Communiqué 103: The fault in our creator economy
Africa’s $3 billion creator economy is currently built on an army of creators that cannot monetise.
1. The virality illusion
For the average African creator, virality rarely translates into income. A video with 500,000 views might generate $30 in ad revenue. That is, if the creator is even monetised. A trending post might attract thousands of followers. But follower count does not pay the rent. Visibility, whilst valuable, is not the same as viability.
This gap shows up clearly in the data. According to the second edition of the African Creator Economy Report, only 5.8% of creators list ad revenue as a meaningful source of income. More than 60% of creators earn less than $100 a month from their creative work. In an ecosystem built on attention, most participants are not making money from the systems that profit from their attention.
What sustains creators is not the platform economy, but the informal market around it. Across the continent, income flows from off-platform work: brand partnerships, consulting, training, speaking engagements, freelance services, digital products, physical merchandise, and access-based offerings. Creators are not monetising content as much as they are monetising the trust and expertise built around it.
But this conversion from attention to income is not automatic. It requires negotiation skills, legal protection, financial tools, pricing power, and, often, access to brands and institutions that sit far beyond the reach of most early-stage creators. The result is a system where a small group learns how to turn visibility into business, whilst the majority remains left out. This point is where the fault line appears.
What looks like a problem of low pay is, in reality, a problem of a missing middle class. The creator economy produces stars at the top and hopeful participants at the bottom, but very few stable professionals in between. There are not enough creators who can rely on repeatable income, long-term contracts, or durable businesses rather than one-off deals and viral moments.
2. The Creator Economy’s missing middle class
In classical economic theory, the middle class is not defined by wealth alone, but by stability.
Middle-class households sit between subsistence and affluence; they earn enough to cover basic needs, absorb moderate economic shocks, invest in the future, and plan beyond the next paycheque. They typically have predictable income, access to financial services, legal protections, and a degree of economic agency. The middle class is what turns growth into an economy, not just a spike in prosperity.
It does not appear spontaneously. It forms when certain conditions converge. First, there must be productive work that pays reliably, not just occasionally. This system is usually created by firms, institutions, or industries that can employ large numbers of people at sustainable wage levels, not just a few high earners at the top.
Second, there must be infrastructure to protect that work. Think banks that provide credit, legal systems that enforce contracts, training institutions that build skills, and professional organisations that create systems and standards that turn labour into a career rather than a hustle.
Third, there must be pathways for continuous mobility. People need to be able to move from entry-level roles into more secure and higher-value positions, whether through experience, ownership, or specialisation.
This is how an economy moves from being a collection of individual success stories to a system that can reproduce prosperity at scale.
When this framework is applied to the creator economy, the absence becomes clear. Most African creator markets today look like hourglass economies. At the top, a small group of breakout stars commands attention, brand deals, platform partnerships, and global visibility. At the bottom, a vast base of aspiring and early-stage creators produces content for little or no pay, hoping to break through and win the algorithmic lottery.
What is missing is the middle.
A creator middle class would not be defined by viral moments, but by durable, repeatable income built by creators themselves. These creators may never dominate global trends or command millions of followers, but they will rely on their work to function as a business and provide sustainable income. Their success would not hinge on a single platform, a burst of attention, or a brand deal, but on systems they control.
They own audiences rather than rent them from platforms. They develop formats that can be extended across YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, courses, events, and communities. They build catalogues of work that can be licensed, repackaged, and sold over time. Their income comes from a mix of subscriptions, partnerships, intellectual property, and services, not only from ads or one-off sponsorships.
What separates them from both the viral elite and the aspiring base is not fame, but structure. These creators can plan beyond the next post. They can forecast income, sign longer-term agreements, invest in better tools, and take creative risks without putting their livelihood on the line.
3. Defining the creator middle class
In a functioning system, this creator middle class would look like people who:
Run small but sustainable creator-led businesses, not just personal pages.
Build and license formats, brands, and intellectual property, not only viral clips.
Work under recurring partnerships and contracts, not just one-off brand deals.
Access credit, legal protection, and financial services as operators, not informal freelancers.
As this layer grows, it naturally pulls a second economy into existence around it. Once creators become stable businesses, they begin hiring, contracting, and training others. Editors, writers, producers, designers, managers, and strategists emerge not as side hustlers orbiting fame, but as professionals working inside creator-led companies. This is where the broader middle class of the creator economy forms, inside studios, collectives, and small production houses built by creators themselves.
Platforms reward scale, and brands reward reach; as a result, the system produces visibility faster than it produces institutions. When a creator burns out, changes platforms, or loses relevance, the business often disappears with them.
A true creator middle class would change the nature of the economy itself. It would mean that creative work can become a career path. That value can be stored in companies, formats, and intellectual property, not just in personalities and follower counts. That people can enter the ecosystem as assistants, editors, researchers, or strategists and grow into operators, studio heads, and owners.
In economic terms, it would signal a shift from an attention market to a production economy. And that, more than any fund, fellowship, or platform announcement, is what would determine whether Africa’s creator boom becomes a lasting industry or remains a cycle of stars rising, fading, and being replaced by the next viral name.
You can access the Africa Creator Economy Report 2.0 here for free.