Big tech vs Nigerian media: FCCPC in search of win-win — by Olabode Opeseitan
What do you do when the media collective of your country seeks presidential intervention to secure a fair share of the value created from their content, which tech giants monetise without adequately compensating the creators? Do you fold your arms, or roll the dice? That is the dilemma now confronting Nigeria as big technology companies draw revenue from Nigerian news content while local media houses warn that the system is slowly edging them toward collapse.
Nigerian President, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has heard the alarm from newspaper owners and media leaders, and he has mandated the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) to look into the matter. That presidential directive matters because it signals something important: this is not a sentimental plea from a distressed industry, but a question of fairness, competition, and the future of Nigeria’s information economy.
Azu Ishiekwene, the organising secretary of the Nigerian Press Organization, says the crisis has been building for years. Advert revenues have fallen sharply as budgets migrate to digital platforms; newspaper sales have weakened; and global tech firms have become the new gatekeepers of attention, traffic, and monetisation.
Nigerian publishers, he argues, produce the content, but the platforms harvest the value, often paying nothing or offering far less than what comparable markets receive.
The pressure is no longer limited to advertising. AI overviews, algorithmic summaries, and changes in search behavior are reducing click-through traffic, which means fewer readers reach the original publishers, and fewer readers mean less revenue.
Ishiekwene’s complaint is therefore not merely about lost ad money; it is about a system in which local journalism is increasingly disintermediated from its own audience.
Other countries have shown that a different arrangement is possible. In Canada, Google agreed to pay about C$100 million a year, roughly US$73 million, to support journalism. In South Africa, the package negotiated with Google and YouTube was about R688 million a year, roughly US$40 million annually over five years. Australia has gone even further: commercial deals between tech platforms and publishers have been worth about A$1 billion, or roughly US$660 million, and the framework now leans toward a compulsory levy if bargaining fails.
Nigeria’s answer should be a practical middle ground. The FCCPC can help design a framework that preserves the pro-business climate Tinubu wants while ensuring that media organisations are not excluded from the digital value chain. That could mean fair licensing or remuneration rules, transparent bargaining between platforms and publishers, and a structure that recognises news as a public good as well as a commercial product.
For big tech, this need not be a crisis; it can be a reset. The scale of their African business gives the conversation real weight: Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all building revenue streams across advertising, cloud services, digital infrastructure, and app ecosystems on the continent.
Nigeria is too large, too influential, and too important to be treated as a place where value is harvested without reinvestment. A win-win is possible: platforms keep expanding, publishers stay alive, and the public continues to benefit from a healthier, more sustainable media ecosystem.
