Until just a week ago, I was indifferent to the social media noise about Big Brother Naija (BBNaija, for short) read more BBNaija: What the numbers really say
Until just a week ago, I was indifferent to the social media noise about Big Brother Naija (BBNaija, for short) losing its relevance. When I saw the same claims appearing in the formal media, however, I thought there was a need to intervene and bring some perspective to the conversation.
I found a very curious contradiction at the heart of the article, “Poor Purchasing Power, Low Subscriber Base Soften Interest in BBNaija”, published in the BusinessDay edition of 28 August 2026. The writer set out to establish that BBNaija is losing its commercial and cultural weight. Curiously, many of the building blocks of his arguments demonstrated something rather different. It is that the television ecosystem around the show is changing, but the show itself remains arguably the country’s most commercially significant entertainment property. That distinction should matter, and it does matter.
There is no shred of doubt that the country’s economic challenges have adversely affected household spending. Neither is there a serious argument against the fact that the domestic pay television market has shrunk. The writer cited the loss of almost 1.4 million Nigerian subscribers by MultiChoice between 2023 and 2025 and pointed to falling subscription revenues. Those are significant facts and they tell us something important about the economics of pay television. But they do not, by themselves, tell us that Nigerians have stopped caring about BBNaija.
It is at that point that I think the writer made a giant analytical leap. A reduced DStv/GOtv subscriber base does not mean exactly the same thing as a shrinking BBNaija audience. The former represents a statement about subscriptions to particular platforms, while the latter is about the reach, relevance and commercial power of a franchise that now exists across the media ecosystem. This includes television, streaming, social media, online video, mobile platforms, fan communities, brand activations and the wider digital landscape.
The DStv or GOtv decoder is not the audience. That attention outage the writer experienced might have been pardonable in BBNaija’s early days, when the most obvious measure of the show’s reach and relevance was the number of people sitting in front of their television sets to watch it. That was the world we used to live in.
In the one we live in now, audiences have splintered. Young Nigerians consume entertainment through clips, livestreams, memes, reposts, conversations and short-form videos. They can follow a BBNaija housemate without watching the entire show. They can encounter a housemate on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or X, become interested in that personality, follow the ensuing conversation and participate in the culture around the show without sitting through a three-hour broadcast.
Using the slide in traditional television subscriptions as a proxy for declining interest in BBNaija is akin to measuring a digital-era entertainment property with an analogue tape. The article inadvertently exposed this problem. It said the show’s commercial model has become increasingly reliant on its digital footprint. True. That, however, is not evidence of the model’s death, but of its evolution.
What I think is most crucial is whether advertisers find that digital footprint sufficiently valuable. About that, the article presents a curiously mixed picture. While arguing that sponsors should be concerned about declining cultural dominance and conversion rates, it also later acknowledged that the sponsorship machine remains active, not anywhere near obsolete. It noted that approximately 25 brands are participating in the 2026 season, with betPawa as headline sponsor, Guinness as gold sponsor and Minimie as associate sponsor. It equally identified the range of benefits available to sponsors. These include on-air advertising, product placement, sponsored tasks, Saturday night parties and digital activations.
That picture should have induced a more fine-grained conclusion than “interest in BBNaija has softened.” If roughly 25 brands are still willing to associate themselves with the show, the question cannot simply be whether the programme has become commercially irrelevant. The question is what advertisers believe they are buying, how valuable that proposition remains and whether they are getting sufficient value from what they are paying for BBNaija.
Brands do not necessarily invest in BBNaija simply to put their logos in front of people watching TV. They aim to be associated with conversation, buy access to a demographic and secure opportunities for product integration. They also buy social-media content, celebrity creation and the possibility of becoming part of the national conversation for 90 days. That, I think, is why the show has survived the media market disruption in the first place.
The article also leaned heavily on comparisons with the huge numbers recorded by earlier seasons, including the 2021 edition, which it said generated 41.7 billion digital impressions, reached 15 billion accounts and attracted more than one billion votes. Those numbers establish that BBNaija has enjoyed enormous engagement. What they do not do is establish that every subsequent season must reproduce those exact numbers or be declared commercially diminished. Entertainment franchises are not known to operate like fixed-income securities. They actually do not.
There will be seasons that explode culturally and seasons that perform less spectacularly. There will be housemates who become stars of blinding magnitude and others who will flame out almost immediately after eviction. There will be twists that electrify audiences and those that fall flat. None of this is evidence, on its own, that the franchise has entered terminal decline.
