
LADbible Is the Most Popular Publisher on Facebook - smacktoward
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/a-british-lad-mags-social-media-dominance-reminds-us-that-the-social-network-was-never-really-meant-to-be-a-news-site.html
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mbesto
Their content playbook is straight out of early BuzzFeed/9gag. "Borrow"
original content from Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Snapchat/etc before anyone
notices, and repurpose it in any way that makes it go viral (controversy,
humor, sex, etc).

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darpa_escapee
It's a common tactic. Ebaumsworld and Newgrounds both got popular 15 years ago
through the same methods.

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kopo
You can rewind to the birth of MTV 15 years before that.

"I Want My MTV" by Tannenbaum and Marks is a great book. Think of it as the
bible of what a successful marketing execs wants to achieve.

It's not a common tactic. It is the BASIS of consumer culture. Give people
what they want. Target their senses not their minds.

It's how you get everything from the global spread of Pepsi to McDonalds to
Starbucks to Apple to Hollywood to the Kardashians having 200 million teenage
girls globally wanting to grow up to be like them.

Consumer culture is based on giving people what they want. And labeling it
Freedom.

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nathancahill
And now, let's repeat the Non-Conformist Oath!

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justtopost
I once watched Jello Biafra lead a crowd in a "we wont follow orders" chant.
The irony was literally and figuritively deafaning. Nothing more stuck up than
the in-crowd of outcasts.

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spuz
The article was posted one day after Unilad (the 4th most popular publisher
according to this article) went into administration:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45744028](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45744028)

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css
For the Americans here, Administration is the common law equivalent of
Bankruptcy.

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malvosenior
> _In other words, Facebook isn’t holding itself to the same standards on
> which it’s being judged by critics who’d like to see reputable, serious news
> organizations dominating the feed._

Does anyone actually want that? It's a _social_ network, I doubt there's a
large percentage of users who want to see the same mainstream news that
dominates every other platform. I think real users want it to be fun and
personal, not "serious".

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jimjimjim
and children just want to eat ice cream.

doesn't mean they should.

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tedunangst
Do we really want Facebook to be our parents?

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jimjimjim
do we really want facebook to be that guy that says 'yeah sure, eat whatever
you want'

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reitanqild
Yep. Just like the grocery store.

It very soon becomes creepy if someone at the store tells me: I don't think
you should eat more pizza this week.

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minimaxir
As someone who regularly works with CrowdTangle data, I can confirm the
article's assertion that LADbible/Unilad's Facebook numbers are nuts.

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SpikeDad
Sadly that would mean that Fox News is #1. Now we know why the US is in the
state it's in.

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minimaxir
For link posts, when LADBible began its inflection in mid-July, it became
mostly on par performancewise with the Fox News page (notably, Fox News has
1/2th the Fans).

