LADbible Group Wikipedia

“[With Facebook we have] a strict schedule in terms of monetising and traffic. We have bigger teams on Facebook just because of the structure there and we know we can make money from that,” says Tyrrell. The group’s biggest Tiktok accounts, its eponymous Ladbible page and its sports-focused channel Sportbible (4.8 million followers), https://www.topforexnews.org/ are the only two accounts that are each run by a dedicated Tiktok specialist. While Ms Turner is happy to spread the word, co-founders Alex Solomou and Arian Kalantari prefer to keep a low profile. The LAD Bible is a mixture of video and photos, some of it posted by users, the rest harvested from the four corners of the internet.

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. LadBible said it made pre-tax profits of £5.6m on revenues of £23m in the first six months of 2021, a substantial increase on the previous year but still relatively small in the wider world of media companies. Its income came mainly from charging brands such as Lynx, PlayStation and KFC for bespoke marketing campaigns, or by earning money from programmatic advertising on sites such as Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube.

‘Redefines lads’

LadBible owns other brands including UniLad, having bought up the debt of its former rival as part a complicated financial transaction in 2018 that left UniLad’s executives furious about losing control of their company. Unlike other new media outlets it has largely avoided hard news content, although it has made videos featuring the likes of the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. For many publishers however, including Ladbible, Tiktok is a key way to reach coveted younger audiences. According to the 2022 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 68% of Tiktok users are aged between 18 and 34.

1. If there’s one positive to come out of this sorry tale, it’s that the website helped to kick-start the fourth wave of feminism here in the UK, galvanising activists to begin organising on university campuses.
2. The publisher, says Tyrrell, also rarely posts the same video across different platforms, making sure that clips are customised to what works best on each platform.
3. “Posting a video with no teaser of what the video is going to be about a lot of the time doesn’t work,” she says.
4. Quinlan sent an email to staff, asking them to share statements online in support of Unilad.
5. While Ladbible’s content naturally appeals to Tiktok’s Gen Z audience, there are some key things that Tyrrell says have helped the publisher find success on the platform.

Other early investors who stand to benefit include Mahmud Kamani, the owner of Debenhams and co-founder of the online fast fashion website Boohoo. Last year, Boohoo was found to have known about “endemic” problems in its Leicester factories, including a failure to pay the minimum wage and life-threatening fire risks. “Posting a video with no teaser of what the video is going to be about a lot of the time doesn’t work,” she says.

In ‘great position’ for monetisation to start

Aware of the site’s problematic early reputation, LadBible attempted to redefine the definition of a “lad” to mean a caring individual who looks after their friends’ mental health and worries about plastic waste. It produced material featuring mainstream celebrities, such as an infamous video of Dame Judi Dench rapping with Lethal Bizzle, in addition to building a substantial female readership. The LADbible project started in January 2012 when the channel published their first Facebook post which achieved over 75,000 interactions. While Ladbible’s content naturally appeals to Tiktok’s Gen Z audience, there are some key things that Tyrrell says have helped the publisher find success on the platform. “As the platforms continue to make more money obviously it means we can bring in more talent to work on those platforms. But we’ve got so many people who are experts on all of them already that we’re in quite a good position.” The company’s biggest and best-known brand, Ladbible, currently counts 11.5 million followers on Tiktok – almost three times as many as the next biggest British newsbrand in Press Gazette’s top 50 rankings according to a recent Press Gazette analysis.

Staff were told they’d be paid that month’s salary in instalments. Sam Walker, 28, is a freelance video director who worked for Unilad on projects involving clients like Red Bull and Aldi. When his unpaid invoices started mounting in the summer of 2018, at first he didn’t see any cause for alarm. “I stupidly brushed them off and thought I’d chase them up on invoicing day,” he says. Facebook’s changes to the newsfeed algorithm – which would have significantly decreased the number of people seeing their content – certainly didn’t help. Like in many media organisations, there was a disconnect between the editorial and production teams, who were responsible for commissioning and producing original content, and the people in finance responsible for paying them.

“John [Quinlan] was saying that the administrators were corrupt and he was trying to get everyone to share this email he’d written on LinkedIn,” says Sara. “I said, ‘Do you not feel like this is karma? There are people with genuinely small businesses… turning up at the office. This is what you do all the time. You are getting what you deserve right now.” Quinlan seemed surprised. “I think he was taken aback that someone had finally told him he was a dickhead.”

