One sunny Friday morning in May this year, Alex "Solly" Solomou and Mimi Turner - TheLADbible's co-founder and marketing director respectively - passed through police security at the entrance to Downing Street in Westminster and made their way to the prime minister's residence at Number 10. They had been invited to a meeting with David Cameron and about 40 people from technology startups, at which Cameron would encourage the companies' attempts to persuade young people to register to vote in the EU referendum.
Civil servants considered TheLADbible influential, as its 13.5 million Facebook followers included more than half of the UK's 18- to 24-year-old men. The site had already been running articles intended to inspire interest in the subject with a distinctive tone. These included "What The Fuck Is The EU Referendum?", "Oi, Ref! The Arguments For And Against Leaving The European Union" and "How The EU Referendum Affects The Stuff You Care About" (subhead: "Pints, footy, summer holidays - it's all on the table").
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.
Three weeks later, over a Nespresso in TheLADbible's offices in Spitalfields, London, she reflects that "it was an interesting example of how tech companies are now at the table, in terms of civic activation". Turner, formerly a print journalist at The Hollywood Reporter and communications director at Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell, home of The Daily Express, discusses the potential of digital communications technology with the fervour of a recent convert.
"We'd really like to do an interview with the prime minister to give him the opportunity to answer questions about what our audience want to know about the referendum," she says. "But he wouldn't be able to come to TheLADbible as someone who gives a speech - he would have to come to listen." The recognition by Britain's political establishment marks a high point in a long campaign by Solomou to establish TheLADbible as a respectable media brand with scale. Four years ago, the site, and other titles such as UNILAD, were publicly blamed by Laura Bates, founder of campaign group Everyday Sexism, and the National Union of Students for contributing to the growth of sexism, misogyny and what Bates described as "rape culture" on university campuses.
In a piece for The Independent, Bates referred to a TheLADbible article setting out a "holiday points system" that included three points for anyone who managed to "slip a finger in on the dance floor"; one comment suggested adding "a straight 20 points for cherry picking. (Smashing a virgin.) And having the blood stains to prove it."
In 2014, the growth in traffic to TheLADbible's owned platforms and follower numbers on social networks led Solomou to believe that the brand could attain the scale and profitability of major international media titles. He also realised, as he told The Guardian in 2015, that "certain things needed to change if we wanted to compete with those guys in the States", meaning digital media players BuzzFeed and VICE.
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. By the summer of 2016, TheLADbible had 26 million followers across all social networks, and an average number of shares per article of more than 6,000 (by comparison, the two top UK newspaper sites, The Guardian and MailOnline, average around 1,000, Buzzfeed has under 3,000, and VICE around 330 shares).
The platform's Facebook reach - the number of feeds in which its content appears - is more than 400 million, the equivalent of a quarter of all the social network's global users. The site is the 13th most visited in the UK, according to Alexa, and is the second most-visited British-owned site after the BBC.
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.
While Solomou and Turner take their seats in Downing Street, TheLADbible's content director, Ian Moore, and head of video, Alex Connock, are sitting in the glass-walled meeting room of the company's head office in Manchester. The space, which includes an area waiting to be developed into a video studio, occupies three floors of a converted warehouse in the Northern Quarter, an area of the city centre known for its nightlife.
The office is true to media-company type: colourful pop-culture artefacts, rows of crowded desks with no landlines, Radio X playing in the background, a bottled-beer bar and the faintly musky tang of twentysomethings working long hours.
The walls are decorated with framed football shirts, a mural featuring Pelé, Diego Maradona and Zinedine Zidane playing table football, and another showing a book entitled TheLADbible. "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."
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.
They are discussing recent figures for video views and shares across TheLADbible's various channels - a key area for both content and growth. The most popular of the last week has been Dinner In The Sky, a 51-second clip showing a dining experience organised and promoted by a Belgian company that allows 22 people to eat a meal while suspended from a crane 40 metres in the air. The story is ten years old, yet the video - which has been overlaid with LADbible captions - has had 800,000 shares and been viewed 60 million times, according to Moore.
"It matched the rules of what keeps people watching: about a minute long, very simple proposition, very clear picture at the top, very clear text, three to five seconds of pre-title sequence footage, then a title card to say what it's about," Connock says.
