As a Nigerian, I understand that a lot of people have Facebook pages, and there’s a need for them to monetize them. While the latest Gen Z folks in Nigeria do not use Facebook as such, a lot of people, especially religious people and comedy and drama seekers, often go to Facebook every day in their millions.
There are huge Facebook pages in Nigeria, a lot of which have millions of followers and even smaller Facebook page owners. They all want to know if they can monetize their Facebook accounts.
And the short the answer is No, but this is not the whole story.
If you are in Nigeria and your Facebook account is in Nigeria, you are not able to monetize your Facebook account. The simple answer is that Nigeria is NOT among the countries that facebook have allowed for this. Now, Facebook does not have an issue with where you come from. You are not able to monetize a Facebook account because you are a Nigerian. You are just not able to monetize your Facebook account in Nigeria.
Now this difference is huge, and what it means is that if you are in Nigeria and you happen to live in one of the countries where Facebook monetization is allowed, that means that you can indeed monetize your Facebook accounts.
What if you don’t live in countries where you can monetize your Facebook account? There is still a way. As long as you have friends and families who live in other countries, you can ask them to apply for monetization for your channel on your behalf if you hand the page over to them.
Also, I know personally of a company that allows Nigerians to monetize their Facebook, and basically they help you monetize your page but you pay them 20% of whatever money you make from that page.
Now I cannot give you the name of the company because they can go bust, and since it’s not as if I am making a percentage of the deal, then there is no sense in me giving you information that I know will work but potentially might also not work. But rest assured, all the big Facebook accounts in Nigeria make use of this exact service.
So the essence of this is telling you that there are companies out there that can help you monetize your page for 20% of your earnings every month. So it is left for you to do your research and look for those companies.
Why is Nigeria not eligible for Facebook monetization?
Nigeria is the biggest market for Facebook in Africa, perhaps in a lot of the world, and the issue of Facebook not allowing Nigeria to monetize…well we can all work out a reason why this is the case.
The problem here is that I can clearly see that this has to do with the payment infrastructure. Lack of a reliable payment system for creators. If you are in the Western world, you have access to PayPal, you have access to bank accounts that allow easier movements of US dollars into your account, but that doesn’t apply to Nigeria, where you don’t even have access to services like PayPal.
Facebook collects millions of advertisement dollars from Nigerians every year, so it’s more of a question of why wouldn’t they pay Nigerian creators some of those dollars? The only point that can come to me is a question of them having a reliable way of settling payments to creators from Nigeria.
Facebook can make the excuse of saying that some other countries are too small, then why should we bother paying their creators? But Nigeria is definitely not one of those countries.
Facebook can also claim that some other country, like China, is giving them regulatory headaches but Nigeria hasn’t given Facebook any regulatory headache ever. The only company that had issues with Nigerian government in the past was Twitter. It was never Facebook. So I hope I’ve been able to answer your question. I believe it has to do with payments settlement for Nigerian creators.
Author
Abbey Johnson has a Masters degree as an engineer and has over 3 years of teaching and research experience. He is happiest when on a bike and is also interested in electric energy and computer Science.