“You pay more attention to things you hold closer to you. But in the end, money will follow consumers.” McKeown suggests the task might be more challenging for TheLADbible. “VICE is still the title that most youth brands aspire to be in, because it’s aimed at opinion formers,” he says. Recent activity includes the June 2016 appointment of former Weber Shandwick head of digital Adam Clyne as COO – he is responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations and driving its strategic growth.

It’s called ‘drownproof training’ and it’s quite dangerous

This is part of its mission to build a ‘Positively Social’ platform that can harness an audience to effect change. 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. Industry estimates, according to Digiday, suggest it turns over between £2 million and £4 million per year. The extent to which TheLADbible can increase those figures over the next year or so will reveal a lot about the state of media, the needs of brands and the nature of mass audiences in the age of mobile-first media. Tom joined LADbible in 2024, specialising in SEO and trending content.

Original content

He studied for a business degree at Leeds University, intending to become a stockbroker. He didn’t enjoy the course, and after doing work experience in Marks & Spencer, realised his restless, loner instincts came from a disinclination to work for someone else. Rather than take a placement in his course’s sandwich year, he set up his own business, a review/listings site called Rate Our Student Life, selling space for £150.

Agencies be warned, LadBible’s nerds want your ad budgets

TheLADbible’s content became milder – or “more inclusive”, as team members like to say – and there were more stories about serious topics such as mental health. Staff numbers grew from 30 to 100, including data scientists brought in to identify the kind of content that trafficked well. Betches Media is the leading humor platform for women on the internet, offering audiences a range of cutting-edge and culturally relevant content across web, social, podcasts and events. The multi-media entertainment and lifestyle brand was founded in 2011 and is one of the earliest digitally native media and entertainment companies founded and led by women. LADbible Group publishes original and acquired content,2223 including editorial, video, and documentary material, some of which trading strategies and systems is broadcast live. Their content covers entertainment and celebrity interviews, as well as news and current affairs.

In a 2019 report in The Drum, LADbible cofounder and COO Arian Kalantari is quoted as saying the two companies have joined together Asian stock futures “incredibly well”. But according to a former Unilad employee, there’s still some lingering animosity between staff, with each side of the lad army “working separately on different floors”. After the administrator was appointed, LADbible bought up £5 million of Unilad’s £10 million debt, making them their rivals’ largest creditor.

1. Finally, with PS5 consoles in high demand, we were challenged to ensure that our audience felt included in Play Day.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Despite being founded by Leeds University student Alexander “Solly” Solomou in 2012 – two years after Unilad – it wasn’t long before LADbible caught up to its big brother. Both publishers competed to corner the banter-industrial complex of the mid-2010s, which usually meant seeing who could be first to publish viral articles about Game of Thrones and chicken nugget festivals. Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, The Guardian, BBC, Huffington Post and the Independent covered the story, situating it within the bubbling ferment of “lad culture” on university campuses. The discussion moves on to brand building and driving audiences to first-party platforms like the dot com. 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. “It can’t be a flash in the pan,” Birchall concludes.

A lot of media companies claim this, but one differentiator I see is its consumer research youth panel of more than 50,000 souls, LadNation. I’m shown examples of it conducting competitor and sector analysis, celebrity buzz tracking, quantitative research and brand uplift studies to sourcing audience questions for one of the Gallagher brothers. This research helped Visa get a handle on how young people were managing the cost of living crisis. Agencies regularly source “conversation starters” for pitch decks from it, as well as creative “hooks” once work is given the does code review really remove coding convention violations green light. With the campaign shrouded in secrecy, due to the competitive nature between PlayStation and Xbox, the announcement of prices and live dates were only announced with 8 weeks out.

At the end of the second day of Lad interrogations, co-founder ‘Solly’ Solomou pops in for a quick chat. During chemistry meetings, the Lads work out just how ’brave’ clients are. They have a scale, to see just how ’out-there’ they can take the work. To activate effectively on social, brands have to be able to flex in this way. As the years pass, brands don’t need to be as brave as they once were to work with the Lads. Catch up on the most important stories of the day, curated by our editorial team.

He was formerly chief executive of media agency OMD UK and theoretically knows what the publisher needs to be selling to clients. Meanwhile, the relationship it has with creators is in flux. Strong-Jones acknowledges that LadBible needs to better position itself as a partner. TikToks, Reels and Shorts, all underpinned by AI personalization tech, are surfacing smaller influencers and sending them into the stratosphere. There are more accounts with more than a million followers than there has ever been.

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. In a LADbible Group first, PlayStation hijacked our five of our core brands (LadBible, UniLad, SportBible, UniLad Tech and GamingBible) and paused our editorial content; a bold move for a social publisher that relies on consistent content to maintain traffic. 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. Over the last year, LadBible has been picking up awards left, right and centre for its social good pursuits, in particular, by creating a dialogue around mental health in young men and raising awareness of ocean plastic pollution.