Indeed, the article’s treatment of social-media criticism is another place where caution is required. The fact that some viewers describe a season as boring is not surprising. Social media, as we know, is an outrage machine with an extremely short memory. A programme can be concurrently criticised as boring on X, TikTok or Facebook and still generate enormous commercial value. The loudest online complaint is not automatically the most reliable measure of audience behaviour.
There is also a need to be careful about treating the opinions of individual former housemates as independent evidence of the decline of the platform that made them famous. The article quoted Phyna saying that the franchise’s fan base narrowed and that being a BBNaija star no longer carries the same prestige. It also cited Dee-One questioning the impact of the show on his own branding. Legitimate opinions, if you ask me, and they should be reported. They are not, however, substitutes for audience data, advertiser data, voting figures, streaming figures, social engagement data or independent market research.
A former housemate saying that BBNaija did not do enough for his career does not prove that BBNaija is commercially declining. It proves that the housemate believes BBNaija did not do enough for his career. Belief is no fact. The same caution should apply to criticism of the casting process. A social-media personality accusing producers of favouring connected insiders may make for an interesting story, but an allegation is not evidence. If the writer wanted to establish that the audition process has become less democratic or that the show has lost its capacity to discover Nigerians from ordinary backgrounds, it should provide evidence rather than dress up an accusation as market analysis.
There is an even more fundamental problem with the argument about purchasing power. Dwindling purchasing power certainly affects consumers. Entertainment, however, is not consumed only by people who can afford every available subscription. Nigerians have repeatedly demonstrated that when money becomes tight, they do not necessarily abandon entertainment. They simply change the mode of consumption.
We watch clips rather than full programmes, follow personalities rather than channels, consume free social content and share videos. We participate in conversations, vote when we consider a contestant relevant enough, follow fan accounts, engage with brands connected to the programme and consume entertainment through smartphones rather than decoders.
The economic crisis may have altered the route by which people consume BBNaija without eliminating their appetite for the franchise. That distinction is one the writer should have interrogated much more carefully. It is valid to ask whether BBNaija can continue commanding the staggering sponsorship valuations associated with the show over the years. There is also nothing wrong with asking whether the producers need to refresh the format and other elements of the show.
Those are the kinds of questions a serious entertainment-business analysis should ask. Where the issue arose, for me, was when the existence of such a question was taken as proof that the answers were already available and known. The article’s own evidence declined to support that view. It recorded a continuing roster of major sponsors across the years, including PayPorte, Bet9ja, Betway, Guinness, Abeg, Flutterwave, Moniepoint and others. It noted the continuing participation of major consumer brands and the extensive commercial architecture around the show. For this year, it acknowledged the involvement of roughly 25 brands.
Does that look like a franchise that advertisers have abandoned? No. What it looks like is a franchise whose economics are being reworked in a changing media environment. Another point worth making is that BBNaija has never been only a television show. It is a talent-discovery and celebrity-making machine. It has produced presenters, actors, influencers, entrepreneurs, comedians, brand ambassadors and social-media personalities. Some go on to have stellar careers after the show. Others have faded at high velocity. That is the normal outcome of a mass platform. It creates opportunity, but it cannot manufacture longevity for every participant.
The article is, therefore, on firmer ground when it argues that contestants should not assume that entering the house automatically guarantees a successful career. That is sensible, as fame is no pension scheme. But that is different from establishing that the platform itself has lost its value. Perhaps the most revealing sentence in the entire article comes near the end, where it says that the commercial future of BBNaija may depend less on traditional television reach and more on whether the online conversation remains loud enough to justify the prices brands have grown accustomed to paying.
That is not an obituary, but a description of the new media economy. The question for MultiChoice is not whether the old television market will return. It will not. The question is whether BBNaija can convert its enormous cultural history, personality ecosystem and digital presence into a commercially compelling proposition for brands. That, even at worst, is a challenge. It is by no means a funeral.
BusinessDay is right to interrogate the economics of BBNaija, to examine subscriber losses, consumer pressure, sponsorship costs and changing audience behaviour. A business newspaper should do exactly that. It should also be careful not to confuse the decline in subscriber numbers with the decline of an entertainment franchise.
The far more difficult proposition is proving that Nigeria has stopped watching, discussing, sharing, voting for, arguing about and commercially engaging with Big Brother Naija. That case has not been made. Until it is proven, the headline “Poor Purchasing Power, Low Subscriber Base Soften Interest in BBNaija” sounds less like a proven conclusion and more like a claim looking for evidence.
Bajomo, a public interest defender, writes from Ibadan
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
