In September 2025, at a technology conference on the edge of a city that never fully sleeps, the Nigerian government did something it had never done before: it put a price on imagination.
The Nigerian Creator Economy Report — the first of its kind, commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism, and the Creative Economy and produced in partnership with the National Council for Arts and Culture, TM Global, and the intelligence firm Communiqué — arrived with ceremony and a headline figure that immediately divided the room. Nigeria’s creator economy, the report declared, was worth $31.2 million.
Thirty-one point two million dollars. In a country of 239 million people, where the music industry alone paid artists ₦58 billion in royalties the previous year. In a country where a single Lagos holiday season — the annual convergence of tourists, returnees, and consumer spending that the city’s marketers have branded “Detty December” — generated $71.6 million in economic activity over roughly two weeks. In a country where one platform, a bootstrapped digital commerce startup called Selar, paid out ₦18 billion to its creator base in a single calendar year.
The number, researchers and founders noted privately, was not wrong. It was just incomplete in a way that mattered enormously.
“The $31.2 million is the floor of what we can see. What we cannot see yet is what defines the real opportunity.”
The gap between the official valuation and the actual scale of economic activity flowing through Nigeria’s knowledge and creative ecosystem is not a rounding error. It is a structural measurement failure and understanding it is essential for anyone trying to navigate, invest in, or build within Africa’s most dynamic digital economy.
THE MAKING OF AN ECONOMY THAT NOBODY COUNTED
To understand why Nigeria’s creator economy is so difficult to measure, it helps to understand how it was built: not by design, but by necessity.
For much of the past decade, the pathway into the Nigerian creator economy was not through a grant programme or an accelerator cohort. It was through a WhatsApp group. It was through a PDF sold from a Google Drive link. It was through a woman in Port Harcourt who figured out that the skincare knowledge she had accumulated over fifteen years of treating hyperpigmentation could be packaged into a ₦15,000 guide and sold to the 47,000 people following her on Instagram. It was, in other words, informal — not in the sense of being unserious, but in the technical economic sense of operating outside the formal measurement frameworks that government statisticians and research firms rely upon.
This matters because formal measurement frameworks are designed to count what they can find. They look for registered businesses, declared income, platform payouts that flow through trackable financial rails. What they miss — what they have always missed in Nigeria — is the vast archipelago of micro-enterprises operating through mobile money transfers, direct bank payments, encrypted messaging apps, and handshake deals between a creator and her community.
The businesses built this way are not small. They are simply invisible to the instruments designed to find them.
A Medium essay published in November 2025 by a Lagos-based analyst captured the problem with unusual precision. “Her most popular post,” the author wrote, describing a social commerce vendor whose deodorant demonstration video had spawned dozens of copycat versions across Nigerian platforms, “delivered guaranteed engagement that converted directly to sales. Yet when industry analysts published reports on Nigeria’s creator economy, her business model and thousands like it were conspicuously absent. This exclusion is not an oversight. It is a systematic failure of the measurement frameworks that industry analysts, research firms, and policymakers rely on.”
“Coaches, educators, and knowledge vendors are quietly building six-figure businesses that appear in neither SME statistics nor creator economy reports.”
The report itself acknowledged the limitation. The $31.2 million figure, it noted, represents “the formal, measurable creator economy” — a phrase that, in the Nigerian context, is a significant qualifier. Coaches, educators, faith-based teachers, finance educators, health practitioners, and knowledge vendors of every description are quietly building six-figure and seven-figure naira businesses that appear in neither small-and-medium enterprise statistics nor creator economy reports. They are the category that falls between every measurement chair.
$31.2M
Official valuation of Nigeria’s creator economy in 2025
NIGERIAN CREATOR ECONOMY REPORT · FMACTCE / NCAC / TM GLOBAL
THE INCOME GAP THAT TELLS TWO STORIES
The most-cited finding in the Nigerian Creator Economy Report is not the headline valuation. It is the income distribution, and it tells two stories simultaneously, depending on which end of the data you are standing at.
Story one: 56.45 percent of Nigerian creators earn less than $100 per month. This is the statistic that circulates on social media with a mixture of shock and resignation, the number that gets quoted in discussions about the precarity of creative work, the data point that critics of the “creator economy” hype cycle reach for when they want to argue that the whole enterprise is a mirage sustained by the exceptional earnings of a tiny elite.
