Why African Creators Are Building Audiences the Platforms Were Never Designed For

The most popular app on the continent barely lets you make money. The platforms that do pay, don’t pay fairly. African creators are building businesses anyway — just not the way the platforms expect.

Open WhatsApp in Kenya and you’re in the company of almost everyone. Registered users access the platform daily at a rate of 90% higher than any other digital platform in the country. It is, by a wide margin, the dominant app in people’s pockets.It is also, for a content creator trying to build a business, close to useless. WhatsApp offers essentially no built-in monetisation infrastructure. No ad revenue share, no creator fund, no tipping mechanism native to the platform. The app where Kenyans spend the most time is the app where almost no one gets paid.

This contradiction sits at the centre of what might be the defining structural problem facing Africa’s creator economy: the platforms with the deepest local penetration weren’t built with African creators’ economic reality in mind, and the platforms that were built for monetisation weren’t built with African audiences in mind either. Creators are caught in the middle, building sustainable careers on infrastructure that was designed for someone else.

The CPM Gap

Start with the platforms that do pay. YouTube and Instagram together account for 68% of all revenue earned by Kenya’s digital content creators, the closest thing the industry has to a reliable income stream. But “reliable” is relative.Kenyan creators report significant disparities in CPM, cost per thousand views, the metric advertisers use to pay for impressions, compared to creators in high-income markets. A Kenyan channel with the same view count as a comparable US or UK channel earns substantially less per view, because ad rates are set by advertiser demand in each market, and African ad markets simply pay less per impression than Western ones do. The audience is real. The engagement is real. The money is structurally smaller.The result, across the broader African creator landscape, is stark: over 54% of creators report monthly earnings of USD 60 or less. Only 5% earn USD 600 or more. And 73% of creators describe what they do as a pastime or side hustle, not because they lack ambition or audience, but because the economics of the platforms they’re on don’t support full-time income at the scale most of them currently operate.

When the Algorithm Picks a Side

There’s a second layer to this problem, and it’s less about money than visibility. Most digital platform algorithms generally favour established creators and internationally appealing content, a dynamic that isn’t unique to Africa, but which compounds differently in markets where local content is already competing against a flood of imported media.In Kenya, 80.4% of digital content creators observe considerable influence of foreign-sourced content on the local digital ecosystem, shaping everything from storytelling techniques to production quality expectations. Nearly half see this influence as positive, exposure to global trends, raised production standards, new formats to borrow from. But platform algorithms inherently prioritise foreign content, which means local creators are often competing for visibility within a system that wasn’t built to surface their work in the first place.Foreign platforms also don’t account for local context in more basic ways: payment systems aren’t compatible with mobile money, the dominant transaction method across much of the continent, and digital divides that shape how African audiences actually access content go unaccounted for in how algorithms distribute reach.

Building Around the Platform, Not On It

What’s notable is how creators have responded not by waiting for platforms to fix this, but by building parallel infrastructure of their own.The clearest example is the conversion of online audiences into offline revenue. Njugush, one of Kenya’s leading digital comedians, hosted a live show called TTNT in 2024 that drew an audience of at least 6,000 people — the overwhelming majority of them his existing online followers. In Mombasa, the same model, converting digital reach into ticketed live events, saw an 18% utilisation rate among creators in 2024. It’s a direct workaround for platforms that won’t pay creators what their audience size would suggest they’re worth: take the audience offline, where the creator controls the transaction entirely.Gifting and tokens have become another parallel currency. In Nairobi, 23.1% of creators rely on gifting and tokens from fans as a revenue source, behind only video ads at 24.4%. In Mombasa, gifting/tokens are the single largest revenue source at 36.4% — ahead of advertising entirely. In Kisumu, the figure is 38.9%. These numbers tell a clear regional story: outside Nairobi’s relatively more developed ad market, direct fan payment, essentially tipping, formalised through platform features or informal mobile money transfers, has become the dominant economic relationship between African creators and their audiences.Then there’s the infrastructure layer that’s emerged specifically to fill the gap platforms left empty. Talent management and production firms, Semabox, a podcasting incubator with a portfolio of 400 podcasters across six African countries, alongside Wowzi, Growthpad Consulting, and Influence Now, now exist explicitly to handle the business operations that platforms don’t: brand partnership negotiation, sponsorship deals, audience analytics, and the offline monetisation strategies that have become essential rather than optional.

The Regulatory Wildcard

Governments have started paying attention too, though not always helpfully. Kenya’s Digital Service Tax, which applies to revenue earned on digital platforms, was reduced from 15% to 3% after creator backlash in 2023, then further to 1.5% in 2024. The intent is to formalise a sector that operates almost entirely through informal, freelance arrangements. But how a government taxes income that platforms themselves don’t transparently report, earned by creators who don’t have formal business registration, remains an open question, one that risks burdening the smallest creators most, precisely the ones least able to absorb it.Meanwhile, platforms enforce their own rules with consequences that can be just as material as any tax. In a single quarter of 2024, TikTok removed 360,000 Kenyan videos and deleted 60,000 accounts for guideline violations. Meta similarly restricts monetisation access for creators who breach community standards. For creators already operating on thin margins, a single moderation decision can erase months of audience-building overnight, with no equivalent due process to what exists for advertisers or larger commercial partners.

The Real Algorithm Problem

None of this means African creators are losing. WhatsApp’s 90% daily reach, the rise of gifting economies, live show conversions, and a growing layer of local talent management infrastructure all point to an industry adapting in real time, building genuinely African economic models out of platforms that were never designed to support them.

But adaptation isn’t the same as fairness. The algorithm problem isn’t that African creators can’t build audiences, clearly, they can. It’s that the platforms determining who gets paid, how much, and under what rules were architected around a different market entirely, and nobody asked African creators what their version of that architecture should look like. Until that changes, the most innovative work in Africa’s creator economy may keep happening not on the platforms, but around them.