Media should tap into the bottom of the pyramid
The media centre inside the Bomas of Kenya, Nairobi, on August 7, 2022. As the media plan to reinstate their paywalls after the election period, this is an opportunity to learn a few lessons from their new audiences – if any – and also a time for critical reflection on the path forward.
What you need to know:
- Kenyan media need to be more innovative and creative in their paid content strategy by tapping into a market that many like to forget; the bottom-of-the-economic pyramid (BOP) market.
- In their quest to capture the attention of the middle class, Kenyan media have risked coming off as elitist and inaccessible, especially to the BOP markets.
- Consequently, they end up missing out on the untapped potential of a market that might well be the saving grace for Kenyan media.
Prior to the elections, a section of Kenyan news media announced they would temporarily make access to their content free, in fulfilment of their role of providing free information to Kenyans during this critical time.
The move was also aimed at enticing younger readers and encouraging them to actively participate in the elections.
As the media plan to reinstate their paywalls after the election period, this is an opportunity to learn a few lessons from their new audiences – if any – and also a time for critical reflection on the path forward.
Many journalists believe that journalism, like healthcare, roads and schools, is a public good.
Most of us, deep down, believe that everyone, in spite of their socio-economic background, deserves to access high-quality information that will not only inform their decisions but also entertain them and their families.
However, the media are like any other business, many journalists (or media executives) will argue.
Salaries have to be paid monthly and it takes a lot of resources to produce high-quality journalism.
In the age of the disrupted advertising business model, this dilemma leaves the media with no choice but to ask audiences to pay ‘a little something’ to access news.
What we have seen so far is the slow uptake of paid content by Kenyan audiences, proving that the journey to a profitable paywall will be a long and treacherous one.
Getting a critical mass of Kenyans to subscribe to a paywall – enough to make it profitable – will take a significant amount of resources in marketing, content creation, audience retention strategies and technology.
How long it will take, and how many subscribers it will take for paywalls to stand on their own is a wait-and-see situation.
Paid content strategy
This is why I argue that Kenyan media need to be more innovative and creative in their paid content strategy by tapping into a market that many like to forget; the bottom-of-the-economic pyramid (BOP) market.
In their famous article, ‘Serving the world’s poor, profitably’, C.K Prahalad and Allen Hammond argue that the market consisting of the world’s poor remains ‘largely untapped’ because corporates (wrongly) assume that people with low incomes have nothing to spend on good and services and whatever little they have they spend it on food and shelter.
On the contrary, the two scholars say that markets at the bottom of the pyramid are in fact new sources of growth for companies and also ‘hotbeds of commercial and technological experimentation’.
Often, we think of business models and paid content products for the so-called ‘middle class’ who are inundated with better options for news and information.
In their quest to capture the attention of the middle class, Kenyan media have risked coming off as elitist and inaccessible, especially to the BOP markets.
Consequently, they end up missing out on the untapped potential of a market that might well be the saving grace for Kenyan media.
Could this be the missing link in the discussions around new business models for Kenyan media?
The writer is the director, Innovation Centre, at Aga Khan University; [email protected]
