Make money offering download services

Posted by Felix Okoli on Thursday December 27, 2012 at 8:45:9:

When you take a visit to a niche market in Nigeria like the computer village at Ikeja, you'd see a lot of small businesses springing up that offer downloading services. The kind of services they offer is not that technical as it basically involves transferring files from a computer to a mobile phone or other portable device. They offer downloads for a fee and this rangesfrom N50 to N100 per file. They make a lot of money doing so and for them it is a profitable business.

These download services being offered mostly by youths at the computer market is profitable and they do have a large inventory of files

More and more Nigerians who own mobile phones nas small gadgets normally desire to have their own copy of digital content and so the demand for downloads is growing and these are basically offline downloads offered by connecting two computers or gadgets together.

What type of files are being downloaded? Mostly files like videos(mp4, avi, mpeg, 3gp), music(mp3, wav) and games(jad, jar, apk)

Is it legal to offer downloads in Nigeria?
If you are interested in going into this sort of business, you should know that the Nigerian law doesn't support offering downloads of files protected by the Nigerian Copyright Commission(NCC) and so most Nigerian content fall into this category. So, what these service providers mostly offer customers foreign content like western music, videos and so on. So, to be on the safe side, don't offer Nigerian content as downloads if you don't have the right to do so. Most foreign songs are not protected by Nigerian law and so these computer guys make lost of profit offering people lots of downloads.

A potential customer could want to download all of R.kelly's songs and these could be up to 100 tracks and these download providers could offer it at a price of N50 per track. For 100 tracks, they've gained a cool income of N5000. They also charge about N100 per download for retail customers.

What this business involves
- Having a good computer system with lots of space
- Having internet access
- Having an large inventory of files or knowing how to get them
- Having an office, shop or location to provide instant service
- Setting a price per download

How to offer downloads
- A customer approaches you for a request
- You browse through your computer folders to see if you have the requested file
- If available, you connect phone or gadget to computer using USB cable, bluetooth or memory card
- Transfer the requested files by copying and pasting or using other software
- Allow customer to review your transferred files
- Customer pays you for the download(s)

What to do if you don't have the requested file
You could download it from the internet by searching for it from free sites. There are alot of sites that offer free mp3s, MP4s, music converters. You could also rip music off cds if the customer brings a cd along and a software Windows media player allows one to do that. Videos can also be downloaded from YouTube using any of the many free online converters available.