Media businesses all across the world are now struggling to maintain their advertising revenue, but the challenge with Nigeria is that the political power is far-reaching and this is even the case in corporate circles. This looked to be the reality for Stears, who are a business publication who have have raised around $600,000 in seed funding and they have some participation from Luminate as well. They are a philanthropic organisation that have come out of the Omidyar network in the year 2018. One of their managing partners is OryOkolloh and he is a veteran investor when it comes to African start-ups. Luminate happened to invest alongside two other Nigerian capital funds.
The Challenges
There are challenges with the way that business models work right now. When you begin to rely on advertising, you might not get the freedom to really do some in-depth work. This is especially the case when you look at the space for Nigerian media. When you look at the online casino industry, you will soon see that it is doing well but the same cannot be said for other businesses.
The Solution
Some say that the solution is to imagine the media and the information industry, separately. You need to replicate information service models differently and you also need to take into account government and corporate clients. The seed round is very significant for home-grown media for Nigeria and it has been terrorised by an inability to fashion a commercially viable model that does not rely on any kind of government funding. Next are an ambitious print publication and they launched in the year 2009. They shut down their operation after two years and they did this because they ran into trouble with advertisers. They were scared off by investigative reporting.
Of course, by offering data and even research services, you will soon see that Stears is part of a growing crop of homegrown intelligence companies. One of their high-profile projects is actually an electoral data centre. This is going to give Nigerians the chance to track any results by state whenever a general election is conducted.
Poor Data Culture
Nigeria’s poor data culture is very prevalent when you look at government circles. Even though there are earning plaudits for the work over the recent years, it looks like Nigeria’s bureau for statistics is underfunded right now. When you look at the incident which happened last October, you will see that present Buhari railed against the World Bank Report. He stated that it bore little relation to the facts that were on the ground. The problem is that Buhari did not actually provide any kind of data that backed up his point. On the flip side, he did promise to try and improve local data collection.
Only time will tell what happens next, but right now it looks like more needs to be done to try and give businesses the support that they need going forward.