The Lad Bible's Mimi Turner on pranks, banter and sexual politics

Mimi Turner, the woman behind the UK’s biggest online lads’ mag, talks to Phoebe Luckhurst 
Man’s world: Mimi Turner outside The LAD Bible office in Commercial Street
Rebecca Reid

Last winter The LAD Bible launched a campaign. “Instead of spending 50 quid on a night out,” explains the site’s marketing director Mimi Turner, “you bought 50 quid’s worth of food for homeless people and distributed it. That was really interesting — people would send us pictures of food they had bought.”

This is not a recognised picture of a “lad”; nor is it the recognised picture of The LAD Bible, an online compendium of viral content that rose to prominence off the back (or, perhaps, the front) of #CleavageThursdays — grainy footage of stag party pranks and that conveniently elusive catch-all, “banter”.

It has been a useful byword for laddish aggression on university campuses and for #everydaysexism. Laura Bates, founder of the original Everyday Sexism project, wrote in a piece for The Independent saying sites including The LAD Bible “implicitly encourage sexual pursuit of unwilling women”.

Play time: The LAD Bible office

It was launched by Alex Solomou —“Solly” — and Arian Kalantari in 2012, and now has two offices. The editorial team is based in Manchester and the commercial arm is just off Commercial Street and it employs around 50 staff (“about a quarter” are women) across both. It is reported to be the 12th most popular website in the UK. How much money does it make? Turner assures me it is “profitable”.

It’s certainly playing with some big numbers: 49 per cent of the 18 to 24-year-old UK male population follows The LAD Bible, and it has almost 10.5 million likes on Facebook and 1.4 million followers on Twitter. Many of its audience “come back two, three times a day”, says Turner, and it’s not unusual for links to get “five, 10, 15 or a hundred thousand likes” from a demographic that traditional media both covets and cannot lure.

Additionally, 27 per cent of its followers are female. If all of these people are raging misogynists, we must face a bigger problem than anyone has twigged.

Turner is the publication’s first marketing director. And she is convinced that young men are unfairly represented by mainstream media. “The way news reporting works means we get a view about bad things that happen,” she points out. “As a consequence, the view of young men especially can be quite negative, and there hasn’t ever really been anything to counter that.”

She points calmly to data. The growth of mobile and social media means that the team has “a really deep insight” into its audience. “We understand how a very large audience — mostly male — responds to different types of stories, what they like, what they support. We have a very granular picture, and it’s a very uplifting one. Blokes want to support each other, they want to be funny, they want to be clever, they want to pat someone on the shoulder and say ‘Well done’.”

She says sometimes as many as “a third” of The LAD Bible’s stories champion someone for succeeding at something, giving as an example a post uploaded by a guy who had lost a lot of weight. Many of The LAD Bible’s submissions come from readers.

Lad Bible founder Alex Solomou

Certainly, the homepage at the time of writing is, if not particularly interesting to me, a 25-year-old female writer, not offensive either. There’s sponsored content about a PS2 game and a video of a man who pumped a Coke bottle full of propane (“the results were explosive”). There’s some celeb fare. There’s no cleavage at all, actually.

I’d expected that: many say the tone and content of the site has changed (presumably so the brand remains appealing to advertisers). #CleavageThursdays are no more.

Is Turner responsible for the shift? “I was really involved in that. We wanted it to be a place where women felt included, not that they were the butt of jokes. It’s a relatively male proposition but I think it should be a place where anyone feels comfortable.” She says that positive responses come when “women are portrayed doing strong, positive things”.

How do they get those hits? What is everyone else doing wrong — or not doing? “Solly took the view that if something is funny or clever or inspiring or new-relevant or interesting to the friends you’ve got on Facebook, two million people are going to like it as well.”

Fine, but isn’t it all just clickbait? “Ten years ago producing content was all about telling people that things happened and expecting them to want to know,” she says. “News supply used to be very limited and audiences used to have to find it. That world doesn’t exist any more: your average 16-year- old now has a better, broader ability to get the news curated exactly the way they want it — and the people they’re prepared to listen to are the people that talk to them in their own language. It might not be the traditional idea of news but for us it’s a big story.”

It must be weird to have a 24-year-old guy as your boss. “It should be but really — they’re all just so impressive,” she says generously. Youth “is not a bar to knowing all the things that people who are 40 know about. These guys have an ability to understand and to activate an audience.”

The office is fun but “focused”. At the commercial wing, where I meet Turner, there is a table tennis table and a whiteboard — or The Hall of Late, on which are scrawled excuses by team members for tardiness (including — “Manchester time”, “poor tactics” and simply “Tube”).

If you’re forty-five minutes late you have to buy coffee for the team; two hours-plus and you have to be dressed by the team. Everyone — Turner is the only woman I see — is dressed smartly, in checked shirts. Do the team have fun together? “Company culture, teams and team-building are really important,” she confirms. “And Fifa’s a big part.”

Boys will be boys, and they’ll keep reading The LAD Bible.

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