Story two: 33 percent of Nigerian creators — as measured by Selar’s internal data on the platform’s creator base — now earn between ₦500,000 and ₦1,000,000 per month. In a country where the median urban household income sits well below that threshold, these are not side-hustle figures. They are founder figures. They are the income of someone running a business.
Both stories are true. The question is which one you use to make decisions.
The distance between the 56 percent and the 33 percent is not primarily a talent gap. It is a model gap. The creators earning under $100 per month are, by and large, pursuing the influencer model: building audiences, pitching brands, waiting for sponsorship budgets to find them. The creators approaching seven-figure naira monthly income are pursuing what might be called the founder model: packaging their knowledge into products — courses, ebooks, coaching programmes, community memberships — that generate revenue independent of any brand’s goodwill or any algorithm’s favour.
Note
The influencer depends on the brand’s budget cycle. The founder depends on her own expertise. One is an employee without a contract. The other is a business owner.
This distinction matters because the two models produce fundamentally different relationships to income stability, scale, and longevity. The influencer’s earnings spike and collapse with cultural relevance. The knowledge product, once built, becomes an asset —something that earns while its creator sleeps, that compounds as her reputation grows, that scales without proportional increases in labour.
Goldman Sachs Research, in its landmark analysis of the global creator economy, found that only approximately 4 percent of creators worldwide are “professionals”; defined as earning $100,000 or more annually. Goldman expects that ratio to hold steady even as the total addressable market doubles from $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027. In other words, the platforms and the global attention economy will grow enormously, while the percentage of creators who actually prosper from that growth remains thin.
The Nigerian version of this pattern is, if anything, more acute. TikTok does not include Nigeria in its Creator Rewards Programme. Nigerian creators on the platform, and there are 6.3 million of them, 98 percent serving local audiences, in a market that grew 43.4 percent year over year to become the fastest-growing TikTok market on the planet, receive no direct platform payments for their content. Every naira that flows to a Nigerian TikTok creator arrives through brand deals, live gifts, affiliate commissions, or their own products and services. The platform takes the attention. The creator must build the monetisation architecture herself.
56%
of Nigerian creators earn under $100 per month while 33% earn ₦500K–₦1M monthly
NCER 2025 · SELAR STATE OF THE CREATOR ECONOMY REPORT
SELAR AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE INVISIBLE ECONOMY
The most compelling evidence that Nigeria’s creator economy is substantially larger than the official numbers suggest does not come from a government report. It comes from the payout disclosures of a bootstrapped software company founded by a former Paystack engineer in 2016.
Selar, now Africa’s largest creator commerce platform, hosting nearly 400,000 creators across Nigeria and 13 other African countries, has made a practice of publishing its creator payout figures with a transparency unusual in the Nigerian tech ecosystem. The trajectory those figures describe is difficult to reconcile with a market valued at $31.2 million.
In 2021, Selar paid out approximately ₦435 million to its creator base. By 2024, that figure had grown to ₦9.8 billion. In 2025, it reached ₦18 billion — roughly $12.86 million at prevailing exchange rates — flowing to the platform’s creators in a single calendar year. Selar alone, in other words, distributed payments equivalent to more than 40 percent of the entire reported valuation of Nigeria’s creator economy.
And Selar is no longer operating in isolation. Three other Nigerian platforms — Nestuge, AllAccessFans, and Youfanly — collectively paid out an additional ₦4 billion to creators in 2025. The four platforms together distributed over ₦22 billion, or approximately $15.7 million, in a twelve-month period.
Douglas Kendyson, Selar’s founder and chief executive, attributes the platform’s growth to two compounding forces. The first is structural: the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of Nigerians to experiment with digital income channels during lockdown, and those habits, unlike so many pandemic-era behavioural changes, did not dissolve when restrictions lifted. The second is reputational: the visibility of early successful creators proved to a sceptical public that selling knowledge and digital products could be a legitimate, sustainable business, not merely an elaborate scam dressed in e-commerce vocabulary.
“So many people are creating value on different fronts these days,” Kendyson told Techpoint Africa in 2025. “There are coaching and membership programmes people spend half a million naira on. It’s weird because you’d think Nigerians don’t have money for that, but then you’d be surprised to see the number of people paying for things like that.”
