Tobi Oredein is CEO and co-founder of Black Ballad, an online media brand for black women in the UK. It aims “to help every black woman realise how she can change her world through every click she makes and every conversation she has. We tell stories, host events and create experiences for, by and about black women that they can’t and won’t get anywhere else. From our articles and podcasts, to our thriving membership and community, BB exists to do one thing – help black women in Britain and beyond live their best lives.”
It was launched in 2014 “from a place of passionate frustration” after Oredein had been unable to get anything more than shorterm journalistic assignments from magazines where “black women were just so absent…we were just neglected by the whole media world.” For an energetic and determined journopreneur, she is refreshingly measured, having raised a total of almost £400k from a combination of family, friends, investor angels, and crowdfund investors only in the last five years. Black Ballad employs just three fulltime people and some freelances. The slick, highly practical and informative website, podcasts and member events belie the low budget, a mere 1.5k paying subscribers and an all-platform audience of some 100k. Black Ballad really does seem like a sleeping giant – and with the strategic patience often lacking in passionate digital startups.
That may be why it has taken Oredein a whole decade to get to the point where – either this year or next – it will reach £1mn of revenue. Its credibility and authority among the UK’s estimated 1.5mn black women has been enhanced by her cheery articulacy, tight cost control and her formidable tech-communications savvy partnership with analyst Bola Awoniyi, her co-founder, business partner and husband. They have a clear-eyed view of an audience which needs help facing tough challenges – but also wants joy and inspiration.
The lift-off may come as early as this year if Black Ballad launches its planned annual festival. Apart from amplifying the Black Ballad brand, it could create a funnel for consumer brands targeting black women and seeking to identify with an increasingly significant minority group in the UK.
Black Ballad had an estimated £450k revenue in 2023 but £160k for the first quarter of this year (150% up on 2023). An estimated 47% of revenue comes from event sponsorship, 42% brand partnerships and advertising, and 11% from subscriptions. Tobi Oredein and Bola Awoniyi together own 72% of the company.
How did you get started?
I did American Studies at King’s College London. I stayed in London for uni because I had this plan to work in journalism and so I did all these internships at a number of magazines. I am a journalist, I guess you’d say, by trade. I worked at a lot of women’s weeklies and monthlies, and entertainment magazines. And I came to realise that black women were just so absent in newsrooms, and even on the pages of the publications. We were just neglected by the whole media and women’s lifestyle world. It was like black women didn’t exist. And, even if we did exist, it was to prop up white women. So you might get one black woman in a photo shoot to make it look diverse.
I’d been working freelance on an entertainment magazine for about 18 months and thought I could get another job but I just couldn’t break into the industry. That’s when I started to realize that I was the odd one out. Everyone was white and middle-class. I called up my boyfriend and said: “I’m just really sick of asking people for jobs. I’m just going to give myself a job! There’s nothing for black women in the market. We have Essence and Ebony magazines from the US, but the black British identity is very different.” That was where the idea started.
What is Black Ballad?
Black Ballard is a media and membership platform for (and by) black women in Britain and beyond. Our members pay a monthly or annual fee to access all our content across text, audio and video. We have events not just in London but across the country on a range of topics including film screenings, and panel discussions on politics, finances and motherhood. Brits make up the majority of our paying membership, but also we have members in other countries including the UAE, Ghana, France, Spain and even America. Sometimes these are expat black women who have moved abroad; they continue to pay for membership because it’s a little piece of home for them.
When did you launch?
2014. It really started from that very selfish point of view: my need to be a journalist. As I said, I had started to feel that, okay, there might be another point of view that was not being included in the publications I was working on and reading. In a way, it forced me to make a decision because I have a passion for writing, I really love it. It helped me decide to start my own business because I genuinely love writing. Six months after the first idea, we launched Black Ballad in June 2014.
How did you fund it?
My boyfriend at the time (who’s now my husband and co-founder of Black Ballad) gave me most of the money I needed. A couple of thousand pounds. It wasn’t a lot. We just needed to pay somebody to do a web site. Some of my friends came on as proof readers We gathered our community of friends including a childhood friend of my husband who was a graphic and UX designer. My husband was a data analyst working on Econsultancy at Centaur Media. He was looking at the impact of technology on media, so he was super interested in where Black Ballad could go. Since then, we have raised more than £250k from crowd funding and more than £100k from incubator funds and professional investors.
