Eleven million views in twenty-eight days earned one of Pakistan's best-known independent podcasts $359.40.
MONETISATION
Eleven million views in twenty-eight days earned one of Pakistan's best-known independent podcasts $359.40.
Shehzad Ghias Shaikh of The Pakistan Experience posted the analytics himself: over a crore views for roughly a lakh of rupees, less than the cost of a social media manager. His Spotify numbers are worse. The show has crossed 2.8 million plays and downloads on a platform where podcasters in most countries would have earned somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. His earnings from Spotify, which does not monetise podcasts in Pakistan, are zero. Not low. Zero.
This is not a story about one podcast. It is the arithmetic of an entire digital economy in which Pakistanis supply the audience, the content and the engagement, while the payment rails stop at our border.
Consider how systematic the exclusion is. TikTok's Creator Rewards Programme, the mechanism through which creators earn directly from views, requires that creators reside in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain or Italy. Pakistan has roughly 62 million TikTok users, one of the largest markets the platform has anywhere on earth, and not one of them is eligible. X runs its creator payouts exclusively through Stripe; Stripe does not operate in Pakistan, so a programme the company calls global is structurally closed to every Pakistan-based account.
On YouTube, content watched by Pakistani audiences earns creators well under a dollar per thousand views, against thirty dollars and more for American audiences. And beneath all of it sits the oldest gap of all: PayPal has never entered Pakistan. Even the celebrated 2024 ‘PayPal arrangement’ was a Payoneer partnership under which no Pakistani could actually open a PayPal account.
Then there is Meta, where exclusion has hardened into something closer to confiscation. In March 2025, Meta updated its financial eligibility rules so that Pakistani bank accounts and tax details can no longer be used for monetisation at all. Creators were told to link financial details from an eligible country instead -- a list that includes the US, UK, UAE and, remarkably, India. Sit with that detail. A Pakistani creator can be paid for Pakistani content viewed by Pakistani audiences, provided the paperwork says he is not Pakistani.
Now watch what that policy produces. I have reviewed the documentation of a mainstream Pakistani news channel that is owed $59,065.94 in earnings Meta itself acknowledges. Because Meta's own rules barred a Pakistani payout account, the channel's earnings were routed, as the policy demands, through an account registered in the UAE. Meta's fraud systems then flagged that arrangement as "unusual activity" and restricted the account from monetising.
Two hundred and fifty million people are not a rounding error in anyone's business model. Our audience is the leverage. It is time somebody in Islamabad walked into the negotiation and used it
The payout, unpaid since August 2025, now carries an estimated date of May 2026. The platform mandates the workaround, treats it as a violation and then holds the money. As a digital strategist, I am pursuing this case through my own network and contacts. It should not require anyone's network. Creators across the country reported the same wave of sudden demonetisation in those same weeks of March 2025 -- in-stream ads, reels and story earnings switched off overnight for pages with clean records.
The asymmetry is complete when you notice what still works perfectly: the selling. Pakistani businesses can spend on Facebook, Google and TikTok advertising without any friction whatsoever. The platforms happily monetise Pakistan's attention and Pakistan's advertisers. They only decline to pay Pakistanis.
None of this is fate. It is the predictable outcome of markets that showed up versus markets that did not. The European Union built the Digital Services Act and made accountability a condition of accessing its users; the largest platforms now submit to audits and transparency obligations because Brussels left them no alternative. The US Congress summons platform executives and extracts commitments under oath.
Pakistan, the fifth-largest country by population on the planet and among the youngest, has never formally engaged with creator monetisation on a single platform.
There are early signs the state is stirring. On July 12, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal announced that the government is in talks with Netflix and other global streamers to adjust a regional framework that has long denied Pakistani content its due space, alongside work on a homegrown OTT platform under Uraan Pakistan. That is the right instinct, applied so far to one front of a much wider war.
The next steps are concrete. Parliament should establish a standing committee on digital platform accountability, with the mandate and public hearings that Congress and the European Parliament use to that end; platforms answer to institutions, not to press releases. The State Bank must resolve the payment rails so that a Pakistani creator can be paid as a Pakistani, ending the fiction of Dubai addresses that platforms first require and then punish. And the government should establish a formal mechanism to recover earnings already made and withheld, beginning with the documented cases.
Two hundred and fifty million people are not a rounding error in anyone's business model. Our audience is the leverage. It is time somebody in Islamabad walked into the negotiation and used it.
The writer is the CEO of Campaignistan and hosts the Let Us Build Pakistan (LUBP) Podcast. He tweets/posts @farhadjarralpk and can be reached at: [email protected]
