Lad Bible strives to branch out beyond its blokey name

'Every new person we bring up here thinks it’s still a couple of guys sitting in a bedroom'

Bible leaders, left to right: Mimi Turner, Arian Kalantari, and Ian Moore (Jon Super)

Inside an old mill building on the edge of Manchester’s fashionable Northern Quarter is an unlikely candidate for Britain’s best shot yet at an internet news start-up that can take on the world.

The Lad Bible has more than 11 million Facebook followers – more than three times as many as Mail Online. When you include digital platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, it boasts 31.5 million adherents to this family of brands that extends to the Sport Bible and the new Food Bible domains. No other British media can rival that level of engagement with social media. But what about that name?

Older readers might associate the “lad” concept with Nineties magazines such as Loaded and Front (which have both closed in the past two years), where female flesh was ogled and writers boasted of chemical-fuelled excess.

“I don’t ever want us to offend anyone,” says the editor, Ian Moore, 30, an affable Dubliner newly arrived at the Lad HQ from the rival youth media brand Vice. This is not a cliquey hipster operation – the Lad Bible is deliberately mainstream. Does it objectify women? “We don’t do that at all,” the editor says, wincing. “Quite a sizeable proportion of our audience is women.”

A glance at the Lad Bible’s home page doesn’t exactly confirm this, however: “Professional Prostitute Debunks Three Myths About Penis Size” reads one headline, alongside an image of a scantily-clad woman. And female readers might not feel compelled to click on “Mum Catches Daughter And Boyfriend In The Act And Then Things Go From Bad To Worse”. It’s not that different from the Mail’s fabled “sidebar of shame”, but it’s not exactly progressive either.

The company argues that a female-skewed site Pretty 52 is the fastest growing title in the Lad Bible portfolio. And Moore says that the team are perfectly capable of capturing a young female conversational tone. “I don’t think [the job] is gender specific,” he says.

An extract from the Lad Bible website: Celebrities that look like dogs (theladbible.com)

The Lad Bible claims to be followed by one in five British women aged between 18 and 24 (as well as half of men in that age band), who are attracted by a stream of viral video which prioritises humour but also celebrates the achievements of a demographic that can feel denigrated by other media.

Its most successful content last year was a viral video of Ben & Jerry’s new line of vegan ice cream, and the Lad Bible’s coverage of the Paris attacks, when it momentarily wiped the smirk off its face. More normally it will be celebrating the lad who swam through a near-frozen river to rescue a dog, or showing those lads how to make a chicken kebab from scratch.

It’s not surprising to learn that Moore’s laddish team (none of whom is over 27) can break from their work to play Fifa, the football video game. “If people are in a good mood you will see that in the writing,” says Moore. “And if they’re not you will see that very quickly too.”

Lad Bible’s bosses are in the office. Alexander Solomou, 25, set the site up while a student at the University of Leeds and now runs the business with his partner Arian Kalantari, 24, through their company 65twenty. And that’s still how many followers envisage it.

“Every new person we bring up here thinks it’s still a couple of guys sitting in a bedroom,” says Moore. In reality, the business is expanding at a phenomenal rate.

A year ago, the Financial Times asked “Is the Lad Bible a new media force to be reckoned with?” Since then it has grown from 35 staff to 90. It has spread over three floors, one of which will host its new TV studios. One early film featured a biker gang protecting the property of families flooded out of homes in Yorkshire. The next project shows a similar social conscience, highlighting youth homelessness by the seaside in Blackpool.

The Lad Bible claims to be profitable already. It is sensitive to not over-serving its audience with advertising, and a mobile user will see only one ad in 24 hours. But the demographic is highly attractive to big brands and sponsored content deals have been done with the likes of Friday-night-post-pub favourites Doritos and Carlsberg.

It also licenses UGC (user generated content) videos to other publishers, from Northern & Shell to The Sun.

Mid-twentysomethings are considered to be too old to work on the Lad Bible’s Snapchat and Instagram output, which is mostly followed by teenagers and is operated by James Parker, 19.

“He knows that audience much better than a 25-year-old will know it,” says Moore.” And across the country, traditional journalists feel just that little bit more obsolete.

Indeed, new recruits are found online, often because they are among the regulars who contribute close to 1,500 pieces of phone-filmed UGC to Lad Bible every day. Moore says contributors are thrilled to see their name on the site, and still more so to be offered a job. “I can’t believe how excited they become! They will say ‘I can work there? Is that a thing?’”