Thankfully, he catches himself before launching into a lengthy lecture on aspect ratio selection. Driscoll’s team now, more often than not, has a direct line with client data teams where she regularly faces interrogation. She has one more https://g-markets.net/ responsibility, making sure the organization doesn’t fudge, nudge or “round up” its engagement data. Viral videos spanning “mesmerising laser tattoo removals” to “using breast milk to make jewellery” have kept audience numbers growing.
- By comparison, the US-based BuzzFeed is worth about $770m (£580m) after its share price fell sharply following this month’s listing on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange.
- Among its research efforts, it took to Instagram to ask the audience which issues they care deepest about.
- Strong-Jones acknowledges that LadBible needs to better position itself as a partner.
- The work was built upon by the editorial team in Manchester and the marketing team led Stephen Mai for the next few years, until his departure for Boiler Room.
He wore multiple pairs of gloves for his performance, but one of them was a white sparkly glove, the kind which looks like it’s based on the glove Michael Jackson used to wear. “Having to at some point go through kitchens to even be able to perform for an audience, but they had to leave back through that same door, fear for their lives as they went to the next state to do the same thing.” Maybe it was cold or maybe Usher just thinks gloves are cool, but his fans believe there was a particular reason behind him making sure he had gloves on. If you enjoyed Usher’s halftime show at the Super Bowl then you’re in good company, as it seems like pretty much everyone else did too. The publisher emphasises, however, that it has no plans to lessen investment in Facebook, where its audience is also expanding. Understanding how to package its news content for Tiktok is key, says Tyrrell.
Although Tiktok is one of the world’s fastest-growing social networks, Facebook remains a huge priority for Ladbible Group and is still the biggest audience driver for its brands. Ladbible posts around 150 videos and 100 articles per day on its Facebook pages, where it has a following on Facebook of 160 million, according to data shared with Press Gazette by the publisher. Out on the periphery of this business is the immersive team. I had fun playing with a Pot Noodle AR filter meanwhile. Advertisers envy those engagement times and will likely find a way to make in-camera content a cohesive part of a 360 campaign.
Content and campaigns
We’d reached peak internet access, 4G networks were popping up and smartphones were getting smarter. It was time for ‘the pivot to video’ – a trend that ripped the heart out of some publishers and was the making of others. LadBible Group spans five websites – LadBible,Unilad, Tyla, SportBible and GamingBible – where it has attracted 69m monthly users to the content it fires across Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. “It’s a truly symbiotic relationship – typically 55/45 in our favour in terms of revenue, which shows the importance of LadBible and our other titles in driving traffic to the social platforms. Early trading in its shares pushed the market value of the business as high as £400m.
our mission is to give the youth generation a voice by building communities that laugh, think and act
There is no one-size-fits-all solution more elegant than this beastly camera rig. Solomou will seek to cast aside preconceptions again when he takes the business to the public markets. Kamani is making way for Boohoo co-founder Carol Kane, who will become a non-executive director. A National Union of Students poll from 2014 found 63pc of women found the site contributed to “an unfair representation of women”. LadBible argues things have changed and that 40pc of its audience is now female.
As the years pass, brands don’t need to be as brave as they once were to work with the Lads. I’ve been in this situation a lot over the last few years. It can be painful to watch branded content in front of those who made it when a great deal of it is rubbish.
Still, Solomou has certainly secured rapid growth since dreaming up the concept while studying business management at the University of Leeds 12 years ago. Scenes of the former world boxing champion describing the humble bargain bucket as “thtupendous” and dancing to James Brown in a takeaway restaurant attracted millions of views and vast online press coverage for the fast-food giant. “It has changed a lot over the past couple of years, which does seem types of charts in technical analysis 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. Now home to our head office and over 90 members of the LADbible Group team.
Can LadBible convince marketers?
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”. “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. “The most important thing is just spending time on Tiktok and seeing what kind of content is doing well and getting an understanding of why. Was it because it used a trending sound or did it use the in-built filter features?” says Tyrrell.
Contents
Yet, as BuzzFeed has proven, the tougher audience to win over may be investors. Its executives believe a profit margin of around 30pc – three times that of BuzzFeed’s – is sustainable. Comparing its social media reach to its rivals, LadBible is second only to Buzzfeed with the pair respectively holding 262m and 324m. Such has been the rise of the 10-year-old media minnow that it is now primed to take its growth story to the public markets.
Mental health was the audience’s biggest concern, followed by the environment, and politics. Then, back in 2016, it was (at the time) marketing director Mimi Turner who was charged with turning around this perception, even jumping on the radio to deny LadBible was a sexist. She outlined that a quarter of the ‘Lads’ reading the site – were women.
Dwell time, returning visitors, reader sentiment and shares come up often, even if LadBible is no longer hooked on the scale that it and its contemporaries once touted. As I go deeper, I am surprised by just how exacting the platform gatekeepers are. That clip of Pedro Pascal seductively chewing on a sandwich, the user-generated video featuring a cat doing something incredible, or that bit of sage mortgage advice – all purposefully feel at home, as cogs in the world’s biggest engagement engine. It turns out you can learn quite a lot from this content flywheel. After two days of quizzing the social publisher’s staff in London, The Drum reports back on the progress being made in its quest for credibility among the marketing, publishing and original content industries. LadBible believes it can overcome the challenge with little fuss because of its massive reach across each of the main social platforms.
Train strikes to continue for six more months – latest updates
Using all major platforms, we’ve rapidly risen to become one of the web’s most prominent social video publishers. LADbible Group, one of the biggest social publishers in the world, with an audience approaching a billion has now become a firm favourite for US social audiences and its reach is ever increasing across the world. According to Tubular Labs, the world-leader in social video analytics and sponsored video intelligence, LADbible Group is also the third largest UK media property globally across Facebook and YouTube with an average of 184m viewers per month. Beating the likes of Daily Mail, Barcroft Media, Channel 4 and Jungle Creations, LADbible Group’s flagship brand LADbible also took to top spot in the UK. Founded in 2012, LADbible is a social media and entertainment social publisher based in London and Manchester, United Kingdom. The website is co-founded by Alexander “Solly” Solomou and Arian Kalantari and focused on publishing easily shareable clips, pictures, and stories.
Founded in 2012, LADbible Group has redefined entertainment and news for a social generation. With a global presence, and offices in the UK, Ireland and Australia, LADbible Group has grown to become one of the biggest social publishers in the world with a global audience approaching a billion. LADbible Group operates across all major social publishers including Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube and reaches 69 million monthly users across its five websites including LADbible, UNILAD, Tyla, SPORTbible and GAMINGbible. It has been widely recognised across the industry for its impactful and perception-changing campaigns. Founded in 2012, LADbible Group is redefining entertainment and breaking news for a social generation. Our global community engages with our content–spanning editorial, video, documentary and live – billions of times each and every month.
Now, there’s a new campaign running on the site, called Free To Be. LadBible’s creative agency Joyride, working with Smirnoff, is exploring what it really means to be a lad, exploring different aspects of nightlife with an exclusive lens looking to highlight minority communities including LGBTQ+ and disabled people. To date, it has shined a spotlight on the wisdom of a toilet attendant, a female bouncer, and two trans people, one a bodybuilder, the other a bartender and ran a series of articles about new lad culture.
