What’s Behind the Launch of LADbible’s FAST Channel? “They’re Already Watching on TV”

Three weeks ago, UK publisher LADbible Group launched a free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel on Samsung TV Plus, marking the social entertainment company’s first foray into CTV.

The move brings its popular YouTube formats onto the FAST platform, including Snack Wars, Agree to Disagree, and Would You Rather, along with a new debate format called Jury Room.

Becky Gardner, Head of Originals at LADbible Group, discusses the FAST channel’s launch, how LADbible produces video content, and where YouTube sits alongside the digital publisher’s short-form video platforms.

What prompted the decision to launch a FAST channel?

We started thinking about this maybe a year and a half ago, so it was a long time in the making. FAST is a very new thing for us. I did a lot of R&D into what FAST is, and whether it would actually suit our kind of programming. Historically it was a little bit different in terms of its programming, maybe historically slightly older, archive content. Gordon Ramsay had a channel, Graham Norton had a channel, and I used to watch those shows religiously.

So we were trying to find, first off, if our content would actually do well on a FAST channel. Secondly, we found it was a different kind of consumption, but maybe in a good way. A lot of our formats are very formulaic and very easy to digest in a digital-first format, but they also run into each other pretty well. We have Minutes With, which is a first-person story format. So if you’re into that story, you might be into the next one as well. It’s both bingeable and also kind of relaxing, because you don’t have to fully decide which one you want to watch, it’s just scheduled for you.

Then we had to get a lot of our videos ready for the FAST platform. We’re a digital business, a social entertainment company. So we were YouTube first, or social first, and we had to basically change a lot of our licensing and our content to be ready to upload. It took a long time to get there because obviously we have a lot of content, but we got there. We were also looking at our backend on YouTube, and finding that an increasing percentage are watching YouTube on their TV. So if they’re already watching on TV in this bingeable way of viewing, this seems like a good way to go.

LADbible content is largely aimed at 18 to 34-year-olds – how strong is that younger audience on Samsung TV Plus?

We have evergreen content, which is actually quite a scoped audience. So even though we make formats with the cultural zeitgeist in mind, you can probably watch if you’re a 60-year-old or a 16-year-old, which is great as well. So although as a business we are very much focused on younger audiences, we don’t go making formats purely for a narrow age group. It’s more a case of trying to find bigger audiences; we want as many people to watch as possible.

Do you produce video content in-house?

We do everything in-house. We have a team of 18 people who work a bit like a TV unit, including a group of producers, with a casting producer and development producer. In terms of content we have LADbible Stories which does documentaries, LADbible Entertainment which is the celebrity content, and SPORTbible. And we’re constantly making content, literally on a daily, weekly basis.

Our studio has been running for five and a half years, and we’re ramping up production, purely due to the amount of opportunities coming our way. But also we want to build our brand and our formats out to be as big a slate as a studio like Banijay; they have big slates within their indies. We want bigger slates to be able to give our audiences different things.

How does monetisation on the FAST channel compare with your other video channels? 

This is too early for us to say as we’re only three weeks in from launch. We have a very successful digital business, we’ve proved a fantastic strategy there. I think we need to be on the platform for a few months to be able to compare and contrast from our perspective.

LADbible now averages 100 million viewing minutes per month on YouTube – how is YouTube content used to produce short-form video? 

Originals are the longest-form version of what we produce. But there are multiple different teams who work across specific channels, including a Snap team, and a huge Facebook team, literally 50 or 60 people. Everyone has their own goals and ways of working on each specific platform. The goal of my team is to create the original IP, and that sits best on YouTube. And we cut down from the hero video across the different platforms, in order to create the individual bespoke videos for each platform.

We split our YouTube channel into three genres (sport, factual, entertainment) to serve each niche audience, and we are developing more and more shows on a weekly basis. At the moment we average four long-form episodes per week. On the short-form side, we publish around 350 videos every day, and receive 4,566 engagements every minute.

The launch includes a new series called Jury Room – what can you tell us about the new show, and any other formats in development?

Jury Room came about because we wanted to get a lot of LADbible contributors together to discuss topics that people want to know about, voicing their opinions on topics like conscription or billionaires, and seeing if they can they change their mind and come to an actual decision. So we launched that as our new show on FAST. We also post it on YouTube after the fact, because at the minute, it’s way too early for us to invest more into an entire series on something that we’ve only had for three weeks.

Snack Wars is our most famous show, so we’re also thinking about how we build on that brand, and how we do spin-off versions. How do we build on this thing that everyone loves, but in a different way?

Are there plans to launch the channel on other FAST platforms and in different markets?

We are very much looking at different geos. At the moment we are very much at the start, but we’re basically looking at everything.

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