I went on a little rabbit hole and tried to see what African YouTubers earn (specifically Kenyan and Nigerian ones). It’s important to understand that brand partnerships are not a common phenomena in Africa because most companies don’t see the value in it and are run by boomers who are used to old school marketing methodology. They’re resistant to change and they hate young people so they’d never put money in their pockets to push brands for them.
It therefore follows that African YouTubers rely more on viewership earnings unlike their counterparts in the west who make a majority of their take home pay from 10 second ads on their chanells just promoting companies like Shopify, Skillshare etc.
I was surprised to see that even Nigerian accounts with huge followings don’t make much. We see that Tayo Aina for example makes in the low thousands (in dollars) but he’ll have those rare moments where he reaches $10k. These are monthly payouts by the way. Recently, he acquired a St. Kitts and Nevis passport for $150k so I thought he was rich but it turns out he got the money from crowdfunding. Only after seeing these hard numbers have I come to terms with the fact that he doesn’t really make much, albeit he still enjoys decent earnings. If you listen closely, you’d be able to pick out the fact that he isn’t making as much as you’d think and his earning stats below prove it.
The other Nigerian YouTuber I looked at is Steve Ndukwu (the guy who highlights expensive real estate in the countries he chooses to visit - South Africa, Mauritius, Kenya etc). He still makes in the neighborhood of Tayo Aina’s earnings although his numbers are more towards the $4-5k mark but he also has his highs at the beginning of the year. See below:
It’s crazy to see that even someone like Wode Maya (big big name) is also in the lower ballpark of $1-3k as seen below:
On to the motherland and it’s Lynn Ngugi who takes the cake (among the Kenyans I looked at) and by a huge margin bearing in mind Spice FM (a whole podcast) comes in right behind her. Although their numbers are in the lower end of a few thousand dollars, this is still a good living. Miss Trudy doesn’t make as much as you’d think as well - a few hundred dollars a month here and there and sometimes cracking the $1k number. Even people like Natalie Tewa and Afrikan Traveller who you’d expect to take home the bag don’t really make enough to sustain a family. This is crazy especially because you’d think they’re really taking the bag home. Butita, however, seems to be making MCA level money which is good but I think that’s because he has a full blown TV show on his chanel (A girl Toto) which every mboch and idle Kenyan woman tunes to. Our boy Andrew Kibe doesn’t seem to have made any useful cash even in his heyday (well maybe from live chat contributions and super-chats). This explains why he’s not as well-off as we might have thought.
See some more earning charts below for more clarity:
These are some very popular chanels and they’re still making njugu karanga money. Now I asked myself how much a small-time YouTuber (all these new YouTube baby girls and semi-celebs with their funny “fake” American accents - putting their Rs and Ts in the wrong places) makes and it’s clear as day that some make a big FAT ZERO in YouTube income. Now, of course this analysis doesn’t count for instagram because it looks like African companies, while they haven’t yet adopted YouTube partnerships, have indeed gone full kamikaze on instagram paying huge amounts for reels. It could therefore mean that African YouTubers instead make more money from Instagram (and maybe TikTok) than YouTube. This is crazy because it’s upside down everywhere else in the world.
Anyway, this is just a hole I got myself into and decided to dig in a little bit more.
