We Are Set To Disrupt The Content Market Place With Ckrowd — Adebayo Kayode

We Are Set To Disrupt The Content Market Place With Ckrowd — Adebayo Kayode

 

Adebayo is the Chief Executive Officer  (CEO) of Ckrowd, a video monetisation and content marketplace. The platform is a direct-to-consumer platform where original and exclusive content in education, information and entertainment is distributed directly to local and global consumers in short video and live stream format. In this interview by ROTIMI IGE, he speaks about the platform, its unique offerings for content creators across Africa and how a global disruption in the content market place from Africa is imminent.

Streaming is the future of entertainment and many global entrants are already charting a course for it in Nigeria. How does Ckrowd, a wholly Nigerian streaming company, come in?

The Ckrowd platform bridges the gap between independent, self-published content suppliers and their global content consumers. Ckrowd does this by providing tools to publish, market and distribute content to an exclusive paying audience, who access rare, unique Live and OnDemand content from these creators. The consumers support content creators by giving monetary exchanges for the different levels of access granted them to their content published and streamed exclusively on the Ckrowd platform. Locally created content can attract premium value from a local and global fan base. Payment can be in local and foreign exchange earnings.

Ckrowd is using digital technology to promote and export African related content, while connecting and promoting African culture and education across the globe. Ckrowd gives multiple opportunities to content creators to generate revenue from different expressions of their creativity on one platform.

How did you start?

Ckrowd was founded out of a will to do more by myself in November 2020. But before then I had founded a real estate company that morphed into a hospitality business. I then started a media outfit in September 2016, called Kayode Adebayo Media Africa.

At Kayode Adebayo Media Africa, I started an initiative that would help creative professionals like musicians and actors understand the business part of their craft. Later, I realised that there was a need to bring all these promising enterprises together and give them a vision for international domination. Nobody builds in isolation, especially in the entertainment scene. So I started AMFEST, a festival-like event that brings together African creative industry businesses which scaled out of its founding country in Nigeria into Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania and even Dubai. We started building business partnerships with other platforms and scaled very fast. It was in the process of supporting the sector that we found out that many of these talents that are now enterprises had a problem with anything that doesn’t involve physical human interaction. At the point of this discovery, COVID-19 happened and it became even clearer as most of them were left without income. So, there was a need to bring them online.

The next thing to build became apparent; Ckrowd—the solution to these persistent problems. After doing a lot of research and consultations throughout 2020, I launched the beta version of Ckrowd early last year with co-founder Toba Afe, former Nokia, Quickteller product manager at Interswitch (CTO), Olayemi Falusi, a certified cloud engineer at Harava Technologies, USA (COO) and then went live in August.

What is a creator economy?

The term ‘creator economy’ became popular throughout 2021 when venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and independent creators not only threw the phrase around but also invested heavily in the content industry—an industry that would leapfrog into becoming a $100 billion industry.

Content creators—writers, artistes, social media influencers, videographers, gamers, podcasters—are raking in millions of dollars annually by monetising their craft. But only a tiny fraction of these creators are Africans. This means African creators are still struggling to earn much from their craft, compared to their global counterparts.

Two things may have caused this: one is, global payment networks like PayPal that should connect African creators with the rest of the world have shut Africans out of their network; secondly, lack or shortage of efficient local creator platforms that connect the rest of the world directly to African creators.

Ckrowd is positioning itself as the platform that bridges the gap between African content creators or suppliers and their global content consumers by providing creators with the opportunity to earn income while giving “unique, exclusive, and engaging content experiences to their consumers”.

How does Ckrowd intend to boost and disrupt the creator economy?

Ckrowd believes that content creators can use their talents to make lots of money for themselves and the community at large. Here, creators can bring their contents and earn heavily on each content viewed by their super fans. On Ckrowd creators can also make live events and make it open to their super fans. On each contents creator gets a 70 per cent share of the total profit made from their exclusive fans. Due to the capacity that the Ckrowd technology has to measure engagement, data and retail content, it gives the Ckrowd business the opportunity to directly show revenue accruing from content retail, comparing it to cost, then showing profitability or loss.

With these sorts of statistics from a content retail technology like Ckrowd, the future on investment or content finance will surely be disrupted. Content can then attract investment just like real estate and also give investors possible good returns on their investment (ROI) over a given period, because cost and revenue can be measured using proper data from technological means. The future has never been this bright for content creators and possible content financiers (Angels or Institutional Investors).

