Plenty to watch, not enough attention
Nigeria's creative economy has become good at producing content, BusinessDay observed in an October profile. More films are being made and more platforms are available, but the harder problem is getting people to pay attention. [1]
The profile's subject, former film marketer and digital media executive Opeyemi Ewumi, made the point bluntly: content must compete for attention, and that attention is only worth something once it turns into engagement. [1]
That is the shift in a sentence. When more people can make films, podcasts and videos, the scarce resource stops being production and becomes the audience's time. Every new release competes not only with similar work but with everything else on the same phone. [1]
The problem looks different for a film and for a creator. A film needs a large audience to show up within a short window. A creator needs people to come back again and again. Both depend on being discovered first, and discovery is increasingly decided by feeds and recommendations that neither controls. [1]
Adebola Williams, chairman of AW Network, made a similar argument at a creator programme launch in Lagos in April, BusinessDay reported. In his view, the volume of content matters less than giving people a reason to care, and in a crowded market clarity and visibility count for more than talent. [4]
That is the attention problem seen from the creator's side. Output is no longer the measure of effort that matters. A clear identity, a reason for a particular audience to return and a way of being found now decide whether good work is seen at all. [4]
What the numbers say about creators
Survey data suggests most creators are still small. The Africa Creator Economy Report 2.0, published by Communiqué and TM Global and based mainly on creators in Nigeria and South Africa, found that 55.8 percent had fewer than 10,000 followers and six in ten earned less than $100 a month, BusinessDay reported. [3]
Instagram was the primary platform for 77 percent of those surveyed, TikTok for 56 percent and YouTube for 42 percent, and 76 percent used more than one platform to earn. [3]
Top earners relied on product sales (29 percent), brand sponsorships (28 percent) and platform payouts (11 percent), according to the report. [3]
That mix is revealing. The money platforms pay directly is the smallest of the three, so creators who wait for payouts are waiting on their least dependable income. Products and sponsorships pay more, and both depend on an audience that trusts the creator enough to buy something or listen to a brand. [3]
Formal investment is rare. Only 4.2 percent of the creators surveyed had secured major formal funding, and 60 percent were not looking for it, mostly because they felt shut out from investors. [3]
Why follower counts are not the business
At a Lagos panel reported by BusinessDay, Walter Badoo of 4DX Ventures argued that a creator is fundamentally a talent layer, not a business, and becomes one when wrapped in things like intellectual property, systems and infrastructure. [3]
Samuel Onyemelukwe, managing director of Trace West Africa, made a related point in a BusinessDay column. In his examples, a creator with two million followers can drive almost no commercial behaviour, while one with 80,000 deeply engaged followers can quietly generate large numbers of sales. [5]
Adetutu Laditan, founder of Woof Studios Africa, told a Lagos audience in April that brands are now looking beyond vanity metrics to value and positioning. [4]
Follower counts are the easiest number to show and the weakest evidence of attention. They record a decision someone made once, not whether that person still watches, trusts or buys. Engagement, repeat viewing and sales are harder to fake and harder to earn, which is why they are becoming the numbers that matter. [5] [4]
For creators, that is both a threat and an opening. Large accounts with passive audiences may find their numbers worth less than they thought. Smaller creators with a loyal niche have a clearer case to make to the right brand, even without a headline follower count. [5]
Onyemelukwe argued that influencers turned into the media channels of a generation raised online as attention drifted away from older outlets, and that plenty of companies piled into influencer marketing for no better reason than the size of influencers' followings. [5]
That helps explain why brands and creators often talk past each other. A brand that bought reach because everyone else was buying it will be disappointed when reach does not turn into sales. A creator who spent years building an audience will resent being judged by a number the brand chose. Both are reacting to the same gap between attention and action. [5]
At the April launch, Laditan blamed Africa's smaller slice of creator earnings less on the platforms than on what creators still need to learn about making money, building an audience and structuring content. Her advice was to spread income across brand deals, products, licensing and affiliate marketing. [4]
Diversification is also protection. A creator who earns from products, licensing and partnerships is less exposed when a platform changes its rules or its feed, and is building something that could outlast any single account. [4]
The businesses forming around creators
Ewumi's new venture, the Hira Company, works across marketing, content strategy, digital growth, experiential marketing and audience development, aiming to help brands and creative businesses reach the audiences they want, BusinessDay reported. [1]
