LBG Media, the UK listed owner of the self-described “global leader in youth publishing” LADbible Group grew revenue by 23% and EBITDA 32% in 2024 as it reported “strong signs of early success” in the US. Its revenue has now trebled in the past four years, with content marketing now comprising 51%. The company’s previous 40% dependance on Facebook has now halved, making investors increasingly confident about growth prospects amid predictions that it is targeting £200m revenue, presumably in 3-4 years.
LBG’s worldwide audience grew by almost 20% to 503mn, 28% in the United States. Interestingly, the gender split of the brand once derided as sexist is now 50:50, following its 2023 acquisition of the New York-based Betches Media LLC for $24mn (£19.7mn) and up to a further $30mn on an earnout to 2026.
The 12-year-old Betches was owned by its three female founders who will all remain with the business, at least until 2026. Betches has 32mn, largely female followers and had generated $14.6mn of revenue and $3.9mn EBITDA in 2022, 44% ahead of 2021.
Investors noted that the acquisition marked a step-change in the LBG business because of Betches’ focus on millennial and Gen Z women in the US. The deal followed the successful US acquisition of UNILAD in 2018 and insiders predict further US investments by LBG after “a transformational year”. The company now has an enterprise value of £239mn.
LBG/ LADbible was launched 11 years ago in Manchester, England by two schoolfriends, Alexander “Solly” Solomou and Arian Kalantari. CEO Solomonou had developed the idea while studying business at university. It started with a Facebook page and then the content, traffic and followers just exploded. Their first Facebook posting achieved over 75k readers. They were in business.
The site had been launched just a few a years before the demise of FHM, which had led British “lads” magazines all the way up to almost 2mn monthly copy sales and back again in a frenzied 15 years. LADbible seemed like a logical successor to FHM, Loaded, Maxim, Nuts and Zoo which had stamped British “blokeyness” across the world in the last years of the 20th century.
By 2014, LADbible had more than 5mn monthly uniques. Its come a long way since.
LADbible publishes shareable clips, pictures and longer form cause-related campaigns, giving 18-34 year olds a voice “by building communities that laugh, think and act, across all social channels”. In practice, the site originally became best known for male banter, pranks, sexist jokes, and video of America’s fattest bear. Back in 2015, BuzzFeed – no less – noted that LADbible was inviting women to send-in pictures of themselves for two features, #CleavageThursday and #BumdayMonday.
But, along the way, it has grown up and won two Cannes Lions Grand Prix awards for its ground-breaking environmental campaign, Trash Isles. Last year, it weighed into the Roe v Wade abortion debate in the US and launched Sexual Abuse & Violence Week. Its grown up a lot.
Brand extensions include SPORTbible, GAMINGbible, UNILAD and the women’s site Tyla, for an audience of young adults; 40% are female. Its user-generated and publisher content is a lively, high-quality blend of Vice, BuzzFeed and much else, with a declared strategy “to give the youth generation a voice by building communities that laugh, think and act”.
The sizzle is everywhere. LBG claims to be “the largest youth publisher in the world”, with its UK audience said to comprise 64% of the country’s 18-34 year olds, a valuable demographic for advertisers which has historically been hard to reach. LBG has been wooing fund managers this past week with an investment case based on its addressable digital ad market of $21bn in the UK, Ireland, US and Australia.
LADbible has long extinguished the sexism of its original popularity but the site has drawn the ire of envious traditional media for its blurring of the lines between advertising and independent content. But then, like most other digital media outlets, content marketing is the primary source of its revenue, along with advertising and revenue sharing arrangements.
Given its consistent profit and strong cash balances (£27mn at end-September), LADbible (and parent LBG Media) might bristle at comparisons with the disastrous BuzzFeed and Vice. After all, it was bootstrapped for most of its first decade and had a 31% EBITDA margin back in 2021. But its 2024 results have set investors thinking more positively about the prospects of a company whose market cap is still only about 70% of its £360mn IPO in 2021.
The financials also tell the story of a company which – while it has captured a growing slice of the valuable youth audience -needs to restore its profit margins which were hit in 2022 by a 21% increase in staffing. There’s still work to do:
| LBG Media Plc £mn | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 |
| Revenue (growth) | 86 | 70 | 63 | 55 | 30 | 29 |
| EBITDA | 25 | 19 | 16 | 17 | 6 | 6 |
| Margin | 28% | 27% | 25% | 31% | 18% | 20% |
| People | 471 | 446 | 470 | 388 | 280 | 201 |
| Net cash (debt) | 18.8 | 13.7 | 29.3 | 34.3 | (6.3) | (9.3) |
Revenue is now 37% from the UK, 32% from the US and (curiously) 25% from Ireland, reflecting the global audience that has more than trebled in the past five years. But much of that early growth was outstripped by cost increases. In 2022, the 15% revenue increase was swallowed up by the rising cost of sales (+47%), overheads (+30%) and payroll (+16%). LBG effectively spent an additional £9.5mn in 2022 “just” to get the extra £9.4mn of revenue.
With a 28% EBITDA margin in 2024, LBG may be on its way back to the 31% peak of 2021. Cash conversion last year was 105% so it’s looking good, with the first quarter revenue in 2025 forecast to be double-digits ahead.
Solly Solomonou says: “LBG is well positioned to capitalise on the fast-growing digital media market. We have a diverse range of brands catering to the hard to reach 18–34-year-old demographic, have expanded our capabilities, with our survey platform LADnation forming an increasingly key part of our offer, and we are taking advantage of the significant growth opportunity that the US market has to offer.”
The audience numbers show LADbible is a significant youth brand, especially in the UK, US, and Australia. This is a good media group but with, err, a business model that might belong to a previous era of digital exhuberance. The bruised backers of BuzzFeed and Vice would tell LBG that it simply cannot afford to put its faith in the social media platforms.
The simple fact is that the future of so much media depends on some degree of “ownership”: of its audience. For LADbible, that has meant getting out from under the platforms and generating most of its own audience on its own sites. It might also mean generating some “owned” revenue from readers, whether as subscriptions, membership, or eCommerce.
LBG Media need have no cash (or profit growth) worries – as long as it keeps tight control of spending and overheads. It’s a golden opportunity for the bigger-than-you-think UK startup that has finally upstaged the bloated transatlantic ambitions of BuzzFeed and Vice. The evident success of the Betches acquisition is expected to lead to a yet bigger US deal in the next year or two.
All-digital youth media can win.
