The Influencer Debate: Brands Are Angry, Creators Are Tired, Everybody Is Right

Last week’s Brouhaha around influencers, rates, and brand expectations was intriguing and revealing. Depending on which side of the internet you landed on, influencers were either “overpaid, entitled youth with ring lights” or brands were “exploitative corporations looking for cheap access to culture.”

Everybody had screenshots and their own hot take and suddenly became marketing experts overnight. I found it fascinating. Beneath the sarcasm, bad belle, quote tweets, and passive-aggressive threads was a very real conversation about where Nigeria’s
creator economy is heading.

First things first: influencers absolutely deserve to make money. Let’s kill that conversation immediately. Some of the best creators have spent years building their audiences while traditional media executives watched them with folded arms. They posted consistently for free, burned through data bundles, entertained millions, took social risks, survived endless algorithm changes, and built communities from their bedrooms, cars, kitchens, hostels, salons, and every corner of Lekki, Surulere, or
Kafanchan.

Now brands want access to that attention and relevance but do not want to pay. Please. All that hard work, attention, cultural relevance, and everything that we call “influence” has real value.

In many ways, influencers became the media channels of a digital-first generation while traditional media companies were still sitting in conference rooms discussing “digital strategy.”

And this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable for some of us in media. I have had a few of those painful moments over the years. The kind where your spirit briefly leaves your body and you question your life. You spend years building a media company ; offices, studios, satellites, staff, compliance systems, advertising structures, distribution deals, budgets, and endless meetings. Then suddenly, one 24-year-old with a phone, consistency, charisma, and vibes is sitting there talking about who knows what for three minutes and pulling numbers comparable to an entire media platform.

The magic of celebrity is not lost on the entertainment industry. So while media practitioners paid attention and even followed their favourite influencers, many of us dismissed creators as unserious when it came to “real” media work. Once the numbers became too big to ignore, we started trying to copy and paste them into traditional media formats. We tried tweaking our platforms to behave more like digital channels.

Meanwhile, audience attention quietly migrated. The internet democratised content creation and distribution, and it changed one
thing fundamentally: people stopped following institutions alone. They started following personalities, and those personalities were free to do as they pleased.

And slowly, creators became the beginning of a major shift in media dominance. Not the end of traditional media, but certainly the beginning of a new reality.

The biggest lesson in this new landscape is that it is not just filled with competitors. It is filled with collaborators too. The smartest organisations have stopped seeing creators as threats and started seeing them as partners. At the same time, the smartest creators will stop dismissing traditional media as “old school” and start understanding the importance of structure, infrastructure, distribution, monetisation, and long-term scalability.

Because virality may get attention, but systems are what keep businesses alive. That is the bigger conversation hidden underneath last week’s influencer debate.

Nigeria’s creative economy can no longer survive on raw talent, viral moments, or chaotic clout-chasing alone. The next phase belongs to creators, companies, and platforms that can combine cultural relevance with institutional-grade execution, intellectual property discipline, and sustainable monetisation systems. And this is where finding a delicate balance becomes crucial.

The entire system still depends on rawness. A company cannot create virality. It can only create an environment where creativity thrives. Then it must trust the talent. The memes. The experimentation. The chaos. The energy. The ridiculousness. The clout-chasing.

Culture has never been born in boardrooms first. It usually starts messy before structure arrives later to organise it. And maybe those of us in the older generations still do not fully understand what social media actually represents to young people.Many adults still think young people are “just scrolling funny videos.”

That interpretation completely misses the point. Social media has evolved into a fully immersive social environment where young
people build identity, discover music, develop fashion tastes, learn slang, flirt, network, argue politics, find communities, build careers, market businesses, form opinions, create status, and increasingly make money.

To many young people, social media is no longer simply an app sitting on a phone screen. It functions more like a living digital society: part hostel, part marketplace, part group chat, part talent show, part street corner, and part entertainment hub,
all happening simultaneously in real time.

And because young audiences are so deeply immersed in that environment, they can instantly detect when a brand enters the space awkwardly or inauthentically.

That is why forced influencer campaigns fail so publicly. People can smell fake vibes online almost immediately. Interestingly, Gen Z audiences are not anti-advertising. In fact, they are often far more accepting of monetisation than older generations.
“Secure the bag” is practically an economic policy at this point.

What they reject is opportunism. They reject campaigns that feel disconnected from internet culture. They reject creators who suddenly sound like corporations after years of speaking like normal human beings. Or worse, a brand suddenly trying to sound cool by saying, “No cap“. And brands are still learning this lesson.

Many companies rushed into influencer marketing simply because everybody was following influencers. No strategy. No audience understanding. No behavioural insight. Just vibes, follower counts, and panic. That was always going to end badly. Because visibility is not the same thing as influence.

A creator can have two million followers and drive almost no commercial behaviour. Another creator with eighty thousand deeply engaged followers can quietly generate massive conversions because their audience genuinely trusts them.

At the same time, creators also need to understand that once you start charging premium rates, expectations naturally change.
You are no longer just posting. You have become part of a company’s marketing infrastructure. That means even as the biggest, most trending creator out there, you now have a boss and all that comes with it. Communication, deadlines, audience insights, and reporting matter. Professionalism matters.

Too many creators want media-company money with freelancer-level systems and structure. As the saying goes, there is no free lunch, and things are changing.

And that explains much of the noise surrounding the debate today. The next decade will belong to creators who understand business, not just content.

Creators who understand data, contracts, intellectual property ownership, audience psychology, partnerships, community building, long-term positioning, and monetisation beyond advertising deals.

Because globally, the biggest creators are no longer functioning as influencers alone. They are becoming media companies, production studios, consumer brands, talent ecosystems, and even investment vehicles. Nigeria is moving in that direction too.

Which is why this current influencer debate actually matters. It is not just Twitter noise. It is a sign that Nigeria’s creator economy is entering its professional era.

Messily.
Loudly.
Emotionally.
Very Nigerianly.
But inevitably.
by Samuel “Samo” Onyemelukwe.

Onyemelukwe is a Nigerian-American, African media and entertainment industry expert and is currently VP Global Business Development and Managing Director of Trace West Africa.

BellaNaija is a Media Partner for The Influencer Debate