REPURPOSING OF FILMS AND VIDEOS
Most people think about content conversion in one direction. Someone writes a book, and years later it gets turned into a film. The far more interesting opportunity right now runs the other way. Take the films, the songs, and the viral video content that already exist and turn them into something readable.
It sounds simple on paper, but the reasoning behind it is worth unpacking, because it points to a genuinely underused business model.
The Gap Nobody Seems to Be Filling
The idea started with something small. An entrepreneur was listening to a social media influencer known for delivering prayers in Yoruba. Nothing scripted, nothing polished for text, just spoken word, rooted in Yoruba oral tradition and delivered with real depth. He found himself thinking about how much of that content simply evaporates once the video stops playing. The creator moves on to the next post, and unless someone was recording or transcribing, the words are gone.
That is the gap worth pointing to. A huge amount of rich, well-crafted content across Nigerian and broader African culture exists only in spoken or musical form. Films, standup comedy sets, influencer monologues, prayers, folk sayings set to rhythm. All of it lives and dies as audio or video. Almost none of it gets converted into paperback books, eBooks, or blog posts that a different kind of audience could sit down and actually read.
Why Converting Video and Audio into Text Actually Matters
It's tempting to assume that if people wanted to read the content, someone would have already written it down. But creators who are gifted verbally are not always inclined, or equipped, to also become writers. Producing a great spoken monologue and producing a polished manuscript require different skills, different time commitments, and honestly, different personalities. Plenty of talented speakers have no interest in sitting down to write.
That gap creates an opening for someone else, someone who isn't the performer, to step in and do the conversion work instead.
There's also a straightforward audience argument here. Not everyone consumes content the same way. Some people are drawn to video and audio because it fits their lifestyle: background noise during a commute, something to watch while cooking. But there is an entirely different segment of people who prefer reading. Maybe they're traveling. Maybe they want something quiet to sit with on a lazy afternoon. Maybe they just don't want to commit to a three-hour film when they could get the same story, or the same message, in twenty minutes of reading.
Ignoring that audience means leaving money on the table.
Films, Comedy, and Music Are All Fair Game
This idea isn't limited to spoken-word content like prayers or proverbs. The same opportunity shows up across several formats.
Films and biopics. Plenty of well-loved Nigerian films tell stories rich enough to work as standalone novels or novellas, yet almost nobody bothers to write the book version after the movie is out. It's usually the other way around, a memoir gets adapted into a biopic, not a film getting adapted back into text.
Standup comedy. Nigeria has a deep bench of comedians whose material could, with the right editing, translate into essay collections or humour books. It takes more careful handling to make a joke land on the page the way it lands on stage, but it's doable.
Music, especially older Yoruba records. This is where the idea gets particularly interesting. A lot of classic Yoruba music, especially juju and older highlife-adjacent styles, wasn't built around short three-minute pop structures. Some tracks ran twenty to thirty minutes, carrying entire narratives inside the lyrics. The argument is that a huge number of listeners dance to the melody without absorbing the actual message buried in the words, partly because Yoruba song lyrics can carry layered meaning that takes real fluency to catch.
A personal, slightly embarrassing example helps illustrate the point: a school friend who loved a popular song but never quite understood the lyrics, so he sang his own made-up version of the words whenever the song came on. He wasn't alone in that. This kind of mishearing and reinterpreting happens constantly with music, across cultures; but there is something specific to Yoruba music that makes the effect more pronounced. The talking drum tradition at the centre of Yoruba percussion is built around mimicking speech patterns and tonal rhythm, so even the instrumentation carries linguistic meaning that a casual listener would never pick up on without guidance.
The takeaway for a content entrepreneur is that there is real value in digging into the history and meaning behind well-known songs, tracking down where a piece of music actually came from, what inspired it, and what the lyrics are really saying, then presenting that as written content alongside links back to the original recording. Readers get context they never had, and the original artist or rights holder gets renewed attention and, potentially, new listeners.
How the Business Model Would Actually Work
There's a fairly clean structure for how someone could build this into an actual business rather than a passion project.
Partner with the creators, don't compete with them. The plan isn't to rip off an influencer's content without permission. It's to approach them with a genuine business case: you keep doing exactly what you're already doing, and someone else turns it into written content on your behalf. A revenue split, something like the creator taking the larger share since they did the original creative work, means the influencer earns extra income without lifting a finger beyond what they were already doing.
Handle the production and marketing yourself. Whoever is doing the conversion work is also the one editing, formatting, publishing, and marketing the final product. That's the value being added in exchange for a cut of the profit.
Multiple monetisation channels. Once the content exists in written form, there are several ways to turn it into revenue: direct book and eBook sales, affiliate marketing on a companion blog, sponsorships, and advertising placements around the content.
Job creation as a side effect. If the business scales past a single creator or a single catalogue, the workload naturally requires hiring help, whether that's writers, editors, or people managing the publishing side. What starts as one person's idea can end up supporting a small team.
The Cultural Angle Nobody Else Is Chasing
There's a longer-term reason this idea matters beyond the immediate business case. There are second, third, and even fourth generation descendants of Yoruba people scattered across the world, in the diaspora, in South America, in places like Cuba, who have partial or fragmented connections to that heritage. Some of them would genuinely welcome access to well-explained, well-translated cultural material, whether that's proverbs, music history, or oral traditions, presented in a format they can actually engage with.
That's a real, underserved audience. Written, translated, contextualised cultural content isn't just entertainment for them. It's a way back into something they've partially lost access to.
The Bigger Principle
Strip away the specifics of Yoruba music and Nigerian film, and what's left is a broader principle that applies well beyond this one niche. There is enormous value sitting in content that already exists and already has an audience, but that audience is locked into a single format. Somebody who can competently move that content from one format into another; video into text, audio into a paperback, a spoken prayer into a published collection, doesn't need to be the original creative talent. They just need to spot where the format mismatch is costing everyone money and be willing to do the unglamorous work of converting it.
Not every idea like this gets built by the person who first noticed it. Part of the value of talking through business ideas like this one is that somebody else, reading or listening from the sidelines, might be the one to actually runs with it. You don't need to invent something from scratch to build a real business. Sometimes the opportunity is just sitting there in a format nobody has bothered to convert yet.
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