The most recent men’s magazine launch was Coach, a free title offering advice on healthy lifestyles. Ian Westwood, group MD of publishers Dennis, said that the Lads’ Mags had tried to offer a mix of “funny, sexy, useful” content. “The internet wrecked the recipe by doing Funny and Sexy in greater volume and variety,” he said. The content of both sites has attracted criticism, with a National Union of Students poll in 2014 finding that 63 per cent of women thought that sites such as Unilad and The LadBible “contribute to an unfair representation of women”.

On the Campaign Trail for the OnlyFans Vote

As the years pass, brands don’t need to be as brave as they once were to work with the Lads. He was formerly chief executive of media agency OMD UK and theoretically knows what the publisher needs to be How to buy catcoin selling to clients. Meanwhile, the relationship it has with creators is in flux.

It can be painful to watch branded content in front of those who made it when a great deal of it is rubbish. It can’t be if it wants to get past the LadBible social gatekeepers. They can’t risk any bad content killing the algo-karma.

1. In doing so, it has stolen a march on the media establishment it so clearly wants to join.
2. From LADbible, the second biggest news site in the UK, to SPORTbible, the UK’s number one website for sport, each of our brands offer unique content tailored to a social generation and span multiple verticals including pop culture, gaming and tech.
3. 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.
4. Connock, 51, was managing director of TV and branded content at production company Shine North, and is a veteran of the “Zoo TV” shows of the 90s such as The Big Breakfast and The Word.
5. 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.

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. LADbible publishes a diverse range of original and user-generated content – spanning editorial, video, documentary, and live. 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.

Rather than take a placement in his course’s sandwich year, he set up his Black Edge own business, a review/listings site called Rate Our Student Life, selling space for £150. Solomou has not thought a great deal about influences from his childhood but, when pressed, says the sociability and close-knit ties of the Cypriot expats (“We never had an empty house when I was growing up”) probably made him like the idea of communities. He is also close to his mother, who effectively ran the day-to-day business with her husband, and who “could always find a way around a problem”.

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The articles populating the hub received 390,000 clicks. That project is ongoing, and is openly visible on the home page. Editorially, this hub touches on mental health, suicides, celebs and role models talking about their depression. Heneghan admits this campaign, which won The Drum Dadi Award Grand Prix in 2017 (picked up by Mai), had to be relatable to the audience.

We also ran a PlayStation 5 competition, giving away five highly coveted consoles. To enter, the audience had to tell us their best excuse for cancelling plans to play, again involving them in the Play Day moment. LadBible Group won the ‘Best new product or publication launch’ category at The Drum Awards for Content 2021. Here, the team behind the winning entry reveals the secrets of this successful project….

Company

Under Bentley, Harrington and Quinlan’s leadership, Unilad had grown from an obscure Facebook page into a new media success story. 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). Launched in its current incarnation in 2012, it graduated from a pack of British “lad” websites to become one of the most socially driven, Facebook-centric publishers around. It’s part of a new generation of media companies that focus their efforts on social sharing via Facebook, Twitter, and other, newer platforms such as Vine and Snapchat.

Popular videos

As Turner points out, the figures are anomalous because advertisers believe print has better engagement levels. Of course, media owners have been claiming they give the public a voice since the invention of the printing press, and MailOnline, to take just one example, makes similar claims. And talk of political movements is all very well, but shares and comment figures suggest readers care more about DFS sales and #BOOBLUGE than Brexit or Bremain. Moore, 30, was formerly deputy managing editor at VICE. Connock, 51, was managing director of TV and branded content at production company Shine North, and is a veteran of the “Zoo TV” shows of the 90s such as The Big Breakfast and The Word.

“It was like the Montagues and Capulets – that level of hatred,” says Harry. 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 Unilad down, you bitch” – one of the abusive tweets directed at her after she led a public campaign against the site in ADSS forex broker January of 2012. Play Day pushed boundaries like never before, creating a shared cultural moment and shifting audience behaviour.

“Thou shalt always live life by TheLADbible,” it reads in a gothic script. “Thou shall always accept the opportunity to suit up for an event. Thou shall always understand there is no such thing as one quick pint.” During the meeting, Solomou, who is 25 and solidly built with a faintly distracted, lone-wolfish air, kept thinking how strange it was to be somewhere he had seen so many times on television. Turner, an experienced corporate performer who prefers not to give her exact age but has a CV that suggests she is in her mid-forties, was at first so nervous she thought she would be unable to speak. It’s no secret that LadBible wants to combat preconceptions the industry has about it.