Why This Nigerian Movie Mogul Ditched YouTube

Sarah Lacy writing in Pandodaily:

Jason Njoku doesn’t like being anyone’s bitch.

Image courtesy of HBS Africa

As I learned the last time I saw him– over machetes in Nigeria– that includes vigilante mobs. But that also includes YouTube, Amazon Web Services, and US-based video ad networks. And those are the people causing him the most problems since we last spoke.

Continuing...

Iroko does it all: They roam the markets of Alaba cutting deals with independent film producers, they scrub the content for remove copyrighted content, they subtitle it, they enter all the metadata, they convert it from outdated formats, they enter all the relevant information in a IMDB-like database, and upload it for hundreds of millions of people in the Nigerian diaspora to rabidly consume. (That’s him haggling with producers above; Njoku is on the right.) Until a few months ago, he let YouTube do the rest. He started a turn-key YouTube channel, that handled the cost and challenges of serving up gigabits of video every month. They handled ad sales. And even some distribution, putting Nollywood movies in some genre lists. When I last saw Njoku in Nigeria that was working well. He was doing eight million streams a month, and on a $1 million revenue run-rate. But since then, his traffic has soared, and the relationship soured. In Njoku’s view, YouTube has become so maniacal about pleasing Hollywood and doing original, high-level US-centric programming that they just didn’t care about what someone like Iroko was doing.

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