"It works well viewed without sound - people mostly watch video on their phones with no sound now; we're actually in a new silent movie era. Also, it has something great 35 seconds in, which helps because that's the point at which people tend to stop watching."
(In the case of Dinner In The Sky, the 35-second shot is a vertiginous one of a young woman seated at the suspended table with an enormous drop beneath her).
"We're edging towards two types of video: longer pieces that may not get so many views but are editorially really interesting, or about a brand or an issue we want to be involved with, and then short, punchy news-type videos which are your classic social or viral videos of about a minute in length," Moore says.
They discuss recent examples of both genres: documentary videos about mental health for Instagram and Facebook, classic virals, including one about a toilet-themed restaurant in Taiwan, and another called Drunk Britain, "which is a compilation [of] people who are obviously drunk around Britain," Connock explains. Content for TheLADbible and its spin-off sites - TheSPORTbible, TheODDSbible, TheLENSbible, TheGAMINGbible, TheFOODbible, TheLADbible OZ and women's site Pretty52 - is produced on the busiest of the three floors. Each platform has its own editorial team: the technologists and data scientists sit close by, ensuring that the operation is tightly integrated. There are around 20 people at their desks today, a Friday, but numbers can vary as content is uploaded 18 hours per day in shifts.
A screen carries the fluctuating number of people on the site - around 17,000 when WIRED looks, but Moore says it can reach 150,000. Behind the writers is a whiteboard covered in red marker script with suggestions for suitable subjects grouped under headings: "Current Trends: Making A Murderer, Top Gear, Star Wars, Deadpool, David Brent film; Funny/Weird: WhatsApp group chats, dream Glasto line-up, Popular/Weird Sex Fetishes, How long has the DFS sale been on?; Issues: Mental health, Fathers 4 Justice, Bullying, Homelessness, Gym!"
The approach is social-first. Content is scraped and aggregated from anywhere - social media, Reddit, TV, radio, writers' ideas - then written up with a consciously conversational tone. "I wouldn't fancy it myself, but that's life," a writer might sign off, or "I'm sure all this could have been avoided, to be honest."
Content is also bought from agencies, and Moore says that the team receives around 1,500 proposals daily from readers. Crucial to the editorial process are the two data scientists, who apply sentiment analysis to comments to discover why users share stories. New content is then created to tally with the emotions in question.
According to Sean Durkin, 27, an astrophysics graduate who established TheLADbible's data science department, the feeling that most drives virality is "shared reminiscence - content that evokes a memory of having done something with someone else is absolute dynamite".
Similarly, stories that make viewers want to plan ahead to do something with someone else in the future also works. And competitive things - downing pints, say, or football tricks - that prompt them to tag a friend and say, "You need to up your game."
"What they don't share are stories that make them lose faith in humanity - sad stories are OK, but not ones that make them think, 'I can't imagine why anyone would do this,' because if they can't imagine themselves doing something, it's not relatable, and the main thing is, it has to be relatable." Such uplifting stories are much in evidence, although the nature of online media means that readers are never far from another intriguing link. "A Lad Living With Depression Explains Why it's Time For Young Men To Talk", for example, offers links including "Downing Beer Off A Pair of Boobs Is Latest Viral Challenge." The story - #BOOBLUGE - is presented as inclusive. "The thing I like about #BOOBLUGE is its versatility," says writer Josh Teal. "It's not just guys motor-boating lager, but girls too. This is the greatest party of 2016 and every fucker's invited."
While Moore and the content team are focused on meeting audience desires, Turner likes to talk up a sense of mission and social purpose. Mainly based in the smaller Spitalfields office, where an in-house agency creates native ad content, and favouring heels and designer dresses over the rest of the team's jeans, T-shirts and trainers, Turner is not afraid to make bold claims.
"We probably know more about young men than anybody has ever known, ever," she says one afternoon. "What they think about, what they care about, what they respond to.
