“We were so profitable, our main problem was how to cleverly invest all that money,” he says. Venture investors from the US and Europe have approached the company in recent years about investing, but Banišauskas has no need for more funds. “I think the others were losing that traffic and we were getting it,” he says.Įven as it grew, Bored Panda kept things simple. In fact, he says Bored Panda experienced a traffic boost with each algorithm change. That’s why Banišauskas believes Bored Panda wasn’t punished by the Facebook algorithm tweaks that knocked out some of its viral competitors. “If you deliver, people will be okay with it.” “The old clickbait was all about trying to invite someone to read the article and it wouldn’t deliver,” he says. Bored Panda decided against using the same tactics. “These guys were really growing and hacking the algorithm,” he says. When up-and-coming viral publishers began flooding Facebook with clickbait, Banišauskas says his team discussed whether to follow their lead. Submissions poured in, reaching 100 a day, and many of the artists Bored Panda featured later told Banišauskas his posts had changed their careers, winning them new jobs, TV appearances, or fame in their communities. Around that time he decided to let the artists he was writing about tell their own stories. By 2012, Bored Panda was drawing an average of a million visits per month, and Banišauskas hired his first employee. Articles like “ Creative Dad Takes Crazy Photos of Daughters” went viral, racking up 5 million views. In total engagements, Bored Panda ranked second only to, and ahead of major news organizations like NBC, the Daily Mail, the New York Times, and CNN. Bored Panda had more than three times as many engagements per post as its closest competitor, conservative news site Daily Wire. Much of that traffic comes through Facebook, where Bored Panda’s October posts on average generated more likes, shares, and other reactions than any other English-language news site, according to NewsWhip, a news analytics provider. The company pays to promote some stories, though it attributes much of the recent growth to organic traffic. In October, Bored Panda says it hit 116 million unique visitors, up from an average of 17 million per month last year. As its competition has faded, Bored Panda’s growth has accelerated. Against all odds, Bored Panda, a blog started by a Lithuanian photographer in 2009, remains among the top publishers on Facebook. That is, unless you are the one viral publisher that has defied the algorithm and thrived.
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