The success story of TheLADBible
Although I’m not too proud about it, but TheLADBible has become my main source of news, or whatever this is,
I mean…. okay I guess.
With over 21 millions likes on Facebook, 1.94 million followers on Twitter, and according to Alexa reports, they are the 12th most popular website in the UK (I didn’t even know they had a website), it’s fair to say that they are very popular for a company that was created on 2012 (and don’t even have a Wikipedia page). According to the Manchester Evening News they can reach 150 million people per week, that’s more people than there are in Japan.
How did they do this?
TheLADBible is a great example of how you evolve with the ever growing digital world. Like UniLAD, they were originally created for promoting “lad culture” or “laddism”, which encompasses every university male stereotype falling under three main categories; banter, girls and things of the “that’s so sick!!” nature, for example:
They simply pandered to the lowest common denominator of male thinking which is the reason why the majority of their audience is males of the age 18–30.
Wait a minute, that picture on the left is not on their website?
Cleavage Thursday and Bum Mondays were some of the features they, where they posted sexy images sent in by girls, but if you try searching for these now, you’ll notice that they’re all gone.
On an effort to increase their user base, they scraped all not safe for work features to further diversify their core user base. To make sure they never run out of content they pay their users for content. Right now, anyone can send in a video or picture to them and if the media features on their social media or website, you can get paid up to £100, a genius way to get content from your user base to show you your user base.
That’s cool but you said they do news!
Everyone is on social media all the time because we as humans have a need to know what’s going on around us. TheLADBible where on of the few companies that saw this opportunity to give us a lot of information to get to a lot of people. These are the most current three tweets from TheLADBible as of writing this post
Three different types of stories, ranging from the obvious click bait to sad and depressing. Now you may not care about all of these stories, but you mostly likely will be interested in at least one story, and that is all they need. All using just a couple of words and pictures on social media, they can reach millions of people, all with different likes and different views.
TheLADBible grows and evolves with how the digital society grows. They not only have one but multiple versions for different types of people to follow
They also realized that people want their information quick and fast on social media, so they now make subtitled videos on some news stories which is a great use of the Facebook and Twitter quick play mechanic (where a video plays without audio and going to a separate video player).
From cleavage Thursday to telling the world about terrorist attacks, TheLADBible have used social media to legitimize themselves in our lives.
