Kanyin Palmer, Founder and Product Owner of Excluvia, has called for African creators to retain more of the economic value generated by their content, knowledge and communities as the continent’s creator economy continues to expand.
“African creators are already creating enormous value through the audiences and communities they build. The next step is making sure more of that value returns to the people creating it,” Kanyin said.
His position reflects a growing concern around what happens after creators attract an audience. While views, followers and engagement can create visibility, they do not always give creators enough control over how that attention becomes income.
For Kanyin, the next stage of Africa’s creator economy should focus less on audience size alone and more on giving creators the infrastructure to build sustainable businesses around the communities they have already created.
“The talent was never the problem. The plumbing was. We built the plumbing,” Kanyin said.
That philosophy sits at the centre of Excluvia, an African creator-economy platform he founded in 2025 to give creators more direct ways to earn from their work.
The platform brings subscriptions, digital products, online courses, livestreaming and virtual gifting into one creator account, allowing creators to develop different income streams around the same audience.
The approach is also designed to reduce dependence on a single source of creator income.
According to Kanyin, a creator who has built trust around a skill, subject or body of work should also develop paid offerings around that relationship instead of relying mainly on advertising revenue or waiting for the next commercial partnership.
The organisation further noted that this is closely connected to creator ownership. The platform allows creators to build communities and maintain direct relationships with subscribers while selling products or offering paid access within the same environment. This gives creators more control over how the commercial value surrounding their work develops.
“Ownership is not only about having followers. It is about having a direct relationship with the people who value your work and being able to build income around that relationship on your own terms,” Kanyin added.
That control also extends to how creators receive their earnings.
The platform supports payments from audiences in currencies including naira, pounds, dollars and euros, while Nigerian creators can receive payouts directly into local bank accounts in naira. The company’s structure is designed to allow creators to reach paying audiences beyond their immediate market without making access to those earnings unnecessarily difficult.
Another part of the model is lowering the barrier to monetisation.
Excluvia does not position creator income as something reserved only for people with enormous follower numbers. Creators with smaller but engaged communities can begin building paid relationships around the value they provide without waiting to reach a particular level of online popularity.
That becomes more important as the definition of creator success continues to change.
Large audiences can still open doors, but the ability to turn a smaller engaged community into recurring subscriptions, product sales, course purchases or direct support can create another path to building a creator business.
Livestreaming forms part of that wider strategy. Excluvia has further connected live sessions to virtual gifting and the broader creator ecosystem, making it easier for audiences to support creators during live interactions while remaining connected through communities, subscriptions and other forms of creator commerce after the broadcast.
The aim, Kanyin said, is to keep more of the economic relationship between creator and audience connected to the creator’s own business.
“Creators should not have to wait until they become internet celebrities before they can start earning. If people already value what you create, there should be practical ways to turn that relationship into income and build from there,” he added.
This also shapes how Excluvia approaches creator earnings. The company says its model is designed to allow creators to retain a large share of what they generate through their content, products, communities and live interactions.
Since its founding, Excluvia has attracted more than 30,000 platform registrations and is available across web, iOS and Android as it builds its presence in Nigeria and looks toward wider African expansion.
That growth places the company within a broader conversation about what ownership should mean in Africa’s creator economy.
Creators already produce content that travels across countries, influences purchasing decisions and builds communities around shared interests. The next question is how much of the value created around that influence returns to the people responsible for it.
For Kanyin, that is the gap Excluvia was built to address.
The future of Africa’s creator economy will not depend only on producing more creators or generating more online attention. It will also depend on giving creators greater control over how their work earns, how their communities develop and how much of the value created around those relationships ultimately returns to them.
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