The transaction data supports the observation. Selar’s internal research found that three in every five creators on its platform sell digital products — ebooks, online courses, and training programmes — rather than physical goods or services. Over a quarter have hired staff, becoming employers of labour in the process. By creator type, the hiring rates break down as follows: 36 percent of YouTubers on the platform have brought on employees; 35 percent of bloggers; 31 percent of social media influencers; and 27 percent of digital product creators. Approximately one in five hired their first employee within six months of starting their creator business.
“Three in five creators on Selar sell knowledge products. Over a quarter have hired staff. The creator economy is not a content industry. It is a knowledge industry.”
These are not the metrics of a hobbyist class. They are the metrics of a small-business sector — one that happens to have grown up outside the formal economy’s sight lines, funded by customer revenue rather than institutional capital, and built on the twin foundations of mobile internet access and the centuries-old Nigerian tradition of selling expertise.
THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF ATTENTION
Any serious analysis of Nigeria’s creator economy must account for the platform environment in which it operates — and that environment is, by global standards, extraordinary.
Nigeria had 107 million internet users at the start of 2025, representing a 45.4 percent penetration rate in a population of 239 million. Internet subscriptions have since risen to 112.67 million, pushing broadband penetration past 51 percent. Total monthly data consumption crossed one million terabytes for the first time in January 2025, a figure that had grown 93 percent in two years as falling smartphone prices and competitive data bundle pricing brought millions of new users online.
But the most striking feature of Nigeria’s digital landscape is not its size. It is its intensity.
According to DataReportal’s 2025 analysis, Nigerian internet users aged 16 and above now use an average of 7.09 social media platforms per month — up from 5.0 just one year earlier. No other major market shows this pattern of platform promiscuity at this scale. The average Nigerian digital citizen is not loyal to any single platform; they are constantly switching between environments, following attention wherever it concentrates.
The implications for creators are double-edged. On one hand, a Nigerian audience is reachable through more channels than almost any audience on earth. On the other, reaching that audience requires a content operation of considerable sophistication — the ability to produce, adapt, and distribute material across multiple formats and platforms simultaneously.
Nigeria also holds two global records that have significant implications for anyone selling products through digital channels. DataReportal found that Nigeria has the world’s highest rate of brand discovery via social media, at 66.9 percent of internet users — meaning that more Nigerians first encounter brands through social platforms than any other population on earth. More strikingly, Nigeria has the world’s highest rate of product research via social media, at 98.2 percent. Nearly every Nigerian who uses the internet uses social media to research purchases before making them.
This is not an audience that needs to be educated about buying online. It is an audience that is already, functionally, a commerce audience, one that has collapsed the distance between content consumption and purchase decision into a single scrolling experience.
98.2% of Nigerian internet users research products on social media; the highest rate on earth. The audience is not the problem. It never was.
WhatsApp sits at the centre of this ecosystem with a dominance that has no equivalent in any other major market. The platform records 96.5 percent self-declared usage among Nigerian internet users — meaning that for practical purposes, every Nigerian who is online is on WhatsApp. It is simultaneously the country’s most popular messaging application, its most trusted commerce channel, and its most effective customer relationship management tool, all compressed into a single green interface on a ₦80,000 smartphone.
TikTok’s rise alongside this infrastructure has been meteoric. The platform’s reachable advertising audience in Nigeria grew 43.4 percent year over year, reaching 47.8 million, a number that now exceeds Facebook’s Nigerian audience for the first time. Among young Nigerians, TikTok has functionally replaced television as the primary entertainment medium, and the 6.3 million creators producing content for that audience have built enormous influence without any direct support from the platform’s monetisation programmes.
7.09
social platforms used monthly by the average Nigerian internet user, the highest multi-platform usage rate in the world
DATAREPORTAL DIGITAL 2025 NIGERIA
THE DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND AND THE KNOWLEDGE GAP
Nigeria’s creator economy cannot be fully understood without reckoning with the demographic context in which it operates. The country’s median age is 18.1 years. Fifty-eight percent of the population is under 30. Approximately 80 million young Nigerians are unemployed, representing 53 percent of the youth population, in a country that graduates 1.7 million young people from universities and polytechnics every year into a formal labour market that cannot absorb them.
These are not simply economic statistics. They are the biographical facts of a generation for whom the traditional pathway — study, graduate, secure formal employment, ascend a corporate ladder — has effectively closed. The creator economy, for this generation, is not an aspiration. It is an alternative infrastructure of livelihood, constructed in real time, with mobile phones and social media accounts and platforms like Selar standing in for the institutions that failed to materialise.
