Excerpt from my book : Nollywood : The Billion Dollars Money Zone (2016)
Nollywood is a big cake, isn’t it? But who are the lion shareholders? Who are the winners and losers? Who are the consumers of Nollywood movies? The focus of this book is to answer the “Money questions” related to each of the above. In this sense, I will take into account the different competing views in terms of money-making in the Nollywood industry. However, some professionals in the “mainstream” cinema distribution chain believe that it’s a big financial gamble to invest or distribute Nollywood movies. Others claim that the market is difficult to quantify based on the overproduction of Nollywood movies. Regardless of the arguments by the different people I talked to and interviewed while researching for this book, one can say that their theories don’t matter because we have already one millionaire in the Nollywood industry. His name is Jason Njoku. I had the chance to interview him twice about how he made his fortune in the Nollywood industry. Introduction
Jason Njoku, CEO and co-founder of IRokotv Partners talks about his company during our conversation in Paris: “I think that Nollywood is amazing. It was very popular before. I didn’t even recognize it was in existence. I think the key thing is that I just put a new perspective to it. I looked at the established way people were distributing their content until I think I should be basically a part of that and I started distributing on the Internet. It kind of worked for me. Did I know it will become this kind of big company? Absolutely not. I’ll surprise anybody else. I think the industry kind of needed an alternative to being alive and making turnovers. I’m just happy to be the first person to be looking at it from that perspective. You know, since then many people are looking at it from that perspective. There is much more activity and competition online like it was previously. I’m happy to be one of the first, I’m happy to stay in business…”
