Bored Panda
Bored Panda is a Lithuanian website that publishes articles about "entertaining and amusing news". The majority of its articles are repackaged user-generated content from social media platforms such as Reddit, Instagram and Twitter.[1] It was founded in 2009 by Tomas Banišauskas, who was then a business administration student at Vilnius University.
| Format | Online |
|---|---|
| Founder(s) | Tomas Banišauskas |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Country | Lithuania |
| Website | www |
As of November 2017, the site had 41 employees. It makes most of its revenue from the advertisements on the site.[2] LRT has described Bored Panda as a "Lithuanian success story".[3]
History
Bored Panda was founded in 2009 by Tomas Banišauskas, a Vilnius University student studying business administration. According to Banišauskas, there was a "serious offer" to buy the company from a businessperson listed on the "Forbes' 100 rich list".[3]
Popularity
According to NewsWhip, Bored Panda's Facebook page received over 30 million likes, shares, comments, and reactions in October 2017, more than any other English-language news website that month. Bored Panda also reported that it was viewed by 116 million unique visitors that month.
In November 2017, Wired reported that the site had flourished despite Facebook cracking down on attention-grabbing clickbait headlines, a change that had made controversial political news much more successful on the platform.[4] Banišauskas has claimed the success of the site is due publishing a small number of higher-quality articles, which are copied from other sites, and avoiding clickbait headlines.[5]
Reception
Wired contributor Evan Griffith described Bored Panda as "...a throwback to when the Internet was less an addictive, stress-inducing reflection of the ugliness of modern life, and more a place to kill time when we were bored."[4]
References
- Roose, Kevin (2017-11-30). "How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-03-27.
- Roose, Kevin (2017-11-30). "How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
- Deveikis, Jonas (2021-02-06). "A Lithuanian success story: Bored Panda – interview". LRT. Retrieved 2023-02-24.
- Griffith, Erin (2017-11-28). "How Bored Panda Survived Facebook's Clickbait Purge". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2019-01-07.
- Silverman, Craig (2017-09-28). "Publishers Overseas Are Making Money By Targeting Americans With Cheap — And Sometimes False — Information About Niche Topics". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 2019-01-07.