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LADbible Is the Most Popular Publisher on Facebook
- minimaxir 8y agoAs someone who regularly works with CrowdTangle data, I can confirm the article's assertion that LADbible/Unilad's Facebook numbers are nuts.
- SpikeDad 8y agoSadly that would mean that Fox News is #1. Now we know why the US is in the state it's in.
- minimaxir 8y agoFor link posts, when LADBible began its inflection in mid-July, it became mostly on par performancewise with the Fox News page (notably, Fox News has 1/2th the Fans).
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoHow do they do it? I looked at a summary of popular headlines from this article and the LADbible ones didn’t seem especially novel. Are they getting them out there first? Are they spending a lot to boost? Or are they just publishing hundreds of stories per day so we’re just seeing the ones that randomly caught on? Or all of the above? Just curious about the secret sauce, or if there even is any. Could a team of 10-20 twenty-somethings replicate something like LADbible fairly easily?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mbesto 8y agoTheir content playbook is straight out of early BuzzFeed/9gag. "Borrow" original content from Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Snapchat/etc before anyone notices, and repurpose it in any way that makes it go viral (controversy, humor, sex, etc).
- darpa_escapee 8y agoIt's a common tactic. Ebaumsworld and Newgrounds both got popular 15 years ago through the same methods.
- kopo 8y agoYou can rewind to the birth of MTV 15 years before that. "I Want My MTV" by Tannenbaum and Marks is a great book. Think of it as the bible of what a successful marketing execs wants to achieve. It's not a common tactic. It is the BASIS of consumer culture. Give people what they want. Target their senses not their minds. It's how you get everything from the global spread of Pepsi to McDonalds to Starbucks to Apple to Hollywood to the Kardashians having 200 million teenage girls globally wanting to grow up to be like them. Consumer culture is based on giving people what they want. And labeling it Freedom.
- nathancahill 8y agoAnd now, let's repeat the Non-Conformist Oath!
- justtopost 8y agoI once watched Jello Biafra lead a crowd in a "we wont follow orders" chant. The irony was literally and figuritively deafaning. Nothing more stuck up than the in-crowd of outcasts.
- headsoup 8y agoSlight correction: it's convincing people you're giving them something they want, not necessarily delivering what they actually want.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y agoEbaum, perhaps - but I wouldn’t say that about Newgrounds: it was all about user-submitted content, especially original Flash content, instead of being manually curated.
- malvosenior 8y ago> In other words, Facebook isn’t holding itself to the same standards on which it’s being judged by critics who’d like to see reputable, serious news organizations dominating the feed. Does anyone actually want that? It's a social network, I doubt there's a large percentage of users who want to see the same mainstream news that dominates every other platform. I think real users want it to be fun and personal, not "serious".
- cortesoft 8y agoYeah, this view seems to be conflating cause and effect - they are acting like 'reputable, serious news organizations' don't have as many views because they aren't on the feed as much, when in reality it is likely that they aren't on the feed as much because they don't have as many views. The article seems to come to the same conclusion.
- jimjimjim 8y agoand children just want to eat ice cream. doesn't mean they should.
- tedunangst 8y agoDo we really want Facebook to be our parents?
- jimjimjim 8y agodo we really want facebook to be that guy that says 'yeah sure, eat whatever you want'
- reitanqild 8y agoYep. Just like the grocery store. It very soon becomes creepy if someone at the store tells me: I don't think you should eat more pizza this week.
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- spuz 8y agoThe article was posted one day after Unilad (the 4th most popular publisher according to this article) went into administration: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45744028 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45744028
- css 8y agoFor the Americans here, Administration is the common law equivalent of Bankruptcy.
- bobbygoodlatte 8y agoIt's remarkable how little money clickbait publishers make relative to the large negative externalities they impose on society (especially political clickbait)