For one electrifying weekend in March, Nigerian social media platforms were awash with reactions to Love in Every Word, a romantic comedy by Nollywood actress and filmmaker, Omoni Oboli, that captivated viewers across Nigeria and its diaspora.
Oboli’s film is one of the most prominent examples of a rapidly growing trend in Nollywood, Africa’s largest film industry by volume: a decisive shift toward YouTube as the primary platform for new releases. This transition has been accelerated by the retreat of global streaming giants from the Nigerian market, driven largely by profit concerns.
The film’s director, Omoni Oboli, was stunned by the reception. The movie garnered over one million views on YouTube in just 24 hours and surpassed five million views in three days. “God did it and I don’t have anything but a grateful heart,” Oboli said.
“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 admitted. “God has a way of using the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.”
In January 2024, Amazon Prime, then the third-largest streaming platform in Nigeria, shut down its African operations, cutting staff and halting local content acquisition. Netflix, too, has scaled back on commissioning Nigerian originals. According to Jessica Abaga, a former executive at Amazon Prime Studios, the move came down to one issue: “Profitability is the very short answer. It almost feels like as far as the African market is concerned, the business model still isn’t working in their favour.”
Additional pressure has come from international politics. Film executives were rattled by former U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that he would impose a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, sparking share drops at major studios like Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount.
Domestically, structural issues have also nudged filmmakers online. According to the 2024 Nigerian box office yearbook published by Film One, a country of 200 million people has only 102 cinemas. With rising inflation, cinema outings have become a luxury many can no longer afford.
Abaga noted that high ticket prices have shifted audience behaviour. “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.”
Moreover, traditional distributors and streamers have often favoured established names, making it difficult for new talent to break in. This has created a bottleneck in the industry—one that YouTube bypasses entirely. “The biggest appeal YouTube has is the ease of putting your stuff there,” Abaga explained. “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 concurred. “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.”
This new frontier is fast-paced and fiercely competitive. Oboli runs two production units and aims to release one film per week. Her YouTube channel, launched just a year ago, already hosts more than 60 titles.
However, this volume often comes at a cost. Some screenwriters are paid as little as ₦150,000 (about £70) for full-length scripts, which are sometimes shot in just four or five days. Entire movies are filmed in Airbnbs, with changes limited to wardrobe swaps between scenes. After shooting wraps, actors and crew join in TikTok videos to promote the films. Post-production is often rushed, leading to bloopers—like crew members visible in final cuts—making it onto YouTube.
In January, Oboli had to pull one of her films from YouTube after discovering that her scriptwriter had sold the story to another producer who had already released a version in 2022.
Yet despite these challenges, the platform is fostering a new wave of creators and connecting them directly with audiences. Nora Awolowo, a 26-year-old filmmaker preparing to release her debut full-length feature Red Circle in cinemas this June, applauds YouTube-based filmmakers for democratising the industry. She sees her own challenge as “to reconnect to this audience by giving them quality.”
One persistent problem, though, is piracy. Bimbo Ademoye, a popular actor and producer, recently vented on Instagram after finding her latest movie reposted across more than 50 YouTube channels. “Some [pirates] even went as far as putting their watermark [and] their own soundtrack on the movie, claiming it to be theirs,” she said. “Some had as much as 200k views … and it’s painful because we thought the days of piracy were over.”
Another looming concern is the risk of YouTube changing its monetisation model or content rules, similar to what platform X (formerly Twitter) did in 2024. “Many people will have to go back to square one,” Awolowo warned. She believes the industry urgently needs to address its underlying issues, especially in distribution. “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?”
Veteran filmmaker Chris Ihidero, who directed Fuji House of Commotion in the early 2000s, argues that one solution lies in revitalising the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), a once-prominent platform for original programming. “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.”
As Nollywood evolves in real time, creators are improvising, risking, and dreaming—relying less on traditional structures and more on their hustle, digital reach, and, often, sheer faith.
