Case Study: From Dorm Room Hustle to $25M a Year: How Two Founders Built a Facebook Publishing Empire

In this case study we will review exactly what the LADbible Group is, its asset base and how they grew it, how they make their money today, what they’re doing right and what they can do even better.

We got our hands on all of their financial reports and combed through all of their assets to show you exactly how they achieved those results – and how YOU can too…

[This is an updated version of a case study we shared a while ago with some new insights]

1. Their Earnings

So, let’s start with how much money the LADbible Group is earning and then look at the assets that are producing this income, while putting aside their impact on the culture at large.

According to their 2024 financial report, the company earned a total of £86.2 million in revenue over a 12 month period, which converts to $107.175 million USD over the same time period.

In the report they stated that Facebook made up 23% of total revenue for this time period – making up £19.826 million or $24.649 million USD – not too shabby.

What’s interesting is that throughout the financial report they kept complaining that their Facebook revenue was hit hard by Facebook’s algorithm changes and that they had to pivot their approach, which later started working out.

Prior to the algorithm change around the time of their IPO, they were earning 37% of their total revenue from Facebook. This means that their revenue from Facebook for this 12 month period would have been £31.894 million or $39.658 million.

What they did also say is that after they pivoted their approach they were able to start recovering their revenue from Facebook as a total percentage of revenue.

Assuming they can keep recovering but maybe not reach the same heights they had before, we’re looking at a median revenue of £25.86 million or $32,155,380 USD per year just from Facebook. But how much of this money are they keeping? This is the Golden question.

2. Their Assets

Okay, so they’re making money hand over first, but what are the assets that are generating this income?

Check out the attached list of top 20 Facebook Pages in terms of number of US views and you’ll see that LADbible Group’s assets make up the majority of this list.

The ones marked in red are for sure owned by them and the ones marked in orange may be as well.

Here are the ones we’ve been able to dig up including links to each page if you want to check them out for yourself:

3. Their Testing Strategy

The secret of the biggest Facebook publishing networks to skyrocket performance and clicks:

Having a network of so many pages opens up many interesting things you can do to glean more insights and to improve performance across the board.

One of the most effective ways to do this is through the process of Testing.

The purpose of Testing is to ensure that only the best of the best performing content goes out on your biggest and most valuable Facebook pages.

How does it do this?

A) The higher your ratio of bangers to bombs results in Facebook’s algorithm rewarding your page more and more, and spreading your content to more people.

B) Every page has a limited number of share slots per day, so by using Tested content, you are ensuring only the best stuff goes out on the page.

4. Testing – How It Works:

Testing is usually done with link sharing posts more-so than with videos or photos, but you can use this approach for any format type.

We recommend doing it for links at a minimum.

A) Curate as much content as possible that has a high probability of performing well or going viral

B) Share that content on your smaller / less valuable pages. Although you don’t want to destroy the performance of these pages (that’s why you’re still posting things that should be able to do well), they are your sacrificial lambs that are being sacrificed for the grand goal of improving performance for your biggest and most valuable assets.

C) Share links to third party websites and use bitly links for each link so that you can gather reach and clicks data. Create a minimum baseline of engagement for the post and clicks to the bitly link relative to the size and capabilities of this page that must be achieved within 24 hours.

D) For any post that exceeds your set criteria within that 24 hour period, push it to production by creating your own original version of that article. Leave the other ones alone and don’t run them again.

E) Distribute that article on your larger pages. If you have a lot of pages, don’t distribute the article all at the same time, stagger out the distribution so as not to be flagged for spam.

F) Buy your wife or husband some jewelry or a set of golf clubs.

5. The Distribution Process

Use as much of the same content as possible across the board:

You’ll notice that the same exact content keeps being repeated on all of these pages.

Try to stretch the content scope of any page as much as possible while not going outside of the niche in too egregious of a way.

Do not create new and original articles for every page, use the same articles for all the pages, as long as the use of that article is not too far outside of the scope of the niche of that page.

Why? Why not!

We are in the Facebook game to make as much money as possible and have the highest profit margins possible.

We are looking for ways to make our lives as easy as possible and to distribute our content as far and wide as possible.

That means we reuse and recycle the same content as much as possible. And that’s also why LADbible Group makes as much money as they do.

6. The Recycling Process

You don’t need to produce new content all the time.

Yes, new content is the life blood of a page that keeps things fresh and gets a new audience flowing in, but it’s not about only producing new stuff.

In fact, did you know that you can keep re-running your top performers over and over again and continuing to make money off the same old content over and over again?

LADbible Group certainly does.

Keep a lot of your all time best performers and run them every 60 days.

Every time you share this same piece of content it will do a little bit worse, but it will still do great relative to most of the other content.

When you see the performance start getting too low for these recycled posts, put the posts on ice and try again in six months.

7. Scheduling Your Posts

Run as many posts as possible but not too many:

The LADbible Group pages run anywhere from 1 to 4 posts an hour on their pages on average, meaning they run anywhere from 24 to 96 posts per day on any one page.

Their biggest page, Unilad, is currently running 48 posts per day (2 an hour). That’s not too much and not too many, and is the ideal amount if you can pull it off.

