Nigeria Media Market Failure, Causes, Implications and Solutions

Abstract

The media industry, especially the newspaper genre is arguably failing slowly, and the reason is because the information product is characterised by fixed and low marginal cost. In other words, media content is expensive to produce but cheap to reproduce and passed to consumers via the new information technologies that have made information services more ‘competitive' and ‘commodified'. The media organisation has been described as a market owing to its structure, functions and regulations in the society where it operates. Although this is the case in Europe, Asia, and North America, there is no known study that focuses on the media market failure in African and Nigerian contexts respectively. The implication of this is that studies carried out in other areas could be generalised on the rest of Africa, and it may not truly paint the picture due to culture, media preferences and consumption rate, politics and other local dynamics. It is against this backdrop that this study focuses on media market failure in Nigeria contexts. The paper unveils the different factors that led to newspapers market failure in Nigeria which include the social media, corruption and physical challenges. Solutions are also proffered in order to resuscitate the ailing print media industry in Nigeria. The paper argues that in the event of lack of urgent intervention, this vital sector that provides alternative sources of information for a vast majority of audiences will face extinction in addition to loss of jobs.