• UK-based LADBible is one of the biggest publishers on Facebook with 32.6 million followers. But it is moving quickly to make content for other platforms as Facebook’s reach continues to dip.
• The publisher's monthly video views on Facebook have decreased from 3.2 billion to 1.3 billion since October, according to CrowdTangle data.
• LADBible is now focused on Snapchat and Instagram and is eyeing more long-form content.
• As part of the shift, for the past 18 months, the publisher has been producing "positively social" content that tackles topics like mental health and gender norms.

A year ago, bro-oriented UK publisher LADBible was cranking on Facebook.

The six-year-old site had built one of the biggest Facebook followings from funny video clips, and the appetite for such content seemed to only be growing—until it abruptly ended in October.

Similar to other publishers that have seen an audience drop-off on Facebook in recent months, LADBible's reach on the platform has decreased dramatically in recent months due to changes to Facebook's algorithm. In particular,  viral-minded social publishers like LittleThings and Unilad that spent years building massive audiences and distribution for their content on Facebook have noticed a sizable hit.

As a result, LADBible is turning to Instagram and Snapchat to feed its next wave of growth, the company said.

According to data from Facebook-owned CrowdTangle, engagement with LADBible's Facebook content has steadily declined since October. LADBible's monthly video views from its flagship Facebook page (which counts 32.6 million followers) dropped from 3.2 billion in October to 1.3 billion in June.

In terms of interactions—which measures likes, comments and shares—the page has dipped from 95 million to 39.8 million.

The amount of content that LADBible pumps into Facebook hasn't changed significantly, suggesting that it's become harder to drive engagement. In June, the site published 1,152 pieces of content to its main Facebook page, down slightly from the 1,373 posts published in October.

"It's no secret with what they're doing to their platform," Arian Kalantari, cofounder of LADBible Group, told Business Insider. "We probably saw that at the turn of the year where conversations were happening around 'how can we make the newsfeed better?' From my point of view, we're positive about it and we're looking at other platforms like Instagram—it's about where is the audience and what can we do to engage any kind of youth audience."

Ditching the Facebook bubble

LADBible is continuously one of the top publishers on Facebook, per findings from Tubular Labs, and its sweet spot is in short, humorous videos that people can easily scroll through in their newsfeed.

For a publisher that was born on Facebook, untethering itself from the social networking giant is tough, Kalantari said.

"Facebook is a huge beast in itself so it's definitely up there as one of our main priorities," he said. "You can't ignore the numbers that they have."

Still, Facebook's reach is declining, so the publisher is now squarely focused on Instagram and Snapchat because, "If you speak to the younger audience now, Instagram and Snapchat are very much what they're on," said Kalantari. The publisher has even hired two teenagers to work with editorial teams on planning and making social content. All told, LADBible has 150 staffers.

"When we started the business, we were 20 and 21 years old and we were of the Facebook generation and understood that world—we took advantage of it whereas the traditional publishers didn't understand the platform at the time," Kalantari said. "[Instagram and Snapchat] are replicating the way that we came about on Facebook so hiring younger talent to drive it seems like a no-brainer for us."

LADBible's main Instagram account has 6.3 million followers, up from 4.6 million a year ago, per CrowdTangle. In terms of video views, LADBible's Instagram clips had 164 million views in June, up from 26.1 million in October.

According to LADBible's internal numbers, its Instagram Stories average more than 850,000 impressions per story.

The social publisher has also created a handful of long-form videos for IGTV, Instagram's video hub. The same day that IGTV rolled out, LADBible posted a 10-minute clip titled "Conspiracies: Why the Earth is flat" with different perspectives explaining why some people believe the world is flat. The video has racked up more than 246,000 views and 950 comments.

"The growth that we see on Instagram is going to be rapid whereas Facebook is maturing," Kalantari said.

Changing tone

In addition to Instagram's IGTV, LADBible also recently became the newest publisher to join Snapchat Discover, the app's hub where publishers create vertical content. According to Kalantari, the publisher is currently making three Discover editions a week with the goal of making it daily in the near future.

Up until now, advertisers like Smirnoff and Beats by Dre have funded LADBible's move into long-form content but the publisher said that it plans to invest more in its own studio and production resources over the next 12 months.

Along with its new distribution outlets, LADBible has also changed the tone of its content from sensational clips that generate clicks on Facebook to "positively social" content that tackles issues like mental health, gender equality, and pollution.

Its work with agency AMV BBDO and The Plastic Oceans Foundation for plastic pollution, for example, includes a campaign called "The Trash Isles" starring Al Gore that encourages consumers to lobby for the trash in the ocean—which is about the size of the country of France—to become its own country. The campaign won eight Cannes Lions Awards at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

"We're in a generation now where young people are a lot more sensitive to what’s going on in the world," Kalantari said. "We're covering all sorts of topics that maybe we didn’t five or six years ago. A big focus for us is how we redefine the way in which news and entertainment is given to a young audience. Whether it's the platforms or the type of content, it's constantly evolving."

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