Damian McKeown is how to start a currency trading business truic a brand consultant who was part of the ad sales team that launched Loaded in 1994 and now works in digital advertising. “With men’s media, you find that over time your figures skew young, which puts off adult brands,” he says. While Solomou and Turner take their seats in Downing Street, TheLADbible’s content director, Ian Moore, and head of video, Alex Connock, are sitting in the glass-walled meeting room of the company’s head office in Manchester. The space, which includes an area waiting to be developed into a video studio, occupies three floors of a converted warehouse in the Northern Quarter, an area of the city centre known for its nightlife. In 2014, the growth in traffic to TheLADbible’s owned platforms and follower numbers on social networks led Solomou to believe that the brand could attain the scale and profitability of major international media titles. He also realised, as he told The Guardian in 2015, that “certain things needed to change if we wanted to compete with those guys in the States”, meaning digital media players BuzzFeed and VICE.
An early taste of this is a project The LadBible has been filming on the comeback of the boxer David Haye. In a converted warehouse in Manchester’s hip Northern Quarter, 50 young people are producing a media success story that has captured the attention of half of all British males aged 18 to 24. Lessons Learnt in Life spans sharing things that are important to us; our home; our health; our family and our life. From parenting, household hacks through to meal prep and pets for a largely American female audience. Accessible and relatable content covering mainstream gaming. Incredible gameplay and products, as well as stories of gamers themselves, and a celebration of the culture around gaming.
At this point, according to Newswhip, in August of 2018 Unilad was still Facebook’s fourth biggest publisher, bigger even than MailOnline or the New York Times. The site where “Sexual Mathematics” appeared was founded in 2010 by Alex Partridge, a former private school pupil and student at Oxford Brookes University. A self-described website “for when you are bored in the library”, Patridge uploaded much of the content to Unilad 1.0 himself (Partridge did not respond to multiple interview requests). The irony is not lost that, as LadBible tries to build out an original output that the team animatedly assures me “is definitely TV”, the TV giants are trying to build out a social presence that looks to emulate the success of LadBible. The reception area of LadBible’s London office is decked out in black gloss and red neon and signed football memorabilia. Just out of sight from the parade of visiting gangsters, Love Islanders and media-trained footballers are ranks of bespectacled professionals deeply immersed in dashboards.
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Solomou bought the name and assets (he declines to name the price, but it is said to have been around £300) in spring 2012. Rate Our Student Life didn’t take off, but by the summer TheLADbible was growing quickly. In 2012, the shift to smartphones boosted content consumption on social channels; that year 12 per cent of total media time was spent on mobile. By 2015 it was 24 per cent, with mobile used for more than 80 per cent of web browsing. They are discussing recent figures for video views and shares across TheLADbible’s various channels – a key area for both content and growth. The most popular of the last week has been Dinner In The Sky, a 51-second clip showing a dining experience organised and promoted by a Belgian company that allows 22 people to eat a meal while suspended from a crane 40 metres in the air.
At a glance, it’s snackable, subtitled, short and mostly brand safe. Lindsay Turner, director of marketing and communications, takes me through the Instagram feed on her phone. She has liked some of the posts but then, so had many. Turner joined in January 2015, following the recruitment of Tom Toumazis, a former Yahoo! Jonathan Durden, co-founder of media agency PHD, and technology investment bank GP Bullhound were also brought on board in an advisory capacity. Turner’s brief includes the establishment of the business and brand values; this seems to have included having editorial influence – she successfully lobbied for killing off Cleavage Thursday, and encouraged the EU and mental health coverage.
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Now a few years and award wins down the line, Peter Heneghan, head of communications at LadBible told The Drum, “as a brand we have been constantly evolving”. For the last few years it has operated under the mantra “With Social Power Comes Social Responsibility”. “But if you think in old-fashioned terms, it’s like saying the only audience that matters is the one watching Coronation Street, as opposed to any targeted, quality audience.” “I can’t claim to be the genius who sat down and created this strategy of getting to this exact point,” Solomou says. “It was instinct, just moving, making one step forward, one step forward, before you know it you look back – bloody hell, I’ve made all those steps.” His mistake, he says, was to focus on product rather than marketing, a realisation prompted by a meeting with someone who ran an email marketing service.
A video Unilad uploaded of a man playing Pie Face with his son had 183 million views (four years on, it’s up to 205 million views). Mike Vaughan has been at the business since almost the very beginning. He started SportBible in 2013 and accumulated 100,000 followers in a few days. Even in 2023, it’s still LadBible’s fastest-growing brand. With its sleek production and access to top talent, it is now a far cry from its origins. LADbible Group are now approaching 450 people across the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
They also run campaigns on subjects intended to interest a young market, such as mental health, the environment and political matters. Unilad collapsed; the administrators were being called in. Sam Walker got wind of the news and turned up at the London offices – he was owed around £9,000 in unpaid invoices. The head of video met Walker and apologised, but there wasn’t anything he could do. The publisher shares thousands of pieces of content across countless social platforms.
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Its brands have accumulated more than 280 million followers across all major social platforms and work with some of the largest brands in the world. LadBible Group is a household name, our content reaches two-thirds of 18–34-year-olds in the UK monthly and receives 750k+ comments a day on Facebook alone. Our position within British culture paired with our experience in creating ‘movements’, made us the perfect partner to deliver an iconic moment and amplify the significance of the PS5 launch. LADbible is a social media and entertainment company based in London and Manchester, United Kingdom. The publisher has come a long way in a short time, once a Facebook page in the void left by the collapse of lad mags, epitomised by weekly features such as Cleavage Thursday or Bumday Monday, which are purged from the archives. At the time, social community Everyday Sexism said LadBible exuded “a culture of misogyny sickeningly disguised as ‘banter’.”
The story is ten years old, yet the video – which has been overlaid with LADbible captions – has had 800,000 shares and been viewed 60 million times, according to Moore. They had been invited to a meeting with David Cameron and about 40 people from technology startups, at which Cameron would encourage the companies’ attempts to persuade young people to register to vote in the EU referendum. The LadBible was founded in 2011 by Alex Partridge, who quickly sold it and set up rival Unilad, which has more than 9.3 million Facebook followers of its own, is aimed at university students and strikes a notably more laddish tone. This week the site was leading gbpnok great britain pound vs norwegian krone gbp nok top correlation on a viral social media image of comedians the Chuckle Brothers, posing with a female fan whose arm had taken the appearance of an erect phallus. These days, the website itself looks much the same as it ever did, with Unilad pumping out viral news and videos.
- They don’t really hold a political bias, as they aim to create viral content regardless of whether it is true or not.
- Jonathan Durden, co-founder of media agency PHD, and technology investment bank GP Bullhound were also brought on board in an advisory capacity.
- Incredible gameplay and products, as well as stories of gamers themselves, and a celebration of the culture around gaming.
- The debtless parent company 65twenty, mostly owned by Solomou, is preparing for a fundraising round that it hopes will give it the resources for continued fast growth.
This meant we needed to create over 40 pieces of content in the fastest we have ever executed, all whilst working remotely. To overcome the restrictions that both Harmonic pattern trading the secrecy and the Covid-19 pandemic presented, we went back to the roots of social; we filmed all content remotely with a lo-fi, UGC feel that is native to our platforms. According to LadBible, the campaign reached 36 million people and had 823,000 engagements.