Kenyan creators are making less money from YouTube than they should, the company has revealed.
According to Addy Awofisayo, the Head of YouTube Music Business and Partnership in Sub-Saharan Africa, many artists are yet to take advantage of the platform’s potential to fully reap its benefits.
Awofisayo told Kenya’s newspaper the Daily Nation that the country has one of the highest numbers of creators and content consumers in Africa, but most local artists lack the requisite information to full exploit the video-sharing platform.
“One of the problems I have noticed is artists not surrounded by the right team. You see a talented artist with a manager who is not experienced and lacks knowledge of the music business and this definitely has an impact on the artiste’s revenues.” She said.
The last one year witnessed a sharp increase in the number of Kenyan content creators earning seven figures or more. YouTube Africa Managing Director Alex Okosi said that statistics showed a 60% rise in content creators making seven-figure earnings from the platform.
However, as Awofisayo notes, Kenyan artists can better their chances if they acquired the right skills to grow their channels.
“Some artistes also lack YouTube channels.” Awafisayo notes, “Most have been discovered on YouTube, but a majority don’t have their channels. How are they going to make money?”
YouTube reports that it raked in $28.8 billion from advertisements last year. The company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet paid more than $15 billion (Sh1.8 trillion) to creators around the globe.
“When adverts are embedded on your channel that means more money coming your way. The power to select ad categories and at what point to appear are vested in creators. However, a number of creators lose out on maximizing ad revenues because they always opt not to select all, if not enough categories of ads to be served on their channels. When that happens, the ads are left out and then redirected to another creative who is more accommodative,” She explains.
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