on her YouTube channel. The film arrived in two parts; together, they have since gathered more than four million views. Five years earlier, Omo Ghetto saw a very different kind of success. Released in cinemas in December 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it went on to earn more than ₦600 million at the Nigerian box office and became the highest-grossing Nigerian film of all time.
It held the top position until Akindele took it back from herself. The films that eventually displaced it—Battle on Buka Street, A Tribe Called Judah, and Everybody Loves Jenifa—were largely her own. Omo Ghetto now sits seventh on the all-time list. But even five years later, it remains one of the clearest examples of Akindele’s ability to turn Nigerian films into mass-market events.
A film like Omo Ghetto follows a fairly predictable journey. It spends a few months in cinemas before moving to television or a streaming platform where it begins a second commercial life. Omo Ghetto did this too. After its cinema run, the film became available on Netflix. Then, in May, it appeared on YouTube. It was particularly interesting that Nollywood’s most commercially successful producer would eventually put one of her biggest films on a platform anyone could watch.
But this is the brave new world Nollywood now inhabits. Over the last few years, YouTube has become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in Nigerian filmmaking. Every year, over 1,100 films are released on the platform. Some are uploaded by filmmakers with a few thousand subscribers. Others come from channels with audiences in the millions.
Around those channels, an entire industry has formed. Producers such as Ruth Kadiri, Uduak Isong and Omoni Oboli have built businesses that increasingly resemble independent film studios and television networks at the same time. They commission scripts, finance films, assemble casts, hire directors and crews, oversee post-production and release new movies directly to audiences they have accumulated themselves.
The films have created their own stars. Actors who may not regularly headline Nigeria’s biggest cinema releases can appear repeatedly before millions of viewers. Writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, production managers, sound engineers and marketers move between productions designed specifically for these channels. A film can be written, shot, edited, packaged and uploaded within weeks before much of the same machinery begins working on the next one. This is the essence of the Nollywood YouTube industrial complex: the network of filmmakers, production companies, actors, crew members, and audiences that has grown around producing Nigerian movies for YouTube. And increasingly, this is where Nollywood operates as an industry.
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2. Home videos find a new home
To understand the Nollywood YouTube industrial complex, however, you first have to understand what came before it. Nollywood has always favoured direct-to-consumer distribution.
In Communiqué 54, we explained why.
“Nigeria underwent a structural adjustment programme in the late 1980s that transformed its foreign exchange and trade policies. The resulting inflation and currency devaluation hit the cinema and film industry particularly hard. Cinema operators found it difficult to maintain their facilities and import new films as middle-class Nigerians, the primary customers, could no longer afford tickets. The film industry began developing against this backdrop, prioritising a direct-to-consumer distribution model that excluded the cinema middlemen altogether. This model favoured high-volume, low-cost, low-quality productions distributed via VHS tapes and later CDs for home viewing.”
This version of Nollywood first appeared on YouTube. Distributors who had already released films on VHS, VCDs, and other distribution channels began uploading old catalogues to the platform. One of the earliest examples was NollywoodLove, the YouTube channel that eventually became iROKOtv. Its catalogue of old Nollywood films showed that there was an online audience for Nigerian movies.
In the early 2010s, commercial banks began building their own media operations on YouTube. GTBank launched Ndani TV in 2012, UBA followed with REDTV in 2015, and Access Bank launched Accelerate TV in 2016. These channels were marketing engines before they were media businesses. Their primary goal was not to earn advertising revenue from YouTube, but to associate the banks with culture and reach a younger audience spending more time online. Because the banks had marketing budgets, they didn’t need the channels to be immediately profitable. They could finance original web series and release them for free. Early shows such as Skinny Girl in Transit, Gidi Up, and The Men’s Club helped set the expectation that audiences could watch original Nollywood content directly on YouTube. This is the foundation the industry currently stands on.
At the same time, independent filmmakers began to realise that they could bypass traditional distributors and go direct to the audience. In 2017, Ruth Kadiri decided to try. She was already producing films for outlets like DStv and iROKO. Kadiri had two films ready for distribution. Rather than sell both, she let a distributor take one and uploaded the second one to YouTube. The numbers were not massive, but they were encouraging enough for her to keep at it. Many producers would eventually follow her. As the economics of African streaming grew more uncertain and international platforms reduced investment in Nigerian originals, that trickle of filmmakers moving toward YouTube became a wave.