This is coming at a time when Nigeria, Africa diaspora have grown in her size over the past 10years and have also grown in earnings as annual remissions to Africa in 2020 exceeded $44 billion, and its informally stated that what is remitted back home to Africa is only five per cent of annual earnings for every individual. This means that Africans in diaspora generate more than enough income to afford spending on content both digitally and physically, evidence by the full arenas in UK, North America and Europe, selling premium tickets to watch Africa Music Stars by Africans, The presence and success of Nigerian TV and Films on Netflix, Iroko Tv shows that there is a global demand for our creative industry products on digital channels.

What distinquishes Ckrowd from the existing streaming platforms?

To better understand CKrowd’s advantage, let’s look at how existing streaming platforms work: On YouTube, for instance, creators make money according to their view numbers and sometimes from ads. This means, if YouTube pays $0.0001 per view, you’ll need 10,000 views to make $10. In the case of Netflix, let’s say you subscribe at $10 per month, what happens if you are too busy for Netflix that month? Will you be refunded? No!

From the creator’s end, 10,000 views for $10 is not sustainable. How many African creators hit hundreds of thousands of views or millions? A small number. For consumers, the subscription model is not good if you can’t flip unused subscriptions.

Creators can live stream their content like uduX live and upload on-demand contents like on Netflix. They also control their spaces and how they want to be paid—per view or by subscription. Unlike on social media platforms where creators, after creating content and amassing views and followers, would have to go outside the platform to market their views and followers to brands.

Ckrowd is not only for music and film content; educational, culinary, sports, and other forms of content are allowed on the platform. Our platform is similar to a large arena in the cloud where you can broadcast live and short on-demand video content and charge access fees on behalf of the creators of that content. This allows the platform to uniquely function as an edtech, mediatech and adtech hybrid.

How can creators monetise content on such platforms?

I can only speak for our platform which lets creators set their prices and make their money as they go. It also allows viewers to select how they wish to pay for content—all inside the platform.  Creators also control their spaces and how they want to be paid—per view or by subscription.

“Our mission is to deliver economic value to African creators. The platform pays 70 per cent of total income on content to creators, which we believe is the highest pay-out on digital content to African creators.

What advantage does Africans have over non-Africans on the platform?

Ckrowd’s advantage is that her management team consists of talents that have helped grow payment solution unicorns in the African Fintech Space, experts in the Media, and the Creative Industry Enterprise Development sector. Experts that have catered to the business owners in music, film, fashion, culinary, creative arts and tech across the African continent and beyond. The Ckrowd team has a strong understanding of the independent content producer’s ecosystem across the continent and have built relationships with them for many years.

Many great content that might never get distributed in cinema chains or ev9en make premium content streaming platforms due to the politics that surrounds these channels deserve to be given a home, a place that understands the uniqueness in the message they carry. The originality of these kinds of content and theircreators will be catered to on Ckrowd, and they will be distributed to feed a global demand for such, thereby enriching content producers of different content types from one technology platform.

WHAT ARE YOUR ACHIEMENTS SINCE INCEPTION OF CKROWD?

Ckrowd have grown more than 90,000% organically from 2 users at its beta release. Last year in October, it raised $160,000 in pre-seed funding; $60,000 of equity funding, and $100,000 export grant investment from an international angel investor group, as well as backing from the Export Expansion Facility Program from Nigerian Economic Support Program (NESP).

Ckrowd plans to use the new capital to expand with new innovative technologies and strategies to get more customers, accelerate growth and promote intra-African creative industries. In addition to that, the company plans to hire more talent, especially in product, Research and Development (R&D) and engineering.

The startup has already made headway in some of these plans. It acquired a marketing agency last year to power the ads sector of its business. The company said the agency’s channels had access to about 50 million people across Africa, which means Ckrowd can now reach these people through email, SMS, and other channels available.

The startup also recently announced the appointment of the founder and director of Music Works International Katherine McVicker and co-founder of Cultural Connections of Africa (CCA) Adeleye Fabusoro of Rare Edge Media (One of the biggest indigenous African Content provider for African Magic), Akinyemi Ayinoluwa (foremost entertainment lawyer), Elle Erinle (Formerly of PRS music London) as executive members to its advisory board. We have launched our own production studio and digital cinema, and is currently partnering with other media houses across the continent, He hinted that they [Ckrowd] will soon start rolling out the results of the partnerships in original live music, TV content and film productions.

Ckrowd isn’t anxious about big players like Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, ShowMax, uduX and even cable television channels who’ve got their claws deep in the streaming market because her philosophy and the market it intends to cater for is unique, from the creators to the consumers. Will it dominate, niche serve or fade? Though this isn’t easy to know yet, I am optimistic that the product and its pan-African play, Ckrowd is building her own table in this streaming market.