The diaspora premium

The same million views pay very differently depending on the country the viewers are in. In the Nigerian case that gap runs to roughly ten to one against local viewers, which means audience geography rather than audience size is the revenue variable a platform is actually operating on.

For a Filipino platform the implication is not hypothetical. More than fifteen million Filipinos live and work abroad, and remittances run near a tenth of the national economy, most of it from a handful of high-income countries. An overseas audience of that shape is not a secondary market to be added once the domestic product is working. It is the revenue geography that can pay for the domestic one while the domestic one is still unprofitable.

The term carries a warning with it. The Nigerian streamer that ended up living on its diaspora audience arrived there by accident, after its domestic strategy failed and it had already spent the money. Designing for it deliberately, from the first day, is the same insight reached years earlier and much more cheaply.

Source: Course-coined for this build. The earnings differential, roughly US$1,000 to US$1,500 per million Nigerian YouTube views against US$10,000 to US$15,000 per million American views, is from Case 3(d) and point 3 of the cross-case synthesis in the Film industry playbooks, carried into Part 5, point 6, of the Hope research map. The Philippine overseas population and remittance figures are in Part 4, Section 4.5 of the same map, with current figures available free from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas at https://www.bsp.gov.ph/SitePages/Statistics/External.aspx .

First used in: 4.5 · What a community can do