"There are about 5.3 million people [in the UK] actively talking on social networks. Social media is about people talking for themselves, and that has never, ever happened before. The youth audience that we speak to is big - just over 50 per cent of the world's population is under 30. Those people talking for themselves is a political movement of people invested for the future. It is tomorrow's future today. I think if we talk to them in ways they want to hear, we can unlock something that has never been unlocked before. What we think is: 'How do we use our influence to get people to tell us what they care about?'"
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.
Turner, however, argues that you have to make a connection before you can build on it, and in any case having a laugh can be political in itself. For her, the Boaty McBoatface fiasco was "a deliberate testing of the authenticity of a supposedly democratic offer". The real achievement of TheLADbible, she says, is to have represented a worldview of ordinary people in a relatable way - which is not as easy you might think. "When I met the team, I just thought the stuff that I saw on the site was brilliant," she says. "To be funny about the everyday takes a special kind of brilliance; we tend to celebrate the brilliance of Olympic athletes, and of football players who can get the girls, but the brilliance of a guy who takes a photocopy of his face and then cuts out the eyes and sticks them on his spectacles so he can lie down in his call centre job and it looks like he's awake - that's special kind of brilliance. Or take the guys who went to a prom on mobility scooters they had pimped up. This is a brilliance that we can all relate to."
Turner cites the figures. TheSPORTbible alone averages just over 3,000 shares per article; Pretty52, just under 1,000. On Instagram, one in 150 of all users worldwide follows TheLENS Bible, a photo-sharing channel - which launched earlier in 2016. On Snapchat, TheLADbible has 1.2 million followers. In the 28 days before WIRED's meeting, its videos have had more than one billion views. The dozen articles about the EU have reached more than 23 million, and 100,000 people voted in EU-related opinion polls.
Solomou played Rugby Union for Cheshire and has the slightly cauliflower ears to show for it. Turner, whose brief is partly to represent the company publicly so that he does not have to, says he dislikes interviews. However, sitting in the Manchester office meeting room, sporting a fine-knit black sweater, blue jacket and jeans and stubble, Solomou is relaxed.
Born in Stockport, Manchester, in 1990, he grew up in Buxton, Derbyshire. His grandfather had immigrated to Manchester from Cyprus in the 1930s and made money selling shoelaces before becoming a waiter, then opening a Greek restaurant near Manchester Piccadilly station. His father ran a property lettings agency, in which his mother also worked.
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". He was fascinated by the idea of business, and wanted to try it himself. At his Stockport Grammar School he sold sweets his mother gave him to fellow pupils.
He had little interest in media when he was growing up; he remembers his grandmother reading The Sun and his mum having lots of women's magazines, but for him lads mags such as FHM and Zoo were just things passed around the coach for 20 minutes on the way to rugby matches. He preferred "tradeable things" like marbles, Pokémon cards and Digimon, and then early online properties like MSN and MySpace. When Solomou began to use the internet on dial-up, it presented itself to him foremost as a business possibility: he researched where to buy wholesale clothes and sold them on eBay. "That kick that you get is very short, then it's, 'OK, how can I scale this up? How can I make it bigger?'" he recalls.
"I'll never forget the excitement of packaging something up, going to the Post Office and sending it off. This thing that you've done, they'd exchanged money for these goods that you're giving them at a certain price, and you're both happy."
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.
Progress was slow. 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.
"They told me: 'This is how you market sustainably to an audience: you have a bunch of people that are interested in certain things and you need to find a way to connect with them,'" says Solomou.
"It hit home, and I started to look into things that I was already on. Things like Facebook." Rather than trying to grow a following from scratch, he bought one, in the form of TheLADbible - a website then mostly featuring user-submitted content had been set up by a student peer, Alex Partridge, who used to own a similar site, UNILAD before it was sold recently.
TheLADbible began life in 2011 purveying curated and user-generated content with often crude humour. So-called Cleavage Thursdays encouraged women to upload photographs of their breasts, and attracted strong criticism as well as followers. Solomou bought the name and assets (he declines to name the price, but it is said to have been around £300) in spring 2012. Rate Our Student Life didn't take off, but by the summer TheLADbible was growing quickly. In 2012, the shift to smartphones boosted content consumption on social channels; that year 12 per cent of total media time was spent on mobile. By 2015 it was 24 per cent, with mobile used for more than 80 per cent of web browsing.
