This viral video hitmaker from Vietnam is profitable and worth over $300m

Do you know who Chicky is? Chicky is a little cartoon chicken that gets into all sorts of trouble. In a popular video on YouTube, Chicky gets shot out of a cannon, attacked by a rattlesnake, and assaulted by golf balls. That video has 11 million views — that’s more than Maroon 5’s Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show video at the time of writing.

Chicky / Image credit: Yeah1

Chicky is especially popular with children and toddlers, and it’s not just because of its silly antics. Its popularity is, in fact, by the design of Yeah1 Group, the Vietnamese company behind this viral creation. Before we unpack Chicky’s secrets to success, however, let’s find out more about this fast-growing media company.

Yeah1 Group claims to be Vietnam’s largest multi-channel media company. In 2018, it reported a net revenue of US$71.2 million – almost double from the previous year.

It’s been profitable for four straight years, with its net profit jumping from US$620,000 in 2015 to US$7.7 million in 2018. The bulk of its expenses are related to producing, acquiring, or broadcasting content.

Yeah1 Network, the digital media arm of the company, manages and operates nearly 3,500 channels residing mostly on YouTube and Facebook, which in turn generate over 7.5 billion views every month — an impressive number considering the fact that the digital media arm didn’t exist half a decade ago.

Worth more than US$300 million in the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange, the company is part of an ascendant class of local companies raising big amounts from investors.

Niraan De Silva (right). Yeah1 recently acquired a US-based YouTube network for US$20 million / Photo credit: Yeah1

When Yeah1 Group was founded in 2006, the company operated mostly on the traditional media side of things. The business ran well enough in Vietnam until a few trends began to emerge.

First off, Vietnam is a country of young people, with about 40 percent of its population aged 24 and below. By comparison, Singapore, which has an aging population, weighs in at 29 percent.

Further, Vietnam’s smartphone penetration ranks 25th in the world at 53 percent and it has some of the best mobile networks in Southeast Asia. “Finally, about four to five years ago, we saw the emergence of users in Southeast Asia and broader Asia using their smartphones to watch content,” Niraan De Silva, strategy executive and board member at Yeah1 Group, tells Tech in Asia.

These factors prompted Yeah1 Group to develop a digital media arm. “If you look at how people usually consume their content, it’s on advertising video on demand (AVOD) platforms. That’s YouTube and Facebook. These are the two biggest platforms in Asia,” De Silva explains. “In emerging Asia, subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms like Netflix and iFlix are still very, very young [and] people here don’t want to pay for content. They want it for free. That’s why we decided early on to operate in the AVOD space.”

A finger in every pot

Today, Yeah1 Group’s digital media pillar carries four brands: Yeah1 Network, SpringMe (a Thailand-focused beauty influencer network), Something Big (a French kid-focused content network) and its most recent acquisition, ScaleLab (a content network with a focus on US and South American markets). There’s also Yeah1 Publishing, which manages over 1,300 publishers like websites, apps, and games. These publishers, in turn, generate over four billion impressions monthly.

Data is king

Vietnam or the world?