Yes, the list of Shutterstocks for Africa is now on page two with the entry of Africlips promising affordable African stock videos, a level higher than the still photo marketplaces we have had for years.
Founded in Nigeria by Opeyemi Obembe and Taiwo Badejo Africlips is a new online marketplace for original, user generated but high quality, affordable and uniquely african stock videosn allowing African video creatives to license and sell their videos to the global community due to an increasing demand for video assets from the continent.
Badejo says he created Africlips because he strongly believes that there’s a market and Africa’s ever growing media space but stock media that serves Africans is still rare, expensive and often misrepresented.
Apart from providing authentic and affordable African stock videos, the platform is open strictly to African based creatives with clips ranging from as low as N5000 ($15) to 20,000 ($67) as supplementary income for African creatives . The creatives keep the bulk of the profit (60%) from the sale of individual clips while the site keeps 40% which we think is very high and might be contested.
Taiyo adds that as film making tools become affordable, the barrier for entry into video storytelling is getting lower and more affordable. and Africans are expected to seize this opportunity to their own stories in form of video blogs, TV series to documentaries, movies and music videos among others.
“Leveraging on this increasing rise in African visual story tellers, Africlips is out to build a repository where African video creatives can sell their high quality and authentic short clips and b-rolls at affordable prices. Africlips repository is going to further enhance quality african storytelling like never before,” he said.
Africlips might struggle to convince its contributors why they need to part with 40% off their revenues when there are other platforms they could sell their work at a much better rate. Another problem the platform might face is there’s free video content available online especially on YouTube under the meta tag ‘Africa’, Africlips has to have a better reason why one should pay for its content when similar content could be found elsewhere for free. The quality also matters.
