Bored Panda has the advantage of getting most of its content free from up-and-coming artists and other creative types who want the kind of exposure a large Facebook page can bring. (And, yes, it does ask for permission. I contacted several artists whose work had been featured on Bored Panda, and all said they’d given their blessing.) It has also adopted a quality-over-quantity strategy that appears to have served it well. It published only 519 articles in October, or roughly 16 posts a day, according to NewsWhip. Compare that with CNN, which published 5,595 articles during the month, and Fox News, which published 51,919 articles.

It hasn’t been a straight line to success. In its early days, Bored Panda relied on StumbleUpon, a link aggregation site that was popular at the time, for much of its traffic. But in 2010, according to Mr. Banisauskas, StumbleUpon sharply reduced Bored Panda’s prominence on the site and pressured him to buy ads instead.

As Mr. Banisauskas would later write in a post on Medium, the experience taught him that “the only way to survive in this industry is to build long-term value through loyal followers.”

The next several years were a struggle, but in 2013, Bored Panda began to see a spike in viewers being sent from a new source: Facebook. Its positive, lighthearted content was a hit with the social network’s users, and the site’s traffic grew tenfold in a single year. Soon, despite Mr. Banisauskas’s intentions, Bored Panda was far from self-sufficient — its prospects hinged almost entirely on Facebook.

More recently, while its competitors have hedged their risks by diversifying away from Facebook, Bored Panda has made a conscious effort to pull the platform even closer. It has started several offshoot Facebook brands, including pages for art and animal-themed stories, and a page called Crafty Panda that focuses on D.I.Y. projects. It has begun creating original content, too, and recently set up a video studio in its office, a hospital from the 19th century that was converted into a tech office complex.

“Everyone wants to be not so dependent on Facebook,” Mr. Banisauskas told me. “At the same time, it’s impossible — Facebook is the place where people share their ideas.”