CASE STUDY: How 2 guys started a publishing empire from their dorm...

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Publisher in a Box@publisherinabox
43 views Apr 27, 2025 ~16 min read
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CASE STUDY: How 2 guys started a publishing empire from their dorm room that now earns $25,000,000 per year from Facebook alone [🧵👇]

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]
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1/ A business mentor once told me that the only thing that matters in a corporation is how much money it's making and nothing else. He, of course, told me this while he was dumping barrels of oil and raw sewage into the Gulf of M̶e̶x̶i̶c̶o̶ America and kicking a seal square in the jaw, but that’s neither here nor there.

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.
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2/ 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.
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3/ 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.
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4/ Their ‘adjusted EBITA margin’ is stated to be 28% for this time period. That means, after all expenses, we’re looking at a yearly profit range specifically from Facebook of:

Low: $6.9 million

Median: $9 million

High: $11.1 million

That said, their stated EBITA accounts for the income derived from all sources. Since Facebook revenue typically has a much higher profit margin than other sources, I’d reckon that they’re making way more profit than the above.

I would also reckon that their revenue percentage specifically from Facebook is also higher than what’s been stated as there are so many trickle down effects from Facebook traffic that bleed new revenue all over the place.

Either way, in short, there’s lots of money to be made from Facebook!
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5/ 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:

Unilad (facebook.com/uniladmag)

LADbible (facebook.com/LADbible)

Betches (facebook.com/BetchesOfficial, facebook.com/BetchesMoms)

Furry Tails (formerly Go Animals) (facebook.com/furrytailsoffi…)

Lessons Learned in Life (facebook.com/lessonslearned…)

Unilad Tech (facebook.com/UNILADTech)

Sport Bible (facebook.com/SPORTbible)

Ladbible Australia (facebook.com/LADbibleAustra…)

Tyla (facebook.com/Tyla)

Odds Bible (facebook.com/SPORTbibleFoot…)

Gaming Bible (facebook.com/GAMINGbible)

Food Bible (facebook.com/FOODbible)

Lad Bible Ireland (facebook.com/ladbibleireland)

Unilad Adventure (facebook.com/UNILADAdventure)

Unilad Sound (facebook.com/uniladsound)

Women Working (can’t find the page link anymore, likely merged into Betches)

There are likely dozens more out there - if you know of any more please reply with a link!
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6/ Testing - 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.
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7/ 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.
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8/ Distribution - 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.
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9/ Distribution - but still share niche-relevant content!

If you have more niche-specific pages, like ones about food, technology, animals or clowns with missing limbs, then your audience will get too pissed off if you share only irrelevant content.

It’s okay to piss off your audience a bit, but not too much. And we as page owners must find the right balance between maximizing revenue, maintaining brand integrity and not making your audience hate you.

As such, you need to still share some niche-relevant content, not just all of the general viral stuff that you’re pushing out on all your pages. The general rule of thumb is that you want to do at least 50% to 70% of the content distributed on to a page to be as niche relevant as possible. You may get away with as little as 50/50.

And some pages you can get away with less than 10% being niche relevant by slowly turning them into a catch-all type page (those are our favorite as they’re just money printing machines).

You will only know as you test and refine and iterate. This is what LADbible Group does with all of their pages non-stop. Iteration is a literally never-ending process. You can always do better and your content can always perform better on Facebook.
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10/ Recycling a.k.a. how to keep your accountant happy:

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.
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11/ New to recycled content ratio:

You can’t run all new content and you can’t run all recycled content. Well, technically you can, but it’s not in your best interest.

What you should do is a ratio of 75% new content to 25% recycled content.

Pages like Unilad actually seem to be running a higher ratio of newer content, closer to 90% new to 10% recycled, but they don’t need to go this high and they can probably actually make much more money by running more recycled content. This approach would yield them more revenue from bonuses and web traffic while also reducing their overall costs as they wouldn’t need to produce as much new content.

(Maybe they should buy one of our consulting packages? We’ll give you 5% of the revenue if you’d like to refer them or anyone else to us, seriously!)

You can push recycled content through your Testing pipeline, or you can bypass Testing since you know this content should already perform well.
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12/ Scheduling - 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.
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13/ Commenting - the easiest and quickest way to boost engagement and reach:

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?)
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14/ Content format strategy - 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.)
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15/ Video strategy - sourcing overview:

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).
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16/ Non-exclusive video licensing agreements:

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.
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17/ 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."
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18/ 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.
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19/ If you think we missed anything or would like to know more about any part of this Facebook empire, just leave a reply below and we’ll share the answers with you or look into it for you!

This analysis has been brought to you by our many years of experience running pages with a total of hundreds of millions of followers and driving hundreds of millions of visitors to websites. We now put all of this into action through our turnkey management partnership program and our elite consulting program. DM me to learn more or click the links below...
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👉 Book a free 20-minute strategy and consulting call to discuss 1-on-1 guidance to build your own Facebook money-printing machine : docs.google.com/document/d/1nD…
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👉 Other ways we can work together: docs.google.com/document/d/1ek…
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