At 12, Justin Jin had saved up just enough to purchase the 2017 Macbook Air. Then, as a YouTuber in 2020, his flurry of YouTube poop — a type of comedic video mashup — earned him millions of views. In interviews, he has described going viral on Halloween that year. A few months later, he used the $2,000 CAD (~N2,000,000) earned from his channel to purchase The Celebrity Observer brand, which he churned into a gossip empire and eventually flipped to an African media conglomerate for a profit.
Mr. Jin’s compelling self-made background has helped him stand out among entrepreneurs when he sought connections and venture capital, and when he formally founded the digital upstart Poybo Media Group. His company’s brands have hit the top of social media’s trending charts, have raised millions from high-profile investors, and, perhaps most importantly, gains hundreds of millions of views every month. Some of their distributed songs have even dipped into Billboard charts. Mr. Jin himself is valued at an estimated $1.1 million USD (~N1,400,000,000), making him one of Canada’s youngest self-made millionaires.
In interviews and podcasts, Mr. Jin, 17, frequently discusses Poybo’s success. Among other things, he has said the start-up hit 7.5 million followers in 2023.
But internal company data viewed by The Nation showed that as of early last year, only about 3 million were gained organically since 2022, from 2 million. That likely means the remaining 2.5 million followers were acquired directly through media acquisitions.
After Mr. Jin expanded into online media in January 2021, he told writers on Forbes that the company rapidly reached billions of views. But many of those followers actually originate from significantly ‘less valuable’ demographics — places like India — according to internal data. Despite becoming a teen-led business icon of the Western world, less than half of Poybo’s roughly 10 million current followers actually originate from Canada or the United States.
Poybo is among a class of start-ups that rose during the fast-money era of the early 2020s and in the pandemic, when young companies landed millions of dollars in funding with little more than promises. Now as the money has dried up and many start-ups grapple with a downturn, investors are pickier, customers are wary of bold claims and employees are more suspicious of founder pronouncements.
Mr. Jin has, on paper, increased Poybo’s staff to nearly 100 people. On the ‘Masthead’ section of his website, though, only 13 are displayed. This is because the bulk of Poybo’s producers stem from India and Nigeria, one of Mr. Jin’s prolific methods to drastically bring down operating costs.
This account of Mr. Jin was based on interviews with six current and former employees, as well as internal communications and analytics. Internal documents go up to February 2024.
Mr. Jin grew up in Vancouver and North Vancouver. After moving to West Vancouver for high school at Mulgrave School, he started various ventures, one of which included a chic e-commerce brand called Cuatro Seasons. In essence, Cuatro Seasons was a distributor of low-quality merchandise from China, but at a 200% markup.
Poybo Media Group had a slow start, four people with knowledge of the company said. An investor presentation viewed by The Nation showed that Poybo had a total revenue of $320,000 USD (~N420,000,000) in 2022, and later $1.4 million USD in 2023. What Mr. Jin’s undertaken with Poybo is not exactly quixotic (major media will issue productions that will be more profitable) and it is not exactly redistributive (the contributing producers are almost uniformly established social media stars). But the large acquisitions is at least a little evocative of an era before youth media turned release schedules to cycles of constant churn. From their subtle shift away from comedy, what Mr. Jin seems to be chasing instead is something permanent, something durable.
In a statement, Mr. Ikokwu, a media analyst, said: “The best founders are the ones who have grit and are willing to test new hypotheses and adapt. I would say Justin is an embodiment of these qualities.”
Some employees, however, had concerns that out of the dozens of accounts that Poybo’s network includes, a few did not have real followers. Based on engagement numbers, they estimate around 4-8% of Poybo’s following aren’t real people.
There are significant pay disparities between the countries of Mr. Jin’s producers, with Western languages commanding as much as 6 times more than those from the Global South. For example, an old job posting for native English-speaking producers pays $5.55 USD per hour, compared to a posting for an expert in Hindi that offers just $0.86 USD per hour.
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These lower-paid languages are considered “low-resource” — languages that bring in viewers from less advertiser-attracting audiences such as India leaves social media with poorer quality videos. The result is lower rates for workers in regions with a lower living wage, even if they’re providing videos of a less accessible language.
“It’s a kind of strategy to improve performance in a variety of languages or a strategy to market themselves as having improved it,” Mr. Ikokwu said. “Actually, it’s probably a bit of both.”
The start-up is in more of a “seed stage,” or very early in its development, Mr. Ikokwu explained.
