Lad Bible triples revenue and targets acquisitions

Lad Bible Group continues to prosper in a challenging publishing landscape, with its revenue tripling from £30 million in 2020 to £90 million in 2024, predominantly fuelled by advertising. As brands hesitate to invest in news, the group’s audience has grown by 19% in the first nine months of the year, surpassing 503 million.

In an interview with Digiday, CEO Solly Solomou discussed the company’s strategies for sustaining this momentum and achieving its target of £200 million in revenue. “Last year marked a good step towards our ambition of becoming a global entertainment powerhouse,” Solomou said, highlighting strategic efforts that include enhancing US operations, forming commercial deals with AI platforms, expanding intellectual property ownership and potential mergers and acquisitions.

“We’ve got an M&A pipeline that we’re continually looking at,” Solomou added, emphasising a selective approach to potential acquisitions as a means to reach a projected revenue target of $200 million.

Solomou acknowledges the volatility of traffic referrals from social and search platforms, a challenge that has become increasingly apparent. A notable incident came last summer with changes to Facebook’s commercial model, which significantly affected the group’s advertising revenue from the platform. “Keeping an audience is just as tough as building one,” Solomou explained, underscoring the importance of continued reliance on major platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat while aiming to maintain a balanced revenue split between direct and platform-driven ad sales. “The plan is to do what we can to keep that balance intact,” he added.

Though TikTok is considered a supporting element in Lad Bible Group’s revenue strategy, Solomou noted the platform has untapped potential. He remarked, “We’re watching closely” regarding TikTok’s evolving relationship with publishers and the possible benefits of TikTok Shop, which could create new revenue streams for creators through affiliations.

The importance of intellectual property (IP) in publishing has been growing, with a shift towards developing unique content formats that can become standalone brands. An example mentioned by Solomou was rapper Snoop Dogg’s interest in the “Snack Wars” series, which he likened to the popular show “Hot Ones.” “That’s the kind of IP that we want to continue to develop and build on,” he remarked, citing the opportunity for production work that can attract sponsorships from brands keen to go beyond traditional advertising methods.

One growing area for opportunity is collaborations with AI platforms. While tensions exist between publishers and AI companies over content usage and compensation, Solomou advocates for a cooperative approach. Lad Bible Group, already an enterprise customer of OpenAI, is engaging in projects like language translation experiments. “For us, it makes more sense to work with these platforms than against them,” he said.

Source: Noah Wire Services