Her record explains the focus. During her digital growth work at NdaniTV, BusinessDay reported, its YouTube channel went from subscribers in the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, and she holds that reaching people only pays off when they keep coming back. [1]
Laditan's ECHO Creator Accelerator, a five-week programme for a cohort of 21 creative entrepreneurs, teaches storytelling, strategy and revenue generation. Without advertising spend, there is no revenue, she said at its launch. [4]
BusinessDay has also reported that the creator economy is opening up work beyond making the content itself: photography and video, editing, digital marketing, PR, graphic design and online selling. [6]
That is why the creator economy now describes an industry rather than a group of personalities. Around every visible creator sits work most viewers never see: editing, design, campaign planning, community management, analytics and the business of getting work in front of the right people. Much of the opportunity, and many of the jobs, sit in that layer. [6] [1]
Paying creators before they are famous
Some platforms are trying to pay earlier. Yolly, a digital content and rewards platform owned by Starbase Technologies, rewards users for watching, streaming and creating content through points it calls Stars, BusinessDay reported. [2]
Its head of business, Emeka Okenwa, said Nigerian creators earn well below their contemporaries outside Nigeria and that Yolly wants to remove the barrier that says creators cannot earn until they have a huge following. [2]
Paying small creators early speaks directly to the survey finding that most earn less than $100 a month. It also runs straight into the attention problem. Rewards can bring people to a platform, but whether they build lasting audiences for creators, rather than activity that stops when the rewards do, is the test such schemes will face. [3] [2]
One creator's account suggests slow work rather than sudden breaks. BusinessDay profiled Ivorian creator Awa Fanny, who joined TikTok in 2021 for entertainment, began treating it professionally in 2022 and has since worked with businesses. The most important thing is consistency, she said, because building an audience takes time. [6]
Consistency is the unglamorous answer to the attention problem. A single viral post borrows attention for a day. Posting reliably, learning what an audience responds to and showing up again is how that attention becomes a habit, and habits are what brands and platforms eventually pay for. [6]
Events as attention machines
Live events are another answer. BusinessDay reported that the 2022 fan premiere of Brotherhood, which Ewumi worked on, drew 1,000 people to the Indoor Sports Hall of Teslim Balogun Stadium in Surulere and filled every seat. [1]
PodFest Naija 2026, the second edition of the podcast festival organised by The Muvmnt Studio, brought brands and industry figures to Harbour Point in Victoria Island, Lagos, where Yolly sponsored prizes of N500,000 each for the first and second runners-up in its Next Big Podcaster category. [2]
Events concentrate what feeds scatter. For a few hours, an audience gives its full attention to one thing, meets other fans and leaves with something to post about. A good event keeps producing content long after the doors close, from clips and photos to the conversations people have about who they met. [1] [2]
Festivals like PodFest also do something individual creators struggle to do alone: put scattered creators, brands and audiences in one room. For podcasters especially, whose work is often heard rather than seen, that visibility can be as valuable as the prizes. [2]
In his PodFest keynote, Lagos State Deputy Governor Obafemi Hamzat pointed to the state's $22m Unified Fibre Network project as something expected to bring wide economic benefits, including to the creative industry, BusinessDay reported. [2]
Better connectivity lowers the cost of making and sending work, and that matters for creators who upload large files or stream live. It does not, on its own, make anyone stop scrolling. Infrastructure widens the pipe; attention still has to be won at the other end. [2]
A professional era, with higher stakes
The survey report's answer, as BusinessDay summarised it, is formalisation matched to each stage of a creator's growth, from mentorship for beginners to capital for the biggest names. [3]
Onyemelukwe described the arguments between brands and creators as a sign that Nigeria's creator economy is entering its professional era. [5]
A professional era cuts both ways. Contracts, clear rights over content and proper accounts make creators easier to invest in and harder to exploit. They also raise the bar for everyone, and creators who built audiences on instinct now need business skills that platforms do not teach. [3] [5]
Why we are covering the system, not just the stars
For this publication, the infrastructure around creators is part of the story. We will keep covering the personalities at the centre of internet culture, but we also want to follow the businesses, events and platforms forming around them, because the next important creator company may be built by someone who never appears on camera. [6]
That also changes the questions worth asking about any creator story. Not only who went viral, but who owns the work, who gets paid, how the audience was found and whether the attention lasted. Those are the questions that separate a moment from a business. [1]
Published 8 October 2026 · Updated 14 October 2026 · Corrected 15 October 2026 · By Creator & Streaming Desk. Read our editorial standards.