For an entire weekend this March, romcom fever gripped Nigerian social media. Thousands of Nigerians, even in the diaspora, debated fervently about Love in Every Word, in which an affair takes off after a smooth-talking, free-spending businessman hires a dance troupe to get an advertising executive’s phone number.
Critics poked holes in the plot but the movie’s melodrama appealed to many. Clips and memes were shared online as viewers spun fantasies about their own odogwu, an Igbo word used to refer to an influential or well-to-do man.
The film clocked up 1m views on YouTube within 24 hours and hit the 5m mark within three days. “God did it and I don’t have anything but a grateful heart,” said Omoni Oboli, the film’s director.
In recent years, creatives in Nollywood, the world’s second-largest film industry by volume, have pivoted en masse to YouTube as the global streaming companies have taken flight from a market where they struggled to make money.
“I didn’t think it would be a movie on a YouTube channel that would break out like this, challenging everything we know in Nollywood on any platform,” Oboli said. “God has a way of using the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.”
In January 2024, Amazon Prime, the third-biggest streaming platform in Nigeria after Netflix and Showmax, laid off all its employees in Africa as part of a scaling back on original content acquisitions. Netflix has noticeably reduced its take-up of originals.
Why? “Profitability is the very short answer,” said Jessica Abaga, a former Amazon Prime Studios executive who helped commission originals for Nigeria. “It almost feels like as far as the African market is concerned, the business model still isn’t working in their favour.”
The issue unlikely to be helped by film industry worries over Donald Trump’s recent threat of 100% tariffs on films made abroad. Shares in Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount fell on Monday as studios reeled from the US president’s announcement on Sunday.
Industry insiders say other factors have also driven the YouTube boom, including a dearth of cinema infrastructure in west Africa. According to the 2024 Nigerian box office yearbook by the major distributor Film One, Nigeria’s estimated 200 million people are served by only 102 cinemas. And some of those do not fill up due to a cost-of-living crisis that has made paying for films an unaffordable luxury.
Abaga said that as ticket prices went up, people realised that the same money could be used to subscribe to a streaming service. Or they could just watch content on YouTube for free.
Another factor, according to some industry observers, is that streaming companies and traditional distributors have returned repeatedly to the same high-profile directors with proven viewing numbers, freezing out newer talent.
YouTube’s zero cost of entry and the vast potential audience act as pull factors. “The biggest appeal YouTube has is the ease of putting your stuff there,” Abaga said. “Streamers are particular about production value, production quality, story quality, all-around storytelling integrity. On YouTube, nobody cares. It’s your prerogative as a producer … no red tape, no restrictions, nobody’s stifling your creativity. But that also means there’s no quality control per se.”
Oboli agreed. “The audience is left to reward us or punish us for our efforts based on what we choose to produce. Failure and success are solely dictated by market forces, whereby the audience (customers) are again king,” she said.
The result has been a ruthless, relentless market, with new titles appearing constantly. Oboli has two production units that help meet her goal of turning out one movie a week, and Love in Every Word is one of more than 60 titles on a YouTube channel launched just a year ago.
Hundreds of actors have turned directors. Some scriptwriters get as little as 150,000 naira (£70) to deliver feature-length films shot in four to five days. To save costs, some producers now rent an Airbnb for a week to shoot more than one movie, with the only major change being outfits for the cast.
Afterwards, cast and crew do dance videos on TikTok to promote the films. Given the short timeframe for post-production, shots of crew members on duty are sometimes still visible in movie frames.
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In January, Oboli removed a movie from her channel after it emerged that her scriptwriter had reportedly sold the same script to another producer for a 2022 film.
Nora Awolowo, a 26-year-old film-maker, has raised funding from angel investors for her first full-length film, Red Circle, which begins showing in Nigerian cinemas from 6 June. But she is supportive of colleagues who are focusing on YouTube, saying they get direct access to audiences and are giving new faces a chance to rise. Her challenge, she said, “is to reconnect to this audience by giving them quality”.
One longstanding problem has not gone away with the YouTube revolution: pirates republishing content.
“Some [pirates] even went as far as putting their watermark [and] their own soundtrack on the movie, claiming it to be theirs,” Bimbo Ademoye, an actor and producer, claimed recently on Instagram after finding her new movie on more than 50 other channels. “Some had as much as 200k views … and it’s painful because we thought the days of piracy were over.”
Awolowo is worried that YouTube could change the criteria for entry or payment, like X did in 2024, and many of her colleagues will have to “go back to square one”. She hopes a new model emerges to secure the industry’s future.
“We have a structural problem,” she said. “Nobody wants to take risks. We are not addressing our problem in this industry, which is a distribution problem. How do we get to the grassroots? How do we engage the government? What are the policies?”
Chris Ihidero has worked in Nollywood for decades, including directing one of Nigeria’s most beloved series, Fuji House of Commotion, in the early 2000s. He believes the solution is hiding in plain sight – a revamp of the state-owned Nigerian Television Authority (NTA).
Previously, it was a hub for original programming, like its British and South African counterparts BBC and SABC respectively. Since the return of democracy in 1999, however, NTA has progressively become known primarily as a mouthpiece for state propaganda.
“There are no substitutes for investment in quality content on free-to-air platforms,” Ihidero wrote in March. “This is the NTA’s statutory obligation and it has failed at it for decades.”
