She kept losing distribution. She never lost the position.

Welcome to Issue 7 of Narrative Yield.

One question from last issue has been rattling around since: would your story survive a channel change?

I have a smaller and more expensive stake in it. I wrote a children's book series, The Wondrous Journeys of Isaro and Juru, published in Rwanda by Imagine We, and I run its North American distribution myself. Thousands spent on Amazon, and my best month was six copies. A listing is not a readership. I was one row in a sea of goods, with no audience and too few reviews. I owned the stories. I had rented the shelf, and I had not built the reason anyone would walk to it.

This issue is about a founder who understood that early. It asks the sharper version of Issue 6's question: not what happens when the channel changes, but what happens when it disappears.

In April 2025, TIME named Mo Abudu one of the hundred most influential people in the world; Idris Elba wrote the citation. Forbes placed her among the hundred most powerful women the same year. Harvard Business School has been teaching her company to MBA students since 2021, in a case written by professors Andy Wu and Feng Zhu.

She came to media late, and from the least likely direction. She led human resources at ExxonMobil in Nigeria, founded a recruitment firm, then developed a hotel.

What happened next is usually told as a passion project. However, it reads better as a sequence of decisions about ownership.

In 2006 she launched Moments with Mo, a pan-African talk show. In 2013 she launched EbonyLife TV, her own channel, carried on DStv as number 165. The channel was hers.

The carriage was rented, and rented reach can be taken back: MultiChoice dropped the channel in South Africa in 2018, and across the rest of the continent on July 31, 2020, over weak viewership. She launched her own app, EbonyLife ON, that same month.

She was renting elsewhere at the same time, deliberately. A three-year co-production deal with Sony Pictures Television in 2018. In June 2020, a multi-title deal with Netflix, the first of its kind between the streamer and an African company.

Two years later Blood Sisters became Netflix's first Nigerian original series and spent a week in the global top ten.

Read that sequence again.

Across two decades, almost every distribution arrangement she held either expired, underperformed, or was taken away from her. The one thing that never moved was the position underneath them.

The carriage was the tenancy. The story was the freehold.

Then came the test she had not designed.

In January 2024, Prime Video cut its regional funding and stopped commissioning new originals across Sub-Saharan Africa. That November, Netflix stopped commissioning original Nigerian productions and moved to licensing finished films. Netflix disputed the framing and said it was not exiting Nigeria. For the producers involved, the distinction was academic: commissioned projects were cancelled.

An industry that had spent four years reorganising itself around two buyers found out it had been building a supply chain, not a business.

That is what a rented narrative looks like when the lease ends. If your entire position in the market is "we make things for Netflix," then Netflix's budget meeting is your strategy offsite. (Most decks that say "strategic partnership" are worth re-reading as "we are a line item in someone else's roadmap.")

Abudu's answer was to try again. EbonyLife ON+ soft-launched in September 2025 and went global that November, rebuilt as a membership, with an opening slate including a film by Idris Elba.

The tidy version of this story is not available. ON+ is the second attempt at a platform she first launched in 2020, after that one struggled to grow and she went back to co-production deals with Netflix, Sony and AMC because that is where the reach was.

Mo has been looking for the right formula for twenty years. She has been dropped by a carrier, run a platform that underperformed, returned to renting from the people who had the audience, and tried again.

Every distribution bet she made expired, faltered, or was withdrawn.

What compounded through all of it was the position. Since 2006 she has been saying one thing across a talk show, a channel, a studio, a film school and a venue in Lagos: African stories belong in African hands, and here is what they are worth.

That is why the relaunch had a library to open with, a name that gets a call returned in Los Angeles, and an audience that already knew what the brand meant.

The distribution kept changing hands. The position never did.

That is the difference between narrative as output and narrative as asset.

Output is what you make for whoever is buying.

The asset is what they were paying to be near.

None of which makes renting a mistake. Renting distribution is usually the right call. The mistake is failing to understand which of your assets is leased, so that when the terms change you find your narrative written into a contract you never signed.

You probably cannot buy back your company's distribution; you would have to own the company.

I cannot either.

I am at year one of my own twenty, which is the honest thing to say about a case study like this: Abudu is what two decades of accumulation looks like from the outside.

The version available to the rest of us is the one under our own name, a position your employer benefits from but does not hold the deed to.

Either way the audit takes an afternoon.

Write down every place your market currently hears about you. Beside each line, mark whether you own the relationship or rent it. Then ask the only question that matters: if the rented rows went away next quarter, what claim would still be yours?

When this goes wrong, it goes wrong on schedule.

The category term your competitor owns because they named it while you described it.

The round that prices you as a supplier, because a supplier is the only story on file.

Issue 6 asked whether your story will still be saying the same thing in year five.

This one asks the shorter version: if the distribution you rely on disappeared next quarter, what would still be yours?

Somewhere in your market is a leader with less capability than you who has been saying one clear thing under their own name for three years.

When distribution shifts, and it always shifts, the market goes looking for whoever it already associates with the problem.

It is choosing the shortest path to conviction, and that leader is standing on it.

Distribution is a lease. Position is the freehold.

Build the thing that stays yours when the platform stops calling.

P.S. If you want an honest read on where your own signal stands today, the Executive Visibility Scorecard takes about five minutes.

Until next time,

Michaella