I’ve been obsessed with the content business since I was a kid. Or at least I think it’s been that long but recently, I haven’t thought about much else.
If you think about it, content is Nigeria’s biggest export after oil. Literature, Nollywood and “Afro-beats” are all Nigerian creations that have international appeal. The best part is we consume our own stuff. We read Achebe and now we Chimamanda. We danced to Olisadebe and now we dance to P-Square. We feared Herbert Ogunde and now worship Genevieve Nnaji.
There’s definitely a move to create a “new school” of African content. Iroko TV distributes Nollywood. Spinlet distributes music and Kachifo re-kindled our belief in African literature.
So I’m starting a series of blog posts titled “This Content Of A Thing Sef”. I’ll be sharing my thoughts on how we’re creating and distributing everything from video, audio to text and why we are only scratching the surface of Africa’s huge content explosion. The idea is to take a look at how technological and economic forces are affecting the content creation and distribution landscape in Africa.
The first post is about what I believe are The Three Pillars of Great Content. It’s a basic post and I don’t think there’ll be much of an argument about the points I raise in it. However, it’ll lead into a more interesting topic – “Game of Thrones: DSTV vs Iroko”. After that I’ll tackle music distribution with a post titled “Get Rich or Die Streaming”. The last post will be called “Zombie, Oh Zombie” and it’s about this darned print business that just refuses to die.
God willing, I’ll be alive and able to complete these posts and we can have a long discussion about it. Please feel free to say your piece in the comments and if you’re going to be talking about this on Twitter, please use the hashtag #TCOATS.
Seyi Taylor has worked in medicine. Now he works in design, and technology (and sometimes medicine). Follow him on Twitter here.
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