The educational profile of this generation makes the knowledge economy particularly relevant. Afrobarometer’s 2025 research found that 68 percent of Nigerian youth between 18 and 35 hold secondary or post-secondary qualifications — a modestly improving figure relative to older cohorts. These are educated young people with expertise, credentials, and professional knowledge who lack the formal channels through which to monetise what they know.
The creator economy offers those channels. A trained nurse who understands medication interactions has an audience among the millions of Nigerians navigating a healthcare system that regularly fails them. A finance professional who understands investment vehicles has an audience among a young middle class that is, for the first time, accumulating savings worth protecting. A software engineer who can translate technical concepts into plain language has an audience among a generation desperate to acquire skills that the formal education system does not adequately provide.
The knowledge creator, in this context, is not a hobbyist turned influencer. She is a professional who has discovered that her professional expertise has market value beyond the confines of formal employment, and has built the infrastructure to capture that value directly.
The Africa e-learning market reflects this demand at scale. Nigeria is the second-largest e-learning market on the continent, commanding a 20.4 percent share behind South Africa. The country’s online education market is projected to grow at 15.75 percent annually through 2029, reaching nearly $300 million. Industry surveys consistently find that over 45 percent of Nigerian employers report difficulty finding qualified candidates — a structural skills mismatch that the formal education system is not equipped to resolve, but that individual knowledge creators, packaging their expertise into accessible digital products, are quietly beginning to address.
THE BILLION-DOLLAR BET
In the global context, the numbers that frame Nigeria’s creator economy are large enough to fundamentally reframe the local conversation.
Goldman Sachs Research projects that the global creator economy — which it valued at $250 billion in 2023 — will reach $480 billion by 2027, nearly doubling in four years. That growth, Goldman notes, will be driven primarily by influencer marketing spend, platform advertising revenue sharing, and the monetisation of short-form video at scale. It will not be distributed evenly: only approximately 4 percent of the world’s 50 million creators will earn above $100,000 annually, a ratio Goldman expects to remain stubbornly constant.
Africa’s share of that global market is currently small but growing at a pace that outstrips almost every other region. The Africa creator economy was valued at $3.08 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $17.84 billion by 2030 — a 28.5 percent annual growth rate that, if sustained, would represent one of the fastest expansions of a knowledge sector in recorded economic history. A separate analysis places the figure at $29.84 billion by 2032 at a 28.7 percent compound annual growth rate.
Nigeria sits at the centre of that projection. It is Africa’s most populous nation, its largest economy by nominal GDP, its most prolific music and film exporter, and its most culturally influential digital content producer. When African content goes global — when Afrobeats fills European festival stages, when Nollywood titles appear in international streaming catalogues, when Nigerian slang infiltrates the vocabulary of diaspora communities from London to Atlanta — it almost always originates in Lagos, or in the imaginations of people shaped by it.
The music industry data illustrates the scale of what is already happening. Nigerian artists received ₦58 billion from Spotify in 2024, a 146 percent increase from the previous year, on the back of more than 30 billion global streams of Afrobeats content. Nollywood’s box office revenue jumped 60 percent in the same period, reaching ₦11.5 billion. YouTube paid Nigerian creators over $10 million in AdSense revenue, from content that attracted more than 20 billion annual views and crossed 1,500 channels over the 100,000-subscriber milestone.
Don Jazzy’s Mavin Records signed a $200 million distribution and equity deal with Universal Music Group. Funke Akindele’s film projects have collectively grossed ₦4.7 billion at the domestic box office. Mark Angel Comedy’s YouTube channel crossed subscriber milestones that most global content companies spend years and significant capital pursuing.
These are not outlier anecdotes. They are the visible peaks of a very large iceberg — the portion of Nigeria’s creative and knowledge economy that has grown large enough to attract international capital and media attention. Below the waterline, hundreds of thousands of smaller creators are building the businesses that will become the next wave of visible success.
THE POLICY ARRIVAL AND ITS COMPLICATIONS
The Nigerian government’s decision to formally recognise and measure the creator economy represents a genuine turning point, and brings with it the complications that inevitably accompany institutional attention.
