Fascinating story in FastCompany about the opportunities and chaos in Nigeria's film industry, the most prolific in the world
"As word spread that he was paying cash for content, marketers started showing up at his office, carrying shoeboxes and plastic bags filled with Nollywood classics. He presented himself as a friend, not a competitor, because his audience was abroad. Even more important, he could offer them another revenue stream in a world of rampant piracy, where new releases are knocked off almost immediately, rendering them almost worthless within weeks or even days. It's often hard to tell the genuine discs from the bootlegs, and they are priced comparably, because legal content must sell cheap if it wants to compete. As a consequence, the idea of a long-tail business had never occurred to anyone at Alaba. Njoku was able to acquire 200 titles, paying marketers between $100 and $1,000 a title for licenses of varying duration. He launched a website called Nollywood Love and struck a content partnership with YouTube, which hosted his streams and inserted commercials into them, giving Njoku a murkily defined cut of the ad revenue."
"At the same time, Njoku was struggling with YouTube, his distribution partner. Although his site generated 150 million views in 2011 and $1.3 million in advertising, Njoku felt that YouTube executives treated him with indifference, and he was annoyed by the heightened scrutiny of any transaction involving a Nigerian IP address. So last year, he decided to build his own platform. The move was daring. Going it alone meant Iroko would have to give up YouTube's built-in audience and replace infrastructure that Google had provided for free. The company refuses to disclose its page views or revenue as a stand-alone site, but Gotter does say that storing movies in the cloud brought new back-end costs of more than $1 million a year.
Still, the gamble could pay off if Njoku can expand his reach in Africa. Around 90% of Iroko's traffic today comes from the estimated 30 million African emigrants spread throughout the world. Njoku aims to reverse that proportion. The obstacle, as usual, is infrastructure. Only a tiny fraction of consumers in Africa have broadband connections, or their own computers, for that matter; many rely on Internet cafes. And the pipes to carry the video streams back to Africa from overseas, where Iroko has its servers, aren't yet robust enough for heavy traffic."
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