What’s the business model?
It’s a freemium model. So, if you don’t pay for Black Ballad, give us your email and you get two weekly newsletters, limited content, and then access to some events. If you pay £4.99 or £6.99 a month (£49 or £69 a year), you get access to all the content and all the events and also perks. We work with brands such as Dove, and they provide lifestyle perks. Last year, they sent 200 of our subscribers really beautiful boxes of deodorants and we provided free surfing lessons for members. The top-price premium members get access to our online community Slack and lower-priced tickets for some events. That’s how our freemium business model works. But, although we are now 10 years old, we didn’t really turn it into a business until 2017 and we went full-time only in 2020. We have been profitable since 2020 through a combination of keeping our costs down and just growing the team slowly.
We are huge fans of data! When anyone buys a membership, they fill in a membership form so we can see what they are interested in getting from us, what are their life experiences and what they expect from membership. We also hold focus groups with members and we have done long-form surveys to understand black women’s views on subjects such as motherhood, health, and finance. All this comes together to give a rich set of data, which inspires a range of Black Ballad activities from content concepts to new products.
What have been the milestones?
The year 2020 – when we became full-time on Black Ballad – was a big milestone. Several things happened. On the back of our survey among 2,000 about black maternal health outcomes, we were able to take over Huffpost for a week which was a huge achievement for us. Then, we did a deal with Maltesers on Black Motherhood, which really opened up the advertising potential for us.
That same year, we also got a £70k grant from the social innovation charity Nesta which enabled us – across five months – to recruit freelance black women writers, editors, pjotographers, filmmakers and podcasters across the UK (and specifically outside London) to help us highlight the differences between the black experience in London and elsewhere. We had editors from the West Midlands, East Midlands, Scotland, South of England, and Southwest.
One of the things that UK media does quite poorly, I think, is that it focuses so heavily on London. When we did those nine weeks of content about black people outside London, it boosted membership. I think it won a lot of sentiment. It also changed the perception of Black Ballad because we were really trying to be as inclusive as possible. One of the things I was very keen to do differently with Black Ballad was that I was not (and am not) going to repeat the mistakes of mainstream media. Although probably more than 50% of our audience is in London, I think the regional ‘takeover’ was huge for us. And this year, to coincide with International Women’s Day – and our own 10th anniversary – we launched our campaign “The Face of the Modern British Workforce”, highlighting 56 women across a range of professions. It was funded by Google: another breakthrough for us to work with a major tech company.
What’s your competition?
It probably includes R29 Unbothered from Refinery 29. But our biggest competitors are actually influencers on YouTube, TikTok and other digital media.
What’s the future?
I don’t want people to see Black Ballad just as a media brand. I want it to be a lifestyle brand for black women. I want other forms of our media to be more consistent. So we will have a bigger range of podcasts. I want video to be more frequent on the site. I want people to access the membership through an app. Actually, I hope we get to a point where it’s an app and people can receive tailor-made content for them. I think it’s shaping to be more of a lifestyle brand with it being digitally focused and making sure our journalism is really good and can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other media houses, and making sure we also invest more in video and audio. We also have big plans for group memberships.
We are currently in about six universities. Academia has, historically, been really white in the UK. But more people are becoming more interested in the courses being more diverse. We have a plethora of content that is really well done and checked. We have data. So we will be making sure we are in as many universities as possible. Young women will be able to access Black Ballad through university and then grow with it as they get their first job and they move on with their lives. I want to be in all UK universities because, as I said, that journey of growing with black women is really important to me. Then, there’s this great challenge of work experience and internships that I know all about and we will be working hard to help there too.
Finally, I would love to have – and something we’re working on – a huge staple event like a big annual convention which can be a celebration, something really joyful. I can’t tell you more about that just yet!
My vision for Black Ballad in, say, five years is: being in many more universities by providing the content to help with academia, becoming an app, having that annual event and growing much more content in video and audio – and being everywhere for all black women in the UK. We’ve got a lot to do.