The Creative Economy Development Fund, seeded with $200 million from the African Export-Import Bank, signals that the state is prepared to back its rhetorical support for the creative sector with actual capital. Government initiatives like iDICE, the Three Million Technical Talent programme, and the Creator Loans Access Programme suggest a policy architecture, however nascent, beginning to take shape around the knowledge and creative economy.
But the relationship between the Nigerian state and its creator economy is not straightforwardly supportive. In July 2026, Selar’s founder and chief executive published an open letter accusing the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service of attempting to impose a backdated 5 percent royalty fee on all sales processed through the platform. The dispute, still unresolved at the time of this writing, crystallised a tension that has long existed beneath the surface of Nigeria’s digital economy: the question of whether the state will nurture the creator economy as an asset or extract from it as a revenue source.
The Nigeria Tax Act of 2025 settled one question definitively: all creator income — AdSense payments, brand sponsorships, affiliate commissions, platform payouts, and even cryptocurrency receipts — is taxable under Nigerian law. The legislation is in many respects appropriate: a sector generating billions of naira annually should contribute to the public revenue that funds the infrastructure it depends on. But its implementation, and the manner in which tax authorities approach the platforms that have built the infrastructure enabling creator income in the first place, will determine whether the policy environment accelerates or impedes the sector’s development.
Kendyson’s framing of the dispute drew on an analogy that many in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem found resonant: the early days of digital payments, when Paystack and Flutterwave were building the plumbing for online commerce before regulators had fully decided how to treat them. “It just means the market will be more sensitised to the concept of digital products,” he told Techpoint Africa, choosing to interpret competitor entry and regulatory scrutiny alike as signals of a sector maturing rather than one under threat. Whether that optimism proves warranted will depend considerably on choices made in the coming months by officials who are still, in many respects, learning what the creator economy actually is.
WHAT COMES AFTER THE COUNTING
The significance of the Nigerian Creator Economy Report lies not in the precision of its headline figure but in the fact that such a figure exists at all. For years, the case that the Nigerian creator and knowledge economy was a serious economic sector worthy of policy attention, institutional capital, and the kind of sustained analytical focus that the banking sector or the oil industry takes for granted, rested largely on anecdote, platform data disclosed in press releases, and the observable reality that significant numbers of educated, skilled Nigerians were building their livelihoods through digital knowledge products.
The report gives that case an official number to stand on. It is, as several researchers have noted, almost certainly an undercount. But an undercount acknowledged is more useful than an accurate figure that nobody has yet tried to produce.
The more important question is what happens next, what the existence of official data enables that the absence of it foreclosed. The answer, most analysts believe, is primarily institutional: the ability to attract the kind of patient, structured capital that transforms a sector from a collection of individual hustles into an integrated industry. The ability to design tax and regulatory policy that supports rather than strangles the platforms building the infrastructure. The ability to make the case to international investors that Nigeria’s knowledge economy is not a speculative bet but a measurable, growing, trackable market.
The demographics virtually guarantee continued growth. A country where 58 percent of the population is under 30, where 1.7 million graduates enter the labour market annually without sufficient formal employment to absorb them, where 7.09 social platforms are used per person per month, where 98.2 percent of internet users research purchases socially, and where three in five creators who reach a monetisation platform immediately begin selling knowledge products — that country is not at risk of running out of creator economy activity. The question is whether the infrastructure, the policy environment, and the capital allocation can keep pace with the human energy already flowing into the sector.
There is, finally, a question about language — about what we call the people at the centre of this story. “Content creator” is a phrase that has always fit awkwardly in the Nigerian context, carrying connotations of entertainment and virality that do not accurately describe the coaches building client lists, the finance educators explaining treasury bills to a generation of first-time investors, the health practitioners translating clinical knowledge into accessible audio guides, the tech instructors teaching programming to young people who cannot afford a university education in the discipline.
These people are not content creators in any meaningful sense. They are knowledge entrepreneurs — professionals who have recognised that expertise is a product, that the internet is a distribution channel, and that an audience of ten thousand people who trust your judgment is, in many respects, more valuable than a following of a million who merely find you entertaining.
The $31.2 million figure will be revised upward. The methodology will improve. The invisible economy will become, gradually and imperfectly, more visible. And when the next official count arrives, it will find a sector that has continued to grow in the interval between measurements — one that, like the Nigeria it emerged from, has not waited for permission to become significant.
