Vlogs by the Nigerian content creator Tayo Aina, on anything from Nigeria’s japa (emigration) wave and voodoo festivals in Benin, to time with the Afrobeats star Davido or the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Tanzania, can garner millions of views on YouTube.
Aina, 31, who started his channel in 2017 while working as an Uber driver, says it helped him to see parts of Nigeria he had never had the chance to visit before. Using his iPhone, he began to make mini-adventures of his work trips, taking breaks to document the places he visited, and telling stories not covered by mainstream media.
Aina learned how to film and edit through tutorials on YouTube, saved up for better equipment, and soon began travelling beyond Nigeria to countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia and Namibia, creating travel videos that showcased culture and social life on the continent through the lens of an African traveller.
“Most of the media online was negative, and I saw that I was changing the narrative about Africa by showcasing it in a more [representative] light,” says Aina, who now travels the world.
A 2024 report on Africa’s creator industry by the publishing firm Communiqué and the media and technology company TM Global, valued the sector at £2.4bn and predicted that it would grow five-fold by 2030, mirroring trends in the global creator economy. Its growth is being driven by a wave of creators aged 18 to 34, and spurred on by surging internet connectivity and social media use across the continent, as well as the explosion of African culture on the world stage.
The growing interest in African culture – from Afrobeats and Amapiano music and dance to international fashion collections made from African textiles such as Ankara or Kikoy, and African film – is part of an international clamour for authentic cultural storytelling outside the global north, mirrored in global cultural movements such as the Korean wave, says David Adeleke, founder of Communiqué.
This year, TikTok recognised more than a dozen African creators, including the Nigerian lifestyle creator @__iremide, who makes satirised videos of everyday life, and South Africa’s Princess Sachiko, 22, known for cosplaying characters from anime, video games and pop culture. Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, recently held meetings with creators in the region to discuss expanded avenues for monetisation on the platform, while other social media platforms, including YouTube and TikTok are growing their presence, and investment funds such as east Africa’s Heva are getting involved.
While the industry is gaining traction, it is still young, according to the report. Most content creators are in their first three years, with fewer than 10,000 followers, and face challenges translating their social capital into income. Conversations about monetising and standardising the creator business ecosystem are still mainly happening in the west, the report adds.
But that is slowly changing.
As Aina’s channel grew and attracted a more global viewership, he discovered he could make much more money when his content was viewed by audiences in the west rather than in Africa. YouTube’s advertising model relies on ad spend, which is lower in many African markets than in North America or Europe.
“Part of it is economic: generally speaking, western creators and audiences have more resources, but it’s not enough to justify the disparity in opportunities,” says Adeleke.
For Aina, who started to diversify his content and viewer base so he could earn more, there were other issues to worry about. He has vlogged about the barriers and prejudice he has faced while travelling, such as being detained in Ethiopia over suspicions that he was carrying drugs, being arrested in South Africa over suspicions that he was a “fraudster”, and being denied entry into Dubai. The Dubai incident in 2022 was the “last straw” for Aina, who eventually secured a passport from St Kitts and Nevis by pouring his savings into investments there, making him a national of the Caribbean country.
He now runs a creator academy on YouTube that has trained nearly 2,000 mainly African creators. “I want to inspire the next generation of Africans not to have limits, and to grow their brands globally,” he says.
Chiamaka “Amaka” Amaku, a 30-year-old Nigerian travel and lifestyle innovator who works as a social media manager and creates content as a personal project, says digital infrastructure issues, including challenges making and receiving international payments, can limit Nigerian creators’ growth. Some global payment platforms impose restrictions on certain countries, including Nigeria, due to concerns about fraud and money laundering.
“Payment is one of our biggest issues in the creator economy in Nigeria,” says Amaku, adding that the barriers to payment discourage global brands from working with Nigerian creators.
Over the past couple of years, Fintech companies such as Flutterwave and Paystack, which support international payments, have reduced the barriers creators face receiving digital payments, but a number of restrictions, including in local banking policy, remain. For a travel creator such as Amaku, that means trouble booking flights, or taking Ubers abroad.
Amaku, who charges £250-£500 for posts on her Instagram page, which has about 20,000 followers, says it is difficult to make a living from content creation, and that the “hush-hush culture” around industry rates in Nigeria leaves many creators short-changed.
Sharon Machira, a 31-year-old Kenyan luxury travel creator who describes her audience as “afropolitan champagne nomads”, agrees. Many companies still rely on traditional advertising, she says, so competition for brand sponsorship is fierce, which can make rate negotiations a race to the bottom.
With about 20,000 followers on Instagram, and nearly 7,000 on YouTube, she gets about five brand deals a year, at about £600-£1,000 for each campaign. When she became a full-time content creator last year after nearly a decade in media and PR, she realised she could not count on the handful of unpredictable brand deals to make a living and opened a PR studio that helps businesses tailor their content to their audience, working with companies such as the travel agency Nomad and the Rwandan luxury lodge Singita Kwitonda.
Building a business around her social media brand, she says, earns her several times more for each project than brand deals. “I think that’s where the real promise really is for [African] creators: leveraging your social capital, networks, credibility and personal brand to launch your business,” she says.
