How do you evolve from being the world’s best-known Facebook publisher into a media company that truly understands and serves today’s fragmented digital ecosystem? This was the question facing LADbible Group as they looked to build on their position as the world’s largest social publisher. Like many problems for online publishers, it starts with understanding the communities involved.
“Gone are the days of your local football team only being a community that lives within a certain town or certain postcode,” explains Jon Birchall, LADbible’s Director of Editorial Strategy. “You could now be a Manchester United supporter living in Liverpool, but have huge amounts in common with fans in South Africa or New York when it comes to the content you want to see.”
This shifting definition of community – from geographic to interest-based – presents both an opportunity and a challenge. LADbible needed a way to identify, understand, and serve these dispersed but deeply connected audience groups.
Enter NewsWhip.
The Discovery Process
When LADbible adopted NewsWhip, they didn’t just want a tool to monitor social media – they needed a way to dive deep into specific communities. “It’s not just about what everyone is talking about on social media today,” Birchall explains. “It’s about what everyone who’s really interested in this one specific niche is talking about.”
This approach led to some surprising discoveries. GAMINGBible, one of LADbible’s vertical brands, found that their gaming audience also had a strong appetite for specific types of TV and film content. With the gaming industry facing some challenges, this insight proved valuable. Using NewsWhip to test different content types, they were able to successfully expand their strategy to include more entertainment coverage while maintaining that core gaming audience that is the backbone of their content.
The Power of Precision
NewsWhip’s platform allows LADbible to set different engagement thresholds for different topics – crucial for understanding what they should view as “trending” in different communities. To go back to the Manchester United example; a story might need thousands of engagements to be noteworthy about such a big sporting institution, while a passionate conversation about a niche gaming topic might be significant for that audience with far fewer interactions.
“We’ll post far less on our channels than some larger publishers,” Birchall notes. “We try to focus on high engagement.”
This selective approach is supported by NewsWhip’s real-time monitoring, allowing the team to quickly identify which stories are resonating within specific communities, and rework them if engagement is not as high as expected.
Cross-Platform Communities
Perhaps most importantly, NewsWhip helps LADbible understand how different platforms serve different segments of the same community. Reddit might provide ground-level conversations, while TikTok offers trending perspectives, and Facebook hosts more established community discussions.
This multi-platform view proves particularly valuable when expanding into new areas. The UNILAD Tech vertical, which launched in 2020, has recently been using NewsWhip to identify specific areas of audience interest, such as Tesla and SpaceX, and track how these topics performed across different platforms.
The Results
This niche-focused approach has transformed how LADbible operates. Their editorial team of 80 now creates hundreds of pieces of content daily, each targeted to specific community interests. The strategy has enabled successful expansion into new verticals while maintaining engagement with existing audiences.
LADbible continues to use these insights to grow with their audience while attracting new ones. As Birchall puts it, “It’s not just about how we do more for the audience we already have, as important as that is… but how can we diversify and cover something that is going to be of interest to a younger person encountering us for the first time while still appealing to someone who’s known us for years.”
As communities continue to fracture and find new places and ways to congregate, the ability to understand and serve both existing and emerging communities may be the key to sustainable publishing success, and it’s an area LADbible continues to lead as one of the standout publishers in the digital media space.
