With 17 million social media followers and surging revenues, The Lad Bible is a publishing phenomenon. Critics say it objectifies women and fuels sexism. Now The Lad Bible wants to be taken seriously, but can it shake off its trashy image?

Matthew Tucker / BuzzFeed

Launched in its current incarnation in 2012, it graduated from a pack of British "lad" websites to become one of the most socially driven, Facebook-centric publishers around. It's part of a new generation of media companies that focus their efforts on social sharing via Facebook, Twitter, and other, newer platforms such as Vine and Snapchat.

Despite this scale, the company operates under the radar of mainstream media, and guards its inner workings closely. Having spoken to former employees and contributors, BuzzFeed News has learned that:

– The Lad Bible's parent company, 65twenty, is trying to make the transition from scrappy startup to serious media business – but has some way to go, according to insiders.

– On its website, The Lad Bible routinely publishes images without credits or attribution.

– The company hired an experienced advertising sales director with a background in newspapers in January 2014 but he left in November after a dispute over commission payments.

– The laddish internal office culture led to one new starter having pornography uploaded onto their work laptop as a prank.

– The Lad Bible is now trying to shake off its reputation as a boobs-and-banter site, full of sexist jokes and soft porn, which has seen it vilified as part of a "lad culture" pervading university campuses and high streets.

– It is financially successful, making more than £1 million a year from advertising, and its 24-year-old CEO harbours a dream of it becoming "the next IPC Media" (a reference to the UK's biggest magazine company, now called Time Inc. UK).

Its main Facebook page has 7.7 million likes and is gaining more at the rate of about 250,000 a week. In terms of traffic to theladbible.com, the publisher claims 4 million daily visitors, citing comScore figures, and 20 million unique visitors a month, according to one company director.

The Lad Bible has refined quickfire viral publishing into an art form. It spots videos before they become hits, and with lightning speed uploads them to its Facebook page. The clips are usually taken from YouTube, Twitter, Vine, Reddit, and other Facebook accounts. Sometimes there is a credit and link to the source account or the person who sent it in, and sometimes there isn't.

In an interview, a 65twenty spokeswoman acknowledged that the company was reconsidering its stance on photo copyright. "We are definitely looking at how we attribute," she said.

The Lad Bible's growth is closely linked to the explosive growth of video on Facebook.

Since June 2014, Facebook says, its users have on average viewed videos 1 billion times across the platform every day, thanks in no small part to the autoplay feature, which makes clips start playing without users having to click.

The Lad Bible has around 30 staff, not including freelancers. Some are straight out of university. Editorial staff are tasked with scouring the web for video clips and sifting through the 1,000 emails The Lad Bible's readers send in each day, submitting or suggesting content they've seen online.

The atmosphere, according to two people we've spoken to who worked there, is anarchic, and appears to be part digital media start-up and part university sports club. In one instance, pornography was uploaded to a new starter's laptop before it was handed to him, as part of an initiation prank. There have been instances of someone's Facebook status being updated with childish messages while they were away from their desk.

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