That’s a lot of content! But it’s worth it if every one of those pieces of content makes you some money, whether it’s from Conuses, Content Monetization or web traffic ad revenue.

Plus this also means that by pushing out so much content you’re always ensuring that at least some of the content is performing well, even if you may have a larger amount of flops.

But that’s why one does Testing – to ensure the ratio of bangers to flops is as high as possible and to minimize the number of flops.

8. Commenting Strategy

On top of leaving a link in the first comment to drive traffic to their website, they also leave an engagement-boosting comment an hour later, and then one more a few hours after that.

This creates an upward engagement spiral by increasing the click through rate of your posts.

How? Users will see that the page has left a comment, they will click the comments button and then on to your comment to see what you wrote.

This creates a bunch of extra clicks that are registered against your post, and then Zuckerberg tells his minions to push your post out to more people because they’re spending more time engaging with your content relative to other pages’ content.

Furthermore, these people who have clicked on the comments are now more likely to leave their own comments.

Thus pushing up your post engagement further, driving even more clicks and getting your post distributed to more people.

The LADbible Group would actually get even better results by having someone respond to more user comments as well, as opposed to just leaving their own new comments.

This will create nested comment discussions, which will further increase the click through rate as more people will be clicking in to see what all the hubbub is about. (Hubbub is still a word people use, right?)

9. Content Format

How you share something is as important as what you share:

The LADbible Group pages all primarily run just two formats and types of posts:

A) Image + link in first comment linking to their website

B) Videos And nothing else!

They do not do any memes or photos of any kind outside of ones associated with driving links to their own websites.

The image + link posts are fully original and thus generate a higher Performance Bonus or Creator Monetization revenue, and they also generate income from the traffic driven to the website.

The videos generate revenue from ads and reels, and also massively pull up the engagement and reach of the page, which also cascades into improving the performance of the image + link shares.

I believe they can do even better by sharing 1 or 2 super viral recreated memes per day.

And the same thing with 1 or 2 super viral text shares per day.

They can ensure they’re only sharing the best of the best memes and text shares by pushing them through the Testing system.

New content format types like this would not only increase their reach even more, but it provides a fresh new format type that the audience can interact with and that will help give further boosts from Facebook’s algorithm.

It will also diversify the Bonus or Creator Monetization revenue a bit too as there are different RPMs for different content types, all of which helps.

(Seriously, why aren’t these guys getting consulting from us? Is it because they’re more interested in our turnkey management partnership program? We’re happy to do that with them too.)

10. Video Strategy

One of the LADbible Groups’ top strategies for growing their pages and driving massive engagement is through their video strategy.

If you analyze their pages, you’ll notice that the vast majority of their video content is not actually originally theirs (even if it may look like it).

They get their videos primarily in one of two ways:

A) Non-exclusive licensing agreements with video creators

B) Video licensing

C) User submitted videos In almost all cases they add their own branding and other elements to the videos to make them seem unique to their brands, but, in the end, these are all either licensed or user generated videos (which are also licensed).

LADbible Group has a whole team of people doing outreach to video creators on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and wherever else viral videos lurk.

They will ask for permission to share your video and in return they will reward you with huge sacks of cash and gold bullion.

Oh, wait, no they just say they will give you free exposure. They do so by leaving a link to your original video or to your profile in the first comment of the video and may provide attribution to you in the video itself.

And they’ll get you to sign this nifty agreement. Once they get access to your video, they will update it with their own branding and push it out on all their pages.

Any user submitted content through their website’s submission portal works the same way and you’ll be asked to sign the same kind of licensing agreement.

Video licensing:

They also license their videos from companies that do the above process for you at scale and who specialize in nothing else.

One such company that they use that has amazing viral videos that are shared on all of the biggest pages from The Dodo to The New York Times is called Newsflare.

Hold on to your kidneys though as their charges are astronomically high for regular publishers.

They ask for a monthly minimum base of thousands of dollars plus 50% of the revenue generated. Or you can go a la carte and pay $230 plus tax to use a single video one time on up to three different platforms.

Now multiply that over 12 videos a day… and consider starting your own version of a company like this or building out this kind of function in-house (we certainly are!).

Here was the lowest quote we got for a pilot launch after some haggling (as you can see it’s not cheap): “The lowest bundle I can do on AYCE is 100 clips per month on a 2 month trial. I can do that at £20 per clip.”

Final Thoughts

All of the above is basically all you need to know to go from a dorm room or your mom’s basement to earning $25 million a year from Facebook pages.

Then again, here are some other things that you may want to know about LADbible Group:

A) They raised millions of dollars in funding and later IPO’d at a valuation of £360 million ($448 million USD).

B) The two founders personally withdrew £53 million ($66 million) from the IPO, presumably to have funded the fire insurance for their homes in Los Angeles [citation needed].

C) Their current CEO has set a revenue target of £200 million ($249 million USD) for 2025 for the company. Do you think they’ll hit this target?

D) They continue acquiring new Facebook Pages and are also working hard to diversify their traffic.

Resources to help you grow 

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