Unilad
Logo of Uni Lad from 2010 to 2012
|
|
|
Type of site
|
Viral internet media content |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Liam Harrington and Sam Bentley |
| Created by | Alex Partridge |
| Website | www |
| Launched | April 2, 2010 |
| Current status | Online |
Unilad, styled as UNILAD, is a United Kingdom internet media company and website. Before its relaunch in 2014, the site, then referred to as UniLad or Uni Lad, promoted lad culture and targeted male university students in the United Kingdom, describing itself as the "number one university student lad's magazine".
The site shut down in 2012 after controversy over misogynistic content. The brand and its Facebook page were subsequently acquired from owner Alex Partridge and relaunched in 2014 at unilad.co.uk with "no shared association at all" with the previous website. Now "one of Facebook's most popular content producers," the new website has become a top publisher of video content. The page had 17 million followers in 2016, with 2.7 billion monthly video views, second to BuzzFeed's "Tasty" channel in views and are first in global engagement.
Alex Partridge from Eastbourne and James Street, a student at the University of Plymouth, created the original website. According to an FAQ on the website in 2010, the site was "created, designed and written by Alex Partridge", then a 21 year old student at Oxford Brookes University. James Street, then a web design student at the University of Plymouth, managed technical aspects of the site, claiming that he was "not responsible for writing or checking the content that gets published".
In 2014, Liam Harrington and Sam Bentley acquired ownership of the brand name and inherited its Facebook page.
The 2010 website described itself as being "for when you are bored in the library" and "the 'tongue in cheek', article based solution to library boredom". The site also set up a "Uni Ladette" page with "debauched disasters" from a "borderline alcoholic" female writer that they supposedly found in "a gutter, muttering something about needing to get laid and nursing her broken stilettos".
The site attracted considerable critical comment in the press and on Twitter due to perceived promotion of rape in some of the articles on the website. Articles that have been reported on in the press include:
The website also contained a shop section that sold T-shirts with a variety of slogans, including a rape-themed T-shirt in the style of the World War II-era Keep Calm and Carry On propaganda posters reading "Keep Calm – It Won't Take Long".
...
Wikipedia