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Costs have risen sharply across every major input — currency-denominated equipment and software, diesel-powered generation, and inflation-driven salary pressure — while revenue from the traditional advertising model has failed to keep pace.
At the same time, audience attention is migrating to social media platforms
that monetise the very entertainment function on which broadcast advertising was built, without compensating the broadcasters who built the audience.
Yet the deeper paradox of this moment is commercial, not technological.
The North houses more than half of Nigeria’s population and an economy whose principal node — Kano State — has a GDP comparable in scale to the entire sovereign nations of Niger Republic and Chad.
The national advertising economy is now valued at N 605.2 billion, growing at 18.7% per annum, yet less than 4% of that spend reaches the North-West, and less than 3% reaches the North-East.
The trade is rational by no commercial yardstick. It is the residue of a national advertising architecture built around Lagos, sustained by inertia, and reinforced by the absence of any organised Northern counterweight.
This paper argues that survival requires Northern broadcasters and the
Association of Private Broadcasters (APAK) to act on four reinforcing fronts: contest the advertising investment that the Northern audience rightfully commands; build the regional industry infrastructure — audience measurement coverage, broadcast verifications
Northern agencies, distributor advocacy — that closes the trust and access gap with national advertisers; pivot decisively into digital revenue streams that pay in foreign currency and reach the global Hausa diaspora; and deploy artificial intelligence and solar energy as cost-side equalisers that allow Northern operators to match the analytical and operational
sophistication of any Lagos network at a fraction of the cost.
Abbas M. Dalhatu — APAK Summit, Kano, April 2026.
SB E-news.
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