How Piers Morgan Became the Most Divisive Man in British Media

Just four months after Sara’s Las Vegas trip, Unilad would collapse into administration, before being bought by arch-rival LadBible at a knockdown price. The 30-year-old founder of LadBible, the company born out of a sexist Facebook page that became one of the one of the biggest global publishers on social media, is worth £200m after his business floated on the stock market. Unilad collapsed; the administrators were being called in.

In scarcely six years, Unilad went from a national pariah to a new media success story, before drowning in a wash of creditors’ invoices and unpaid tax bills. If there’s one positive to come out of this sorry tale, it’s that the website helped to kick-start the fourth wave of feminism here in the UK, galvanising activists to begin organising on university campuses. Thanks to the website’s early content, the petri dish of rape culture received a massive antibiotic dose in 2012. “LADbible was better at diversifying away from Facebook than Unilad,” explains independent media analyst Alex DeGroote. Besides expanding their reach on other social platforms, LADbible also launched a creative agency, Joyride, in 2016, and a lucrative, long-term branded partnership with Smirnoff in 2018. These days, the website itself looks much the same as it ever did, with Unilad pumping out viral news and videos.

In contrast, there’s still no direct way to monetise content on Tiktok. Ladbible currently posts between three and ten videos each day to the main Ladbible Tiktok account. As with other publishers, being on top of significant news moments relevant to its audience has helped Ladbible Group grow its Tiktok presence. “We’ve definitely found that having someone work on the accounts full-time increases the following at a faster pace. It is possible, however, to build communities on Tiktok by marshalling resources from other platforms and departments,” says Tyrrell. Sportbible’s following surged from less than one million at the start of 2022 when a dedicated Tiktok creative was brought in, to close to five million currently.

After Estelle Hart got the first incarnation of Unilad shut down, her friends made her an apron. Printed on it were the words, “Thanks for shutting https://www.investorynews.com/ Unilad down, you bitch” – one of the abusive tweets directed at her after she led a public campaign against the site in January of 2012.

Content and campaigns

By 2016, Unilad had 11.5 million likes on Facebook and was one of the platform’s most engaged-with pages, rivalled only by its nemesis, LADbible. 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). Alexander “Solly” Solomou, who created the Manchester-based media company while studying business management at the University of Leeds, has cashed in shares worth £50m and retains a stake worth about £150m in the listed LadBible Group. The publisher has come a long way since 2012 when it began as a Facebook page posting quick, shareable user-generated content. But while light-hearted, amusing and downright bizarre stories are still key to its offering, harder news is also part of the mix.

Ladbible meanwhile has seen its following increase by over ten times since the company introduced someone to run the account in 2020. Ladbible Group’s female-focused brand Tyla, for example, has seen success posting Tiktok features tied into news stories. Following the Queen’s death, Tyla posted a video of images of the Queen overlaid with “inspiring” facts about her life which Tyrrell says garnered over a million views. “We don’t really share straight news [on Tiktok] in the way we would on other platforms. So on Instagram and Facebook it’s about getting the headline out https://www.day-trading.info/ as soon as possible but on Tiktok it’s more thinking about the audience, why they’re there and what they want from Tiktok,” she says. “It has changed a lot over the past couple of years, which does seem to be a model for a lot of companies – you start off by getting some kind of stranglehold on the market, then you can make yourself acceptable to a wider demographic.” If you use Facebook, the chances are that you have seen the material – videos of Rambo-themed stag parties, mobile discos paraded through supermarket aisles, or a man changing a nappy wearing a gas mask.

They also run campaigns on subjects intended to interest a young market, such as mental health, the environment and political matters. The group’s video views, which along with growth and engagement is a key metric for publishers on the platform, are up from 2.5 billion in 2021 to 7.4 billion last year. LADbible’s biggest awareness campaign to date, ‘Trash Isles’, was designed to highlight the global problem of plastic pollution in oceans. Here was a website that had overcome highly misogynistic origins to become a globally influential youth media brand, with 25 billion video views and nearly 1 billion likes.

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). Still, speculation reached fever pitch when someone trailed the announcement by taping a T-shirt to the front door of Unilad’s London office out of hours, with the words UNILAD EXPOSED printed on it. The company could now pursue expansion in the US, where it has a large audience but no staff. The publisher emphasises, however, that it has no plans to lessen investment in Facebook, where its audience is also expanding.

This meant that as the situation worsened, in August and September of 2018, it was business as usual. Eventually he stopped, because he worried the freelance staff would never be paid. Under Bentley, Harrington and Quinlan’s leadership, Unilad had grown from an obscure Facebook page into a new media success story.