Solomou was producing content with the help of interns from Leeds University, and they found that the right idea could drive spikes so high it would crash the servers.
"I can't claim to be the genius who sat down and created this strategy of getting to this exact point," Solomou says. "It was instinct, just moving, making one step forward, one step forward, before you know it you look back - bloody hell, I've made all those steps."
He brought in a friend, Arian Kalantari, as a co-founder, employed students to develop software and concentrated on the site in his final year. By the time he graduated with a 2:1, he was making money by advising companies how to grow social followings. At that point he still envisaged revenue would come from advertising to local companies.
Turner joined in January 2015, following the recruitment of Tom Toumazis, a former Yahoo!, Endemol and Disney executive, to the board. Jonathan Durden, co-founder of media agency PHD, and technology investment bank GP Bullhound were also brought on board in an advisory capacity. Turner's brief includes the establishment of the business and brand values; this seems to have included having editorial influence - she successfully lobbied for killing off Cleavage Thursday, and encouraged the EU and mental health coverage.
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.
The laddish legacy brings challenges, and not only those to do with ethics and the anxiety it might cause potential investors: the lads' magazines of the 90s and 00s discovered that while crude, laddish content is attractive to young men of 11 to 16, the 18-plus segment is more sensitive about sharing.
Damian McKeown is a brand consultant who was part of the ad sales team that launched Loaded in 1994 and now works in digital advertising. "With men's media, you find that over time your figures skew young, which puts off adult brands," he says.
It could even, he suggests, be more acute with digital media: platforms like Snapchat and Instagram are popular with younger teens, and Turner and Solomou see not just millennials but centennials - the generation born after the mid-90s who have grown up with the internet - as key to their audience.
TheLADbible's relationship with commercial partners and its audience is to acknowledge that its readers loathe intrusive advertisements; the platform remains very ad-light - for instance, there are no programmatic ads in its app. The strategy for generating income rests on creating native content - particularly video in partnership with brands.
In 2015, advertisers spent 18 per cent of their money on newspapers, which account for only four per cent of time spent consuming media; although 24 per cent of media hours are spent on mobile, agencies invest only eight per cent of spend there. As Turner points out, the figures are anomalous because advertisers believe print has better engagement levels.
"I think print works too," she says. "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.
"TheLADbible is mainstream, though maybe it has mainstream opinion formers who can affect the behaviour of their peers. They have huge figures, and they're very sharp on big data, so they will have an easy sell to brands like supermarkets and FMCGs [fast-moving consumer goods] who just want as many eyeballs as possible. But many advertisers want to work with media owners on more native editorial content that has strong attitude and tone of voice.
"To do that, you need media owners who can tell a story about the nature of their audience, their lifestyles and spending habits. They need to articulate their beliefs and attitudes. Saying you're about positivity helps, but it isn't all that distinctive.
"Two great problems face social ads," McKeown continues. "First, people who like and advocate brands online don't necessarily buy them - you need only compare the Likes on Ferrari's Facebook page with the number of Ferraris out there to know that. Second, the content is atomised: people relate to bits of content, but not always so much to the media owner's brand. That weakens them when it comes to selling ad space."
Other approaches are being tried. Recently launched women's site The Pool, co-founded by DJ and TV presenter Lauren Laverne and former magazine editor Sam Baker, is aiming for a smaller but tightly defined highbrow audience.
"The internet is obsessed with scale," Baker says. "But if you think in old-fashioned terms, it's like saying the only audience that matters is the one watching Coronation Street, as opposed to any targeted, quality audience."
Turner counters: "Scale is how you reach those narrow segments of people, because those segments come through the big door. The reason we get a lot of people interested in the story of mental health is because they're a proportion of an enormous audience." McKeown points out they may not need to worry, "not with those figures, and being across multiple platforms - TheLADbible could clean up. Make native ads, undercut theagencies, charge brands for managing their presence and social interactions across platforms. Sell the numbers to people who want big numbers." After meeting Turner and Solomou in Manchester, WIRED revisits the Dinner In The Sky video. It has 844,268 shares, and 349,000 reactions and has 65,096,108 views.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
