When David Adeleke began talking to investors about Africa’s creator economy, he kept encountering the same fundamental roadblock: a complete absence of reliable data and structured storytelling.

For an ecosystem flooded with metrics and analytics elsewhere in the world, Africa’s creator landscape remained remarkably unmapped.

“Until last year, when we did the Africa Creator Economy Report, would you believe there was no comprehensive Africa creator economy report out there? None,” David explains. “Until we decided with our partners that we would do something about it.”

This glaring gap isn’t just an academic concern—it’s a barrier preventing capital, infrastructure, and innovation from flowing to a market brimming with creative potential. For David, founder of Communiqué, a media and intelligence company established in May 2020, this knowledge vacuum represented both a problem and an opportunity.

“I was speaking to an investor about the creator economy and the creative economy generally. And he was asking me a lot of questions,” David recalls. “He asked, ‘If I have the capital and want to invest in Africa’s creator economy, how do I do it? Where do I go? Who do I look at? Which countries should I pay attention to?”

The conclusion? “The world needs an authoritative source of data, knowledge, and information about Africa’s creative economy.”

Founded in 2020 as a newsletter with over 44,000 subscribers analyzing media and tech ecosystems, Communiqué has become what David describes as “a media and intelligence company providing resources for people to understand and benefit from Africa’s creative economy.”

Laying the Foundation Before the House

Communiqué’s strategy flips the typical creator economy business model on its head. Rather than targeting creators directly, David focuses on the stakeholders who can build systems and infrastructure at scale.

“Right now, the people we want to target the most are the decision-makers and stakeholders,” David explains. “It’s better to do this top-down because if you enable the decision makers and high value and high-level operators to build infrastructure, then the creators can benefit.”

He visualizes this approach as a strategic funnel: “You think of it as an inverted pyramid or a funnel. You build all of this value at the top, and then it starts to go down.”

This philosophy stems from David’s diagnosis of what’s truly holding back Africa’s creator economy. 

“The reason why the creator economy in Africa is not as big as it is—apart from the purchasing power problems, economic problems—is the infrastructure it’s lacking,” David asserts. 

He continues, “The creators are not the ones who will build the infrastructure. The people who will build the infrastructure are the business people, the operators, the investors. But they don’t have the data. They don’t have the insights to make proper decisions or to make the most accurate decisions that will then benefit the industry.”

This insight has shaped Communiqué’s business model, which rests on four revenue-generating pillars: media, intelligence, community building, and talent development. 

“Fortunately for us, each business element is already generating revenue. None is a loss leader,” David notes, adding that these integrated components serve Communiqué’s mission to become “the most impactful end-to-end intelligence company for the creator economy.”

Intelligence That Drives Investment

Central to Communiqué’s value proposition is its intelligence arm, which focuses on understanding media consumption and spending patterns.

“The bulk of the data we collect is trying to understand where and how people consume media, how people are spending money, or where they are spending money on media,” David explains. “And then what’s the size of the market?”

Their methodology combines qualitative and quantitative approaches: “It’s a lot of one-on-one conversations and surveys. So, there are many surveys, talking to many people, sending surveys, asking them questions, and just talking to people one-on-one. What are you seeing in the market? What are your projections?”

The 2024 Africa Creator Economy Report, a collaborative project with partners like TM Global, revealed several key findings that challenge assumptions about the market:

• “There are more female creators than male creators,” David notes, adding this was “not surprising, but it was just validation for some suspicions.”
• “There are more nano creators than mega creators or mega influencers. So you have a lot of creators with less than 10,000 followers, less than 20,000 followers.”
• “All these creators across many countries face the same problem: monetization.”

The report’s findings led David to question, “Are they facing monetization problems because there is no market, or is there not enough innovation to help them monetize at the level they can?”

For the 2025 report, which is already in development and scheduled for release in late Q3 or early Q4, Communiqué is diving deeper into investment patterns. 

“This particular one answers questions about investment. Is this market investable? If anybody has invested, or all the people who have invested, where has the money gone? What have they gotten out of it?” David explains. “Those are the difficult questions that this 2025 report will answer.”

Community and Talent Development

Communiqué’s approach extends beyond research into active community building, addressing what David identifies as a key challenge in Africa’s creative sectors. 

“What we’ve seen with a lot of people on the continent is people doing things in silos. One person is doing something here; they’re not communicating to somebody else who’s doing something here.”

The company hosts curated events like Communiqué IRL (In Real Life) that strategically connect ecosystem players. 

“We’re bringing together members of our community and then high-level stakeholders, bringing them into the same space, getting them to interact. A business deal could come out of it; a potential collaboration could come out of it.”

These connections aren’t left to chance. “Those things are properly curated, and it’s not just anybody who will show up,” David explains. “If you check the registration link, you have to request to join, and they will have to approve. So, we look at your profile. Do you fit into what we are looking for? Then we approve.”

These efforts have already yielded tangible results. “Fairly recently, I connected a Nigerian founder, a creative tech founder, to an investor,” David shares. “And that’s because I met this investor through someone. I stayed in touch with him. And I met this founder at an event.”

Meanwhile, Communiqué’s academy focuses on developing industry talent, particularly targeting young professionals. 

“Young people need access to knowledge. Yes, they need access to capital. But more than anything, they need knowledge before they get access to capital,” David explains.

Current offerings include workshops on visual storytelling and business communication. “Our most recent workshop was a visual storytelling workshop for young journalists,” David notes. “So we taught them about mobile visual storytelling, mobile editing, video editing, and the principles of visual storytelling.”

The company plans to transition these educational resources online to scale their impact. “Our long-term vision for the academy is to deploy the courses online,” he explains. “If it’s physical, for every piece of execution, you have to deploy capital, but if it’s online, you spend time executing once, and maybe there will be marginal increases in improvements and updating.”

What’s Next for Africa’s Creator Economy?

David’s 10+ years of experience in African media—including roles as Africa Editor at Rest of World and heading Business Insider Africa—have shaped his understanding of the progress of the creator economy. 

“I think creators are a big part of the media ecosystem now,” he observes. “What the 2024 U.S. Election showed us is that creators have become a vital part, a more vital part of the media ecosystem, even mainstream media, than ever before.”

This perspective informs Communiqué’s media strategy, which is transcending its newsletter roots. “Definitely YouTube,” David says when asked about effective platforms for reaching African audiences. “Our podcasts are going to be on YouTube for sure. And we will also try to syndicate or license the podcast to traditional media.”

Notably, David is selective about platforms, avoiding those that don’t align with Communiqué’s business goals. 

“We’re not on TikTok because we’ve done the analysis. TikTok does nothing for our business, at least in the way that we want it to,” he explains. “We consider ourselves a premium media brand, so the quality of our work and insights matter a lot.”

As for Communiqué’s future, David envisions strategic expansion: “I think in the next two to three years we should at the very least have a presence in all the continent’s major regions.”

He also aims to develop “a deeper data repository, more data than we currently do, so data readily available and on demand.” 

Diaspora expansion may come sooner than expected: “In a year from now, we may have someone covering the creator economy or the creative economy, especially the African-American creative economy in the U.S., UK, and Canada.”

David remains “very optimistic on the creative economy and the creator economy in general” while maintaining a pragmatic perspective: “I’m also realistic in the sense that we need data, we need infrastructure, and we need better capital deployments than we’re currently seeing.”