What I learnt … about staying relevant to Gen Z

Alexander “Solly” Solomou, 33, co-founder of Ladbible, knows how to engage young people. In the UK, two thirds of 18- to 34-year olds consume content from his collection of brands — such as SportBible and GamingBible. In the US it has more than 141 million followers, and 494 million globally. Solomou set up Ladbible in 2012 and floated LBG Media on the stock market in 2021. It had revenues of £67.5 million last year and is valued at £280 million. As the millennials who first started watching his content get older, how does Solomou ensure that LadBible’s content stays relevant?
We started out as a disruptor
Facebook was the platform for young audiences, so when I was 21 that was the equivalent of what Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok is for those younger audiences now.
Over time we have watched very carefully how audiences interact and where they are interacting and have adapted. On a platform like TikTok we are the fastest growing collective of brands.
We have evolved our brands to make sure we understand the audiences inside out, and that we give them culture in a way that they will understand.
When we first started growing on Instagram we hired two 16 year-olds who had grown audiences of over three million people. We had to convince their parents to come to us and that we would help them get their education alongside working with us. They blew up our Instagram and TikTok audiences.
What we have done consistently is bring in brilliant people who really understand culture and have different passion points and where those people are engaging with content.
Most of our team members who are coming through the door now are in that Gen Z [born from 1997 to 2012] bracket. We make sure our people are reflective of where we want to gain our consumers.
We challenge ourselves. We are focused on young adults as a business.
We have broken Gen Z down into two parts
You have the top half that is a bit older and you have your lower end, who tend to be more your Snapchat users. From a leadership standpoint, we need to understand from those people who live and breathe it, how our brands are measuring against what our engagement levels are, and adapting what we do.
We have two studios, one in Manchester and one in London, where we film content, and have over 200 content creators inside the business, whether that is journalists, producers or editors. We have specialists across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube and they tend to skew to the generation that each platform talks to.
Take gaming as a brand
Gaming among millennials and Gen Z is two different things, for sure. Those millennials who are into gaming and how we interact with them may not change a huge amount. When you understand that audience, give them more and more of what they enjoy. It is their passion and it is something that we focus on.
We are not pruning yet
Millennials are so important to our business. We are certainly looking at ways to cater better to them. We had [the actor] Timothée Chalamet in the studios filming a piece of content that was broadcast quality. We have [hired] people from the likes of Endemol and Shine and Channel 4, who are brilliant at creating content that lives on channels like YouTube.
We can also acquire new audiences: buying Betches Media is a good example
They are specialists in millennial and Gen Z women. They started out in the US market but have a global audience base. We had been speaking to that business for nearly four years. When we went to New York, we’d meet up with them and spend time with them. After we listed the business we started to have a conversation.
We took our time on it to make sure we got the culture fit right. It was three entrepreneurial founders who had built a profitable business from day one, with an extremely engaged audience and completely aligned to our way of thinking. LBG Media acquired the Betches for $24 million in cash, with the potential for a further $30 million in payments, in October last year.
We have come a long way
The evolution of our business can be seen in stats like 45 per cent of our audience is now female, whereas it started quite male. Our leadership team is over 40 per cent female. Some of our people will grow with the audience and others will naturally want to nurture the next generation of talent coming through. From a managing the team perspective, a business perspective, they can help harness it.
If I have to share one piece of advice…
Growing a business is one of the most painful things, and also one of the most rewarding things. People are the most important thing to any business, so have the best people. When you get the right people in a room you can create magic, and for me there is nothing better than that.
The challenges are painful
There is continuous change in business. We refer, in our business, in football terms from going from the Sunday leagues to the Premier League, and when you go up a league you have to operate differently as a business. We are in the Championship and still have one league to go. It requires a different level of professionalism, people, and also pace. And it’s not for the faint hearted.
• How I turned LADbible into a £260 million media empire
We are now challenging ourselves to know what Gen Alpha is doing
Gen Alpha — 14 year olds and below — are a bit young for us to be engaging with. But we are still asking “where are they consuming?” and “what touch points do they have?”
My four year-old and two year old are quite often watching YouTube Kids on my phone. Their access point is YouTube. We are thinking all the time how will we connect with them? Is it going to be our existing brands, new brands? Do we acquire businesses and are there going to be brands that resonate with those younger audiences better than maybe what we do currently?
Solly Solomou was talking to Richard Tyler, editor of the Times Enterprise Network