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.
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 January of 2012.
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 https://www.topforexnews.org/ 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.
In ‘great position’ for monetisation to start
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. https://www.forexbox.info/ 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.
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.
“[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), 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.
‘Redefines lads’
“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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- While Ms Turner is happy to spread the word, co-founders Alex Solomou and Arian Kalantari prefer to keep a low profile.
- The company could now pursue expansion in the US, where it has a large audience but no staff.
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.
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.
How Piers Morgan Became the Most Divisive Man in British Media
In a 2019 report in The Drum, LADbible cofounder and COO Arian Kalantari is quoted as saying the two companies have joined together “incredibly well”. But according to a former Unilad employee, there’s still https://www.currency-trading.org/ some lingering animosity between staff, with each side of the lad army “working separately on different floors”. Since Unilad shuttered, Bentley, Harrington and Quinlan have maintained a low profile.
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.
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.
Elsewhere on the BBC
During the 2010s, investors poured enormous sums into so-called new media outlets such as Vice and BuzzFeed, on valuations that classed them as technology businesses. In reality, many of the companies struggled to meet financial growth targets and the market is increasingly valuing them more in line with traditional media outlets. The company now brands itself as an “environmentally and socially responsible business” that aims “to give the youth generation a voice by building communities that laugh, think and act”.
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.