Yusuf Omar, co-founder of Seen TV, opened his presentation at INMA’s South Asia News Media Festival with something of a warning.

“If you’re not making significant investments in video today, you’re dead,” he told the audience. Video is now the predominant way we consume content, he continued, and that’s happening more and more across many generations, so “we have to figure this out.”

In 2015, Omar was given the task of getting all the journalists at the Hindustan Times — 750 people in 27 offices — to create videos with their mobile phones. In the United Kingdom or United States, he said, where the vast majority of people have the latest Samsung or iPhone, it would not have been the daunting prospect it was in India.

Not only was it a huge number of journalists (“I’ve been to countries that don’t even have 750 journalists,” he quipped), there was enormous variation in the types of phones being used. A survey he did in the first week showed that there were 75 different types of phones across the newsrooms, at all price points. 

Overcoming such technological fragmentation was a challenge, but it also taught him a valuable lesson: how to scale video production at a very low cost. He has put that knowledge to use with Seen TV, which has made US$9 million with viral videos.

On a business matrix in which the axes are “cost” and “scalability,” Omar said most media companies are essentially dead — they’re very expensive and not scalable. More often than not, he said, “we have traditional technologies, budgets, systems, and video production workflows, but we’re trying to chase digital revenue. And those two things don’t line up.”

Influencers, on the other hand, are creating more edgy and interesting (and, Omar said, sometimes less editorially accurate) content at a very low cost. But they struggle with scalability.

The opportunity quadrant of the matrix is building something that is both low-cost and scalable, he said: “Whoever figures out low-cost, high-volume content owns the Internet.”

Mobile journalists

Content that goes viral is created by only about 1% of the world, Omar said, with the overwhelming majority of people consuming rather than creating.

There are more than 3 billion smartphone cameras in pockets the world over — smartphones that also have editing apps and social media accounts. So the barrier for most people isn’t technology, Omar said. It’s that they don’t know how to tell a story. He acknowledged storytelling is “bloody hard,” but that if you solve that, “you unlock a new creator economy, not curating existing influencers but building new ones.”

When Omar and his co-founder began the process of building Seen TV, they travelled all over the world to train 20,000 storytellers in 140 countries, building “one of the world’s largest mobile journalism networks.” They built a huge community of people creating stories with mobile devices — communities they could “tap into at any stage.”

Afterwards, he travelled again, this time to conferences to present what they were doing to industry professionals.

“I told them that because they hadn’t been listening to real people with real stories, they had missed big stories,” he said. “They missed stuff. They thought Brexit wasn’t going to happen. They thought Trump wasn’t going to get elected. I said that if you train marginalised communities to tell their stories, you can have a better idea of what’s happening on the ground.”

A response from the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson, summed up much of the feedback he got: “Yeah, but this isn’t journalism,” Robinson told him. “I would rather die than do it, and I don’t want to watch it, either. Curating selfies isn’t journalism.”

It’s clear that Omar remains surprised by Robinson’s comments.

“Over the last decade, name me a big story that hasn’t been broken to us by people with mobile devices. There isn’t one,” he countered. “In the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was giving us updates with his mobile phone. So, if this isn’t journalism, I don’t know what is.”

Omar said that combining a huge team of community storytellers with a team of journalists and editors who can do fact-checking and verifying, and make sense of it all before you publish, is a “new model of journalism.”

The AI effect

Having said that, going viral isn’t easy. There are so many factors that go into it. You need to know what’s trending, have a unique angle, find the right person to tell the story, convince them to tell it, and have a way to share the story quickly. Omar said their solution was to build a series of AI tools with existing AI models and external data. These tools help citizens go from “zero to a million views” much more easily. 

This technology made user generated content (UGC) both scalable and profitable, increasing their video output tenfold, from 150 videos per year to 1,100. They were able to cut costs by 70%, too, going from a staff of 105 to the current team of 35 journalists.

That team, and the editorial role they play in the process, is still very important, he stressed. Seen TV’s journalists do the fact-checking as well as help with narrative structure and merchandising. The work they do enables them to create a series of products, including video shows, documentaries, podcasts, and articles that give you an audience.

“The audience creates data, the data better informs your system, and then audiences use your AI tools, so your audience becomes your creator.”

The bulk of the US$9 million Seen TV makes from viral videos, US$6 million, comes from ad revenue. They have more than 8 million subscribers, 70% of which are 13- to 24-year-olds, and nearly half of those are in the United States.

The remaining US$3 million are split equally between licensing (“if your library is evergreen, you can licence that content”), training opportunities (“when you’ve built the system, NGOs, and other organisations want to be trained”), and branded content, which he said is the “most underutilised one that will grow the fastest.”

“Every company wants to do professional-quality UGC,” he said, “but the agencies they already work with struggle to do it. They’re not publications, so they don’t even have the data to understand what goes viral.” This creates an opportunity for companies like Seen TV to fill a gap the agencies cannot.

Local content

The early phase of UGC was largely topical: Foodies follow food channels, for instance, and sports lovers follow sports channels. But the Internet is changing rapidly, Omar said, and now UGC is hyperlocal.

“Now, it’s not only focused on niches. It’s increasingly at the intersection of niche and region,” he said. “If you’re a runner, you’re specifically interested in running content related to your geography.”

Traditional media really struggles with this, he continued, because it isn’t built to create extremely hyperlocal stories. This is especially true with video, because traditional media video production is prohibitively expensive. But if you can build “a model where citizens are generating that content, where your audience are your creators, suddenly you can launch in many markets, each of which can have its own revenue stream.”

In closing, Omar said there’s an even bigger opportunity on the horizon that every tech company in the world is investing in: wearables.

“Augmented Reality (AR) is happening every day already,” he said, “from AR filters on social media to tools allowing customers to try on makeup or hairstyles.” This is a massive shift from using video and text as the primary input technology to using the camera.

According to Deloitte, 75% of the world’s population will use AR on a regular basis by 2025. Omar went even further

“I believe that, by 2030, every single person in this room will be wearing some form of smart device on their face. I believe it will be your primary device by 2030, replacing your mobile phone.”

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