Salam madior fall has been a pioneer more than once. In 1999, while studying in America, he and a friend founded Seneweb, one of the first websites devoted to news from Senegal, his home. By 2002 Seneweb was the most visited news site in Francophone Africa. In the late 2000s, media firms there still focused on satellite television. Mr Fall thought that setting up “a fully-fledged tv channel would be going backwards”. So in 2012 he started putting news videos on YouTube. Today, Seneweb’s headquarters in Dakar has more than 100 employees, plans to expand across West Africa, and has correspondents as far afield as Europe and America.

Growing numbers of people get their news via videos on social networks such as TikTok, Instagram and—above all—YouTube. That is particularly true in the global south—and especially in Africa (see chart), according to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, a research centre and think-tank at Oxford University. More people in Kenya get their news from YouTube than those in any other country surveyed by the institute. “The trends in media consumption which people say are coming to the West are already well under way in the global south,” notes Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute.

YouTube’s appeal makes sense in a youthful continent with relatively low literacy rates. The rapid spread of smartphones and cheap mobile-internet access across Africa in recent years has also helped. Between 2014 and 2021 the share of Africans getting their news from social media or the internet at least a few times a week almost doubled, according to Afrobarometer, a pollster. When the Oromia Media Network, an influential news outlet run by diaspora Ethiopians, was launched a decade ago, “satellite broadcasting was number one”, recalls its founder, Jawar Mohammed. Once people would gather around one television to watch together. Now everyone can watch the news alone on their phones, notes Mor Talla Gaye, a prominent journalist formerly of tfm, a Senegalese tv network with 2.7m YouTube subscribers. That is liberating for viewers who can seek out a variety of perspectives.

People like and trust news on YouTube in places where traditional media outlets are either unreliable or weak. Kenya, unlike several of its neighbours, has many feisty independent broadcasters. But even there, “there is a perception that things the government doesn’t want you to know, you can find on YouTube”, says Catherine Gicheru, director of the Africa Women Journalism Project in Kenya. Officials leant on part of the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation to try to prevent live footage of anti-government protests being shown on television. At least one station capitulated. But footage of the demonstrations was freely available on YouTube.

In countries where most people would struggle to afford a paid subscription, and where rich advertisers are scarce, YouTube offers media startups a path to financial viability. Setting up a tv channel is expensive and takes an age; establishing one on YouTube is cheap and almost instant. Once they get a certain number of viewers, the platform gives content-producers a cut of future advertising revenues. Yayesaw Shimelis started Ethio Forum, a YouTube channel, in 2019; he says he was making money within weeks. Today it is among the most widely watched Ethiopian news channels on the platform, generating tens of thousands of dollars a month. Crucially, because many of its viewers are Ethiopians living in the West, it attracts advertising from big American firms, says Yayesaw.

There are snags. One is that YouTube does not allow producers in many African countries to receive advertising revenue through its “partner programme”. Another is that its algorithm, which determines how much one can earn on any given day, is “a game with many moving parts”, says Eric Latiff, a Kenyan journalist. Making real money means keeping up a regular stream of videos, often to the detriment of quality. Even then, revenue can be volatile. Sajid Nadeem is a freelance Pakistani journalist who uses open-source intelligence to cover global conflicts. When he covered Ethiopia’s civil war in 2021 viewership of his show was so high at its peak he earned $10,000 per month. After the war ended that fell by more than half.

Despite the successes, few African journalists will get rich on YouTube. Like reporters in India, another place where YouTube is booming, they struggle to reach audiences on the scale of traditional news channels. Yet on a continent where press freedom has declined of late, YouTube’s growth is a “game-changer”, says Yayesaw of Ethio Forum. “Africa’s most brutal regimes cannot control it.”