Lagos, Nigeria (CNN) -- How to make money from movies online is a question vexing studio executives the world over. But a Nigerian tech entrepreneur claims to have the answer -- for his country's burgeoning film industry at least.
Jason Njoku is the managing director of Nollywood Love, an online entertainment company based in Lagos that aims to bring the very best of Nigeria's "Nollywood" cinema to a pan-African and global audience.
Since last December, it has been buying up the rights to Nollywood movies and uploading them for viewing on a dedicated YouTube channel.
"I was swept up with this wave of amazing content, which when I looked at ways to actually consume it, there wasn't any -- the legal distribution infrastructure just wasn't there, so I thought let me just try it and add some value," says Njoku.
Bringing Nollywood to the world
Africa's internet awakening His company now employs more than 40 people and its movies attract over 2.5 million views around the world each week. It makes money by showing advertising before its films and aims to rake in more than $1 million in profits in its first full operational year.
"Our model is really simple," says Njoku. "Typically if you're in the West -- U.S., UK, continental Europe -- before you watch a movie you might watch a 15-20 second pre-roll for one of the big companies there.
"We try to keep it as non-intrusive as possible, so we explain to people that you just have to watch a few ads to watch the whole movie."
From selling ad space alone, Nollywood Love became profitable after just two months of operation, says Njoku.
He says its most popular movie is currently "BlackBerry Babes," a four-part comedy series about three materialistic women obsessed with their BlackBerry phones. The first part alone has been watched 650,000 times, says Njoku. ...
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/08/02...
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Tuesday, August 2nd 2011 at 1:28PM
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