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3. Inside the complex
YouTube’s economics have shaped the way films are made. Nollywood producers strive to make them as cheaply and as quickly as possible. Average production costs range from ₦12–15 million. “The unofficial rule of Nollywood YouTube is that you cannot spend too much money. If you do, you may not make your money back,” Oma Areh said to Communiqué. That pressure compresses production. Some producers can shoot an entire film in four days. The consequences are visible in the films themselves. There is less time for rehearsals, elaborate set-ups, multiple locations or long shooting schedules.
The larger production houses have found ways to make that model even cheaper through economies of scale. Rather than assemble a new crew for every film, some maintain a stable group of directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, sound teams and, in some cases, actors on salaries. That removes the cost and uncertainty of repeatedly hiring freelancers. Location is particularly important. Renting houses and other spaces repeatedly can quickly inflate a budget, so some production houses buy or lease properties and reuse them across several films. “The challenge is making the same places look different.” Precious Kadiri, a producer at Ruth Kadiri Films, said to Communiqué. “A producer may redress a house, change the interiors or occasionally move exterior scenes elsewhere, but if you produce frequently you will have to rent out a separate location so viewers do not feel as though every film is happening in the same world.”
Then there is the question of length. The web series that helped establish Nigerian filmmaking on YouTube have increasingly given way to full-length films. A 30-minute episode provides fewer opportunities to insert ads than a film running for 90 minutes or two hours. Series still exist, but they have been stretched. Many now run for as long as 90 minutes, the average length of a feature film. So producers concentrate on making a single long production, market it heavily and try to maximise the first few days after release like a theatrical opening weekend.
For an established channel with over a million followers, four million views can be enough to cover the cost of production. But four million views are not always worth the same amount. A million views can earn between $1,500 and $5,000, depending on your audience’s location. Large channels with significant foreign audiences can earn as much as $10,000 per million. Producers therefore build release schedules around the diaspora. “A lot of releases are also timed around when they know that these people are going to be awake and they will have a break from work,” Areh said. At the top end, the numbers become significant. A large channel releasing a film every week can generate between $80,000 and $150,000 a month.
Beyond YouTube advertising, producers are increasingly monetising through brand placements. Remittance companies are particularly active because many of these films attract large Nigerian audiences in the US, UK and Canada, which make up a significant percentage of their users.
There are also parallel French-language channels. The same films are subtitled in French and uploaded separately for Francophone Africa and the French-speaking diaspora, allowing one production to earn twice. These parallel channels can generate an additional $20,000 to $50,000 a month.
The National Film and Video Censors Board is now trying to bring the Nollywood industry on YouTube more firmly within its control. The Board says films released on YouTube must be classified before distribution and has warned that unclassified titles could face takedown orders. In August, the Board moved against Living in Colours, a Prism House Studio film set to be released on YouTube, citing both its unclassified status and the Same-Sex scenes in the trailer contravening Nigeria’s Same Sex Act. The Board was able to stop the film’s physical premiere in Lagos and filed a suit to block its release, but it has since been released on YouTube.
Classification matters for the industry. It will introduce another step into a production cycle designed to move from script to release within weeks. This could mean additional fees, longer timelines and more compliance work, costs that larger production houses may absorb more easily than smaller filmmakers. But it could also formalise an ecosystem that already employs actors, writers, directors, editors, cinematographers and marketers at significant scale.
The bigger question is what happens as YouTube filmmaking stops being treated as a side market and becomes recognised as Nollywood itself. Producers can now own their audiences, earn in foreign currency, build catalogues that generate revenue long after release without depending on cinemas or streaming commissions.
Yet that independence comes with a different kind of dependence. The industry is heavily exposed to one global platform: its algorithms, advertising rates, monetisation policies and ability to deliver valuable diaspora audiences. Producers must also work out whether they can improve production quality without breaking the low-cost economics that made the model possible.
Nollywood has once again built a distribution system around the limitations of the one before it. The Nollywood YouTube industrial complex is already here, but it’s not yet clear how it will shape the industry’s future.
