A Political Economy Analysis of Nigerian Digital Media: Ownership, Power, and Democratic Implications

The political economy of Nigerian digital media, encompassing ownership concentration, advertising market power, platform dependency, and the regulatory framework governing digital media actors, has significant implications for democratic communication that have not been subjected to comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis. This study conducted an original political economy analysis of Nigerian digital media. A critical political economy methodology integrating structural analysis, institutional analysis, and discourse analysis was employed. The structural analysis mapped ownership concentration across the top 100 Nigerian digital media properties through corporate registry research, identifying that twelve ownership groups control 67 percent of the top 100 properties by traffic. Advertising market analysis drew on industry data from the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria and structured interviews with 15 digital advertising executives to quantify the dependency relationship between digital news organisations and programmatic advertising revenue. Institutional analysis examined the regulatory framework through NITDA, NBC, and NCC legal instruments, identifying three areas of regulatory vacuum enabling harmful digital media market concentration without accountability. Discourse analysis of 300 editorial articles from diverse ownership groups identified systematic correlations between owner political affiliations and editorial positions on key governance issues. Original theoretical contributions include the Patronage-Digital Media Nexus Model, theorising how political patronage financing of digital media creates non-market editorial dependency, and the Dual Platform Dependency Critique, analysing how Nigerian digital media faces simultaneous extraction relationships with both domestic political patrons and global platform advertising intermediaries. The analysis generates specific regulatory reform recommendations grounded in a democratic communication rights framework.

Keywords: political economy, digital media, Nigeria, media ownership, democratic communication