How this internet business makes millions by bringing African movies to the world

Iroko TV has been aptly been described as the ‘Netflix of Africa’.
Iroko’s co-founder, Jason Njoku, got to realize how popular African movies had become while living in faraway London. Despite the growing worldwide demand for these movies, he could hardly find them on the internet.
His decision to jump on a plane to Nigeria and negotiate distribution deals with local movie producers has earned him a place in history and a lot of dollars in the bag. Today, his IrokoTV platform has more than 5,000 movies online and attracts more than 10 million views every month.
Our estimates put IrokoTV’s monthly revenues at over $350,000.
How did this unassuming guy pull this off?
Let’s find out…

Africa’s movie industry is taking the world by storm…

Africa’s movie industry is actually really huge. From its heartland in Nollywood (the nickname for Nigeria’s movie industry), over 2,000 movies are released every year.

Compared to Hollywood (USA) and Bollywood (India), Nollywood is the second largest movie industry in the world, in terms of volume of movies released per year.

Unfortunately, Nollywood makes the least money of all three global heavyweights.

Before Jason and his Iroko TV platform, Africa’s movie industry, popularly known as Nollywood, was unstructured, had a poor distribution network and was overrun by content pirates.

Despite a global demand for these movies, they were only available on physical Compact Discs (CDs) which severely limited their reach and viewing quality.

For decades, we all thought only Africans had a thirst and appetite for Nollywood movies. How wrong we were!

In fact, the largest chunk of traffic to Iroko’s platform comes from the USA, UK, India, the Caribbean and ‘down under’ Australia!

According to Jason,

“Nollywood is the world’s second largest movie industry in terms of output, making roughly 40 films per week, at an average cost of $40,000 per project. It is a global, cultural phenomenon, adored by millions in Nigeria, in Africa and across the Diaspora. It serves an audience thirsty for love, drama, intrigue, comedy, redemption, action and more.

The end product is unique: African stories, by African people, for Africans. And boy, do we have a lot of stories to tell…”

How Iroko TV got started…

In 2011, using YouTube, Google’s free video sharing platform, Jason launched NollywoodLove, the first major internet channel to offer full-length Nollywood movies.

In less than a year, the channel attracted more than one million views from over 200 countries around the world. With just a simple idea, a few hundred dollars, and a free internet platform, this young and near-broke Nigerian put original African content on the global map.

Since no one had seriously considered and taken on the internet as a reasonable channel for distribution, it was relatively easy and cheap for Jason to acquire online license rights from producers and marketers to distribute these popular movies.

He actually started with a couple of full-length movies which did very well and paid off handsomely. Knowing he was on to something really big, he bought more movie rights and gradually built an impressive catalogue of in-demand Nollywood movies.

Following this spectacular success with NollywoodLove, Jason attracted nearly $10 million from Tiger Global Management, a New York-based private equity firm which shared his vision for digitization of African content.

With this strong backing, IrokoTV was launched as a standalone and independent African movie-streaming website and attracted more than half a million views in only three months!

In July 2012, the business got an additional investment of $2m under a Swedish hedge fund-backed arrangement.

Within two short years, Jason got the attention of the international press and has been featured onForbes, CNN, CNBC, BET and Techcrunch.

Here’s a short interview with Jason Njoku on one of several TV shows he’s been featured on…

https://youtu.be/Fv4QEaISG1U?t=256

In 2012, Jason Njoku was voted by Black Enterprise Magazine as one of London’s top black men of power and has gone ahead to launch several other platforms including iRoking.com, a platform focused on providing African music to the world via the internet.

His company now has offices in Lagos, Johannesburg, London and New York.

In May 2013, Jason Njoku and Sabastian Gotter, both co-founders of Iroko TV, founded SPARK, a one million dollar angel investment outfit based in Lagos (Nigeria) and dedicated to funding and helping young tech and internet startups.The firm has already provided seed capital (between $30 – 75K) to fifteen startup companies. The companies in its portfolio include online fashion and drug stores, an online social-based borrowing service and a photo stock website.