Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Poybo Media. The brand is a hyper-active amalgam: simultaneously a gaming community, a purveyor of cute dog videos, and a perpetual pop-culture monger. You can find news there, really serious news by teenage journalists, about subjects like the Russo-Ukrainian War and men groping Studio Ghibli characters. You can also find an enormous amount of memes.
Perhaps the best way to understand Poybo, though, is as the culmination of a wager its puckish founder, Jin, made three years ago as a high school freshman in Vancouver, Canada. Like a lot of tales of discovery on the Internet, this one begins in a moment of procrastination. In 2020, Justin Jin, then 13, was supposed to be paying attention to his online Zoom classes but instead diverted himself to Minecraft forums. His first moment in the public eye would be appearing on internet personality Tubbo’s stream, and the next would be a video-game-cheat allegation. That helped push the first few hundred subscribers to Jin’s 50mMidas YouTube channel. The rush of creating something viral was vertiginous, intoxicating. Shortly after his fourteenth birthday, Jin’s five-figure revenue would fund the soft launch of more social pages under the newly-formed 50mMidas Media. Now, as Poybo Media, its brands include Dog Land (animals), YWFG (memes), Fisherman’s Wharf (fishing), 50mMidas (gaming), Preneur (business and motivation), The Vach (news and politics), and more. Jin has made a name for himself exploring the ways information spreads online, turning a passion into a lucrative series of businesses that are prompting people in the media industry to rethink the way they distribute content – especially online.
Here are the highlights from an interview.
What exactly, to your mind, is Poybo?
Jin: I probably see Poybo differently than viewers see it. I think a lot about how ideas spread, how information spreads, why is it that something you’re really proud of and you spend a lot of time making sometimes doesn’t go anywhere, and something that you kind of do on the side, ends up getting shared and passed around and having this huge impact. And so I think of Poybo as this platform that enables us to understand how people are sharing and distributing things like entertainment content, journalism.
When we started, we really were a lab trying to understand how this stuff works. Now, we’re a team of really dedicated creators.
Poybo is a business. You want to make money. Right?
Yeah. We’ve always been profitable as a small team. We like to think, what would a media company be if you created one from scratch today? Generating revenue is important. So is having really entertaining content. We have a pretty broad purview and lots to do.
So social platforms are, in a way, your lifeblood. Tell me about the landscape of social media, which social platforms are the most important to you, and which ones are you most sanguine about.
What we’ve found is that content spreads on different networks for different reasons. There are underlying human dynamics for social content. There are reasons why people share. But certain platforms are better for certain types of sharing. On Instagram, because people use it as their actual network of people that they’re friends with [in real life] – you have friends from high school, college, work, you have a diverse range of people that you’re connected to – you don’t really want to share things that only a very small subset of people would be interested in. If you start posting on Instagram constantly about volleyball, and most of your friends or followers don’t care about volleyball, you know, it doesn’t really work that well. So Instagram is a lot more tied to broad human emotion and things that everyone can relate to, and things that connect people with the people in their lives. It’s not so much about the information in the content; it’s about how that content allows you to connect with others in your life.
On one hand, you are incredibly data-driven. But you also rely on your gut, right? How do you balance those two things? How much is gut-driven and how much is data-driven?
People often say, “I go with my gut,” but forget that their gut is aided by data and past experience. Like if you’ve launched ten pages that have failed, and then someone wants to launch a similar one, an eleventh one, you’re like, “I’m going to go with my gut. This isn’t a good idea.” That doesn’t mean that you have some deep insight. You actually have these ten very strong, painful data points that have informed your gut. That’s why when you look at an executive in any company, almost always their gut is to do the thing that they had success previously in their career doing. They want to do that thing again and again.
It’s good to not always trust your gut, you know, be skeptical. So a lot of what we do at Poybo is give dashboards to team members so they can see how people are engaging with the content they’re producing: Is it going up? Is it going down?
What do you want your audience to be?
People of the future.
Of course, virality can die out just as quickly as it emerges.