The Economics of Copy and Paste

There is a Nollywood distribution company who launched their own SVOD platform last week. Their strategy has been to copy everything iROKOtv has done. On YouTube, this is easy because someone else owns the platform. But for an owned and operated consumer internet platform, it’s a different ball game. True to form, they copied everything lock stock and all… page layout, advertising video copy, video player, our payment page; everything. I smiled and shook my head. It’s going to be a mad painful and expensive experience for them.

If you build your company on the back of the blind insights and decisions of another company, who just happens to be in another geography or close competition, you will struggle. Simple. Imitation without innovation (even incremental) is just dumb. Decisions without data in consumer internet products is just plain idiotic. We own the data, we own the insights. You own our mistakes and can only respond to the things you see rather the real value we create.

If we had built iROKOtv based on simply staring a Hulu and Netflix and replicating that, we would be dead by now. The 30 day free trial alone would be commercial suicide, for our audience, their price sensitivity and propensity to NOT pay would ensure we would never ever build a large PayTV operation. We have literally distorted our entire consumer internet product to suit our audience. The vast majority of the insights and value in our platform is our institutional understanding of how to read and interpret our data. From the chicken issue, which we solved but broke the website in the process, so we turned it off, to the long list of tech requirements and updates we are going to push weekly to improve the experience.

I have seen so many sites in Nigeria try to build websites based on Western fundamentals, without thinking. There are words used widely in the West which are basically meaningless in Nigeria or just confuse people. I have seen so many Jumia/Konga clones recently it just annoys the hell out of me. On the face of things, Jumia Vs Konga is a battle for ecommerce. But the nature of those battles in the long term will be very different. Amazon (hybrid of marketplace+retail) Vs Alibaba (marketplace+advertising revenue) has a significant impact on the capital required, profit levels and margin structures of the companies.

The company structures and cultures will ultimately determine who wins this decade-long battle, but to the outside eye they are exactly the same. They’re not. To the copy+paste brigade, it’s all the same thing. There are so many solutions to many problems out there, owning your own perspective is paramount. Without a perspective (some call it vision) you have nothing. When I think of iROKO and the companies I have invested in, they all have very Nigerian solutions to very Nigerian problems. Which, under the hood, make very very different alternative models built elsewhere.