President Ruto said Kenya is among only four African countries monetizing YouTube content, but is that true?

The Head of State intimated this during the Kenya Music Festival Winners' State Concert in State House, Nakuru, on Wednesday, saying that he has been holding talks with owners of these social media platforms to achieve his ambitious plan.

Ruto said that the media platforms - Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and YouTube - can generate sufficient revenue for the country and content creators.

"I am happy to say that two social media platforms have finally agreed to monetize content in Kenya," he said.

"This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on X. Creators are now able to set up Ads Revenue Sharing and Creator Subscriptions independently."

He added that Kenya is among the four countries in Africa that can monetize content on YouTube.

"That is why I have said KICD should have a YouTube channel and we need to be able to sell the content of our children to parents who want to watch this beautiful display of talent," he said, adding that X has also agreed Kenya be among the first countries in Africa to also monetize content.

“Kenya is getting between Ksh.500 million and Ksh.800 million every month from these platforms and so we are increasing our revenue as a country from this space."

The President's sentiments, however euphonic, were not quite fact-based as content monetization has been present in Kenya for over a decade.

Although there are no online citations of when Google began monetising creators' content in Kenya, entertainment website Ghafla Kenya's founder Samuel Majani told Citizen Digital they began monetising their YouTube videos as far back as 2011.

According to Google monetization policies, the total number of nations in Africa that are on the YouTube monetized markets is 12 and about 98 globally.

The countries are Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

This means that advertisers can only target their ads to these countries where YouTube has launched a monetized site, although the availability of these targeted ads may differ between countries.

Meanwhile, creators who open channels in countries that are not under the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) cannot monetize them directly and are forced to deceive the location of their operation as based on another eligible country.

The program is designed to avoid certain international laws, navigate without various tax and payment restrictions in certain countries, as well as ban countries that are linked with fraud tendencies.

To qualify for YPP, one must have at least 500 subscribers and 3,000 watch hours over the past year or 10 million valid public Shorts views within the past 90 days.

For X, users who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription are the only ones eligible for monetizing content, a programme kickstarted in June.

Subscribed users earn money via ads on the platform placed in the replies to tweets.

So far, accounts need to have at least 5 million impressions on tweets over the last three months to be eligible for the pay-outs and accounts with a few million followers can range from a few thousand dollars to nearly Ksh.5.7 million ($40,000).

X says it will expand eligibility to more creators over time.

Facebook has also been providing the monetizing option for content creators but the options were limited since creators only depended on working with brands and sponsored campaigns to create and share content online 

Until the last quarter of 2022, creators got a reprieve as more options were made available to them including payments for good Reels content.

Creators will get paid incentives by Meta, which owns Facebook, for their reels based on their performances.

All or most payments use the CPM (cost-per-mille) paid advertising option where companies pay a price for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives. 

An “impression” refers to when someone sees a campaign on social media, search engines or another marketing platform.

How you can monetize content

Basically, monetizing content is where you generate income from your audience on your social channels through social media marketing strategies.

This can be based on the digital products you promote, the platforms you use, the capabilities of that social platform, and the knowledge or understanding of one's audience.

One needs to first find a niche by identifying the type of content they want to promote and the problems they want to solve, build an audience attracted to their content who will aid in generating revenue.

Creators might seek to work with affiliate marketing by selling a product and earning a commission, being social media influencers and getting paid by promoting products and also paid partnerships where one creates exclusive content that followers have to pay.

Other avenues include partnering with other brands where one gets into a long-term deal with a company.