Photo credit: Robyn Davie Photography

Webfluential, a creator marketing platform with over 600,000 creators in its network, recently unveiled a redesigned platform aimed at empowering Africa’s growing creator ecosystem.

Webfluential 2.0 represents the culmination of a decade’s work connecting brands with creators across Africa and the Middle East. According to co-founder Murray Legg, this update addresses the changing dynamics of how creators monetize their work and how brands engage with them.

“We’ve taken a long view that we want to build the infrastructure more than just the technology, the actual infrastructure in terms of communication, payments, insight and value that we’d be able to serve the creators well into the future,” says Murray, describing the company’s vision for empowering Africa’s digital content creators.

At the core of Webfluential’s redesigned platform is a methodology based on metrics that Murray likens to the baseball strategy immortalized in “Moneyball.”

“The baseball team Oakland A’s was battling in the league,” Murray explains. “They appointed a new manager, Billy Bean, who was played by Brad Pitt in the movie, and he said, ‘Let’s look at the maths and find the people who are the best baseball players by the numbers.’”

Webfluential applied this analytical approach to the creator field when it was founded in 2013. Unlike platforms that merely scraped information about influencers without forming relationships with them, Webfluential built a system that required creators to opt in actively.

“We want to know these creators and we want creators to understand their insights relative to other creators; they have to opt in to use our platform, so they know who we are,” says Murray. “By investing and connecting their content into the platform, we can better understand them. We can understand the audience engagement rate, the viewability of their videos. And the more people that join, the better the insights become.”

This metrics-centered approach provides brands with a practical tool for finding the best creator matches based on performance measures rather than superficial follower counts. As Murray puts it: “When you search for hiking creators and you want to promote your day pack and your water bottle. We’ll find you the best hiking creator by the numbers.”

The Persuasion Economy

The platform’s update is guided by Murray’s insights into what he calls the “persuasion economy”—the understanding that content doesn’t just capture attention but actively shapes decisions and behaviors.

“Many people think that the content economy we live in has to do with money, but it doesn’t. It’s got to do with your attention,” Murray explains. “In the world of content, we’re educating and empowering people about what’s out there, but we’re also persuading them to do something. And the outcome is the purchase, where I part with my money to get the product.”

New Features Unlocking Creator Value

The reimagined Webfluential platform introduces several key features designed to help creators diversify their revenue streams. 

Enhanced profiles enable creators to connect their social channels through authentication. “For every creator, they have a profile where they connect their channels. They will authenticate against all the major media channels, and they’ll also be able to format their own Creator Page,” Murray explains. These profiles function similarly to “link in bio” tools but with deeper integration into the Webfluential ecosystem.

The platform now enables direct sales capabilities, allowing creators to monetize their expertise through digital products. “Additionally, they can list products for sale. So we’re starting with digital products. A lot of creators produce lists, content, educational material, videos, etc.,” says Murray.

Affiliate programs represent another revenue stream now available through the platform. Murray explains that these partnerships “can unlock affiliate programs where creators can have unlimited upside if they promote content and sales happen as a result.”

For brands, the platform offers detailed search capabilities that allow filtering by keyword, channel, location, and other parameters to find creators in specific niches. The collaboration process resembles a WhatsApp chat where brands and creators can communicate, create costings, accept proposals, and release prepayments if needed. 

The platform features a feedback mechanism that allows brands to rate creators after collaborations. “For a platform play, you’ve got to have the feedback loop,” says Murray. “Over time, we have our best creators doing great work with the best brand. So it’s a meritocracy where the people that invest the most win the most, and our platform allows for that.”

While Webfluential previously charged both brands and creators, the new platform has eliminated fees for creators. “We charge a percentage of their sales on that,” Murray explains regarding creator commerce. “We also then connect them with brands, and we work with the Fortune 500 brands mostly across the Middle East and Africa. And when we deliver value to the brands, we charge a booking fee.”

Success Stories: From Tiles to Transformation

Murray recounts how a porcelain tile company’s first creator marketing campaign led to nationwide inventory sellouts: “They said to the creator, ‘Well, come choose a set of a range of tiles that’s going to work. Let’s get them into your house, do the before and after photos, and then tell your audience about where you got the tiles.’ And they literally sold out across the country of those tiles because the audience was so in love with them.”

