Across the continent, a new economic force is rapidly taking shape, largely invisible to traditional gross domestic product (GDP) metrics. Millions of young Africans are no longer just consuming the internet; they are the internet.
TikTok videos are helping FMCG products sell in downtown Nairobi. YouTube channels are shaping political narratives more effectively than traditional television.
Instagram and WhatsApp channels are helping drive actual purchase decisions, bypassing traditional retail. By almost every metric that matters, engagement, growth, cultural impact and raw attention, Africa’s creator economy is booming.
Yet financially, it remains small. The disconnect between the volume of influence and the value captured is staggering. To understand why, and to see where the market must go next, it helps to look East.
In China, the influencer economy is not driven by individual creators negotiating brand deals from their hot desks in co-working spaces. It is powered by Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs).
These are large, technology-enabled conglomerates that manage thousands of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) across platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou and WeChat.
These companies do far more than broker sponsorship deals. They recruit and train creators, optimise their content with granular data, manage distribution across fragmented platforms, finance production and plug influencers directly into supply chains.
In China, a single well-backed KOL can sell millions of dollars’ worth of goods in a single livestream, because of the infrastructure behind them. The inventory, logistics, payments, you name it, are all integrated.
The MCN takes a share of the revenue because they provide the operating system that makes the revenue possible. Africa does not have this. Instead, we have a fragmented ecosystem of independent freelancers, ad-hoc brand campaigns and global social platforms that control distribution while offering little in the way of local support.
However, proposing an African MCN requires a crucial caveat. We must be careful not to import the mistakes of the Western internet. In the US and Europe, the term MCN muddied in the mid-2010s. The first wave of Western MCNs became predatory middlemen.
They acted as rent-seekers, aggregating YouTube AdSense revenue and locking creators into restrictive contracts without adding tangible value. They were landlords, not builders.
They failed because their business model was based on value extraction, not creation. We cannot afford to replicate the predatory middleman model. The margins here are too thin, and the friction is too high.
The African MCN must be fundamentally different. It cannot just be an agency; it must be proper infrastructure. It needs to solve the boring problems that individual creators cannot solve for themselves: cross-border payments, tax compliance, data aggregation and negotiating leverage against global platforms. An African version of this model would act as the middleware of the creator economy.
Africa, with its high mobile-money penetration and youthful population, is uniquely positioned for this kind of media-commerce model. The infrastructure components like mobile money, rapid delivery logistics et al already exist. What is missing is the coordination layer.
So why has it not happened? The first barrier is platform fragmentation. Unlike China’s integrated super-apps, Africa’s creators operate across foreign platforms that do not talk to one another. Payments, content, and commerce are disconnected.
However, this is a data arbitrage opportunity. The entity that can stitch together a creator’s identity across TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and local payment rails will own the most valuable dataset on the continent.
The second barrier is capital. Building this infrastructure requires money. MCNs need to finance studios, offer creator advances, and front the cost of inventory for live commerce. African venture capital has largely overlooked creator infrastructure, viewing it as media rather than tech.
The third barrier is mindset. To succeed, these new entities cannot think like marketing firms. They must think like fintechs and marketplaces. They are in the business of asset management, where the asset is human attention.
None of these obstacles is permanent. But the clock is ticking. Here is the uncomfortable truth: if we do not build our own industrialised creator infrastructure, someone else will. We are already witnessing a form of digital colonialism.
Where our attention is harvested from engagement on social platforms, yet there are peanuts to show for it in payouts of whatever nature.
The cultural and commercial value created on the continent is being exported, leaving the local ecosystem with only the "likes" and "shares." China understood early that attention is an asset and they built the machinery to monetise it at scale, on their own terms.
The next wave of African tech champions will not emerge from the social networks themselves. They will emerge from the layer that sits between creators, platforms and commerce. They will be the companies that industrialise influence and convert it into revenue.
The influence is already here. The audience is already here. The money has not caught up. But it will, and the only question is whose pocket it will end up in.
