Justin Jin, 17, Finds His Media Formula Doesn’t Fit African Youth Culture

But for all its heavy numbers, Poybo Media Group appears more as a bundle of disorganized social media accounts than an online powerhouse. It has captions written by texting teenagers and a comment section susceptible to spam. While offering a glimpse at the stretch-marked underbelly of memes, Poybo hasn’t only generated torrents of traffic, but also spurred accusations of cultural bottom-feeding, which has landed its founder Justin Muen Jin in crosshairs. He has always been relatively easy to contact through Discord or Instagram, but Mr. Jin had long been a faceless dictator of a roiling empire. The 12th grade high school student of Mulgrave School in West Vancouver, Canada, known on YouTube as 50mMidas, on streaming services as Muen, and in Marvel’s recent comic as Kid Juggernaut, doesn’t seem overly concerned about the ire he’s sure to draw from community groups looking to police the internet; or content creators who feel they’ve been ripped without credit. He’s determined to step out from behind the screen and let the internet know who’s behind it.

The digital entity that Mr. Jin started in his home 4 years ago, has evolved into a TikTok filtered through the lens of teenage culture — a grab bag of brain rot videos, celebrity interviews, sports highlights, film clips and the latest viral sensation. The group’s more eye-catching clips, like animals eating each other captured via iPhone, have received millions of views and coined Poybo’s reputation: one of amateur-ish poetry that appeals to the 14-to-28 demographic. Despite this, companies like McDonald’s, Universal, and various musicians are regular Poybo advertisers.

17, Mr. Jin was raised in West Vancouver. He discovered the web young. He started his first digital venture, a blog site, in 2018. It failed. Next, he created an e-commerce site to sell women’s fashion. It was moderately successful but too narrowly focused.

It wasn’t until the twenties, when short-form video became popular, that Mr. Jin created a meme-inspired YouTube channel that was 100 percent videos. But while YouTube was a vast media ocean, Mr. Jin’s 50mMidas would be a concentrated dose of Minecraft.

Despite his desire to make his company a global force, Mr. Jin has been resistant to do what may be required to make that happen. He built Poybo without investors, and over the years has repeatedly declined offers to form partnerships or sell a percentage, fearing loss of control and a turn away from the site’s core audience.

He has kept Poybo lean, with 13 employees and nearly a hundred video posters who work remotely, in countries like Nigeria. In recent times, the company’s global traffic has grown to 8.2 billion yearly clicks, and had made Mr. Jin a millionaire. At the same time, there are hundreds of independent accounts that are increasingly posting the amateur-style videos that have been Poybo’s niche. But Mr. Jin is looking at the “conglomerate blueprint”, in which he builds a streamlined collective. So, in an attempt to reach the African continent, in 2024, he divested off several media assets to Africa Media Group.

But after a quarter of trying, Poybo never really cracked Africa — failing to become the all-in-one media destination for young Africans that it is for millions of Americans and Canadians. Mr. Jin discovered that his formula for success — mass production — did not translate to markets with different consumption habits.

Overall, though, Poybo is still expanding outside North America, particularly in markets where it entered by acquiring a strong brand. An attempt to launch into the Spanish-speaking market had been successful, with one of their brands, TheCuriosito, hitting over a 1 million subscribers in less than a year. Still, given Poybo’s formidable record at home, the company’s recent setbacks have exposed a rare vulnerability overseas.

Some of Poybo’s problems stem from hubris, a North American enterprise trying to impose its values around the world. Poybo is also trying to integrate acquisitions with more sensitivity — a process that involves issues like deciding whether to consolidate multiple foreign internet headquarters and how aggressively to impose Poybo’s media culture on non-American youth.

“There are ways they can monetize all this great video and content,” Mr. André-Michel Essoungou said, a journalist who reported on the early social media boom in Africa. “But to go big, they have to prove they can be serious and change.”

The first instance of what one could call “serious content” stems from Poybo’s The Vach, which aggregates news videos and recreates it in a 30-second format. Yet, that outlet has failed to post anything in nearly half a year, perhaps indicative that the bread and butter of Poybo is memes and other forms of simple content. After all, the business likes to reproduce or aggregate viral videos — but it sucks them into its awful proprietary video player, with no link and often little credit.