This example illustrates the efficiency of creator recommendations in simplifying choices for consumers who are overwhelmed by options. “We have so many choices in the world. If you don’t know, you will tend to gravitate to someone who you aspire to be like,” Murray explains. “All these people who didn’t know what tiles to put in their new kitchen said, ‘I’m just going to go with those ones.’ And rather than picking through a thousand tile options in the shop, they said ‘We’re coming for these particular ones’ and no wonder they sold out.”

Beyond commercial successes, Murray finds particular satisfaction in the platform’s social impact, especially for women creators balancing career and family responsibilities. 

“The stories that are most resonant for me are where we help change someone’s life that wasn’t expecting it,” Murray shares. “We have a lot of single moms with young children who are talking about their experience as young moms. When we work with those, whether it’s an FMCG brand or a pharmaceutical brand, there are some incredible stories about empowerment and upliftment of women.”

Advantages, Challenges, and Opportunities of Africa’s Creator Economy

The reason Webfluential’s platform is focused on the African creator economy is that Murray believes it’s positioned for growth.

“There’s that graph floating around where it shows the birth rates across the world, and the only place that’s growing its population is Africa. Everybody else has less than 2 children, the replacement rate of the population,” Murray explains.

Africa’s technology adoption path has also created good conditions for creator culture. “Africa was late to the innovation cycle. We didn’t have dial-up Internet on a computer, so we worked on a keyboard. A lot of Africa went straight to wirelessly connected smartphones,” says Murray. “They were never sort of framed or biased by this ‘Oh, I’m just consuming content.’ Originally, they were creating content, and as a result, they are quite comfortable producing and sharing content.”

Cultural factors further strengthen Africa’s creator ecosystem. “The nature of the community and tribal essence of a lot of African communities is storytelling that was passed down generationally,” Murray notes. “A lot of the fables and things that we know have African roots.”

As Murray summarizes, “Storytelling, content production, and access to fast Internet on smartphones. If you throw those three things together, you get a very interesting market. We’ve created a tool for creators to gauge their earning potential, as well.”

Despite these advantages, African creators face several challenges that Webfluential’s updated platform aims to address. 

Financial literacy emerges as a primary concern for creators building sustainable businesses. “Because there’s not generational wealth that’s being passed down in a lot of African countries, access to finance means that you can fast track your development, whether it’s as a family, as a business, as a country,” Murray explains.

To help bridge this gap, Webfluential provides educational resources and community support. “The elements of the community and the education of that community are very important to us,” says Murray. “We have a host of recommended products for them. We have webinars in terms of production skills and top tips.” 

The company also partners with other service providers to offer additional support: “We are keen to work with partners who might be interested in offering those additional value-added services. So if it’s a wallet, if it’s insurance play, whatever that is that’s applicable to this community of creators, like we’d love to work with them.”

1,000 Creator Millionaires by 2028

With the launch of Webfluential 2.0, Murray shares the company’s goal that encapsulates its vision for Africa’s creator economy: creating 1,000 creator millionaires by 2028.

“We live in the exponential age where these things start happening in a compounding nature,” says Murray. “We would be so delighted if that’s the case because we think that there’s everyone’s there to win. The brands win, the creators win. We enjoy the ride and help facilitate it as well.”

This milestone is part of a broader five-year vision for the company. “In five years time, we want to be the #1 influencer marketing specialists across the continent,” Murray declares. “And we want to help these creators—a billion people in Africa participate in this economy of being able to produce content and earn money.”

To achieve these goals, Webfluential aims to be an integral part of a growing creator ecosystem. “In time, venture capitalists are going to invest in creators and they’re going to say, ‘here’s money to increase the quality of your production and let’s take a revenue share on the revenue you generate from your YouTube views,'” Murray predicts.

He envisions specialized financial services emerging around successful creators: “There’s going to be banks for creators, there’s going to be venture capital for creators, there’s going to be products for creators. The industry is big enough to have services that are specific to them.”

For young African creators just starting out, Murray offers two key pieces of advice that reflect both current trends and enduring principles. First, embrace artificial intelligence: “Experiment with all of these AI tools that are available now. Because if you are empowered by AI, it’s only going to fast track you, it’s going to help sharpen your ideas and your creativity, it’s going to help you produce things in a higher quality.”

Second, maintain curiosity: “Stay curious because the world does change very quickly. And for as long as you are curious and want to understand the market, what you’re doing, what the rest of the world is doing, you will learn so much.”

As information flow accelerates, Murray believes those who can make sense of complexity will thrive. “Information is only going to come at us faster and faster. And for those people that can digest that information, make sense of it, and communicate that in a story, those people will be highly in demand in the future.”