On the ground floor of a converted warehouse in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, the leaders of the Lad Bible are showing me their film studio. “Next time you see this, it’ll be like Pinewood,” Mimi Turner, the company’s marketing director, says. “There’s going to be a green screen and everything,” adds 24-year-old CEO, Alexander Solomou, known universally as Solly.

“Did you see Amy?” he asks, referring to Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse. “That was a great example of how you could create an amazing story without a multi-million-pound budget. That’s the kind of thing we want to be doing. There’s no reason we can’t be on Netflix or Amazon Prime.”

There is work to be done before Pinewood executives are quaking in their ergonomic chairs, however. The room is dusty and filled with clutter. In one corner, is just a large television surrounded by shelves stacked with old games consoles. An N64 loaded with GoldenEye sits in front of it.

But, unpromising as it seems, this room might be the future of British media. Last month, it was announced that FHM magazine and its Bauer Media stablemate, Zoo, would cease operations in the UK, following the closures of Loaded earlier this year, and of Nuts last year. The appeal of traditional lads’ mags was always founded on two pillars: naked women and brash humour. The availability of online pornography kicked out one. The Lad Bible, and a handful of other sites like it, have gradually eroded the other.

Over the past three years, the Lad Bible – including its offshoots the Sport Bible, the Odds Bible and Pretty52, a female version – has become one of the most visited sites in the UK. In the past year, according to online analytics website comScore, the site has grown by 300 per cent. Most visitors come to the site by following links on social media, and Turner claims that half of all British men aged 18-30, and 20% of women, follow the Lad Bible on Facebook; it has 17 million followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combined. Not bad for a site created three years ago by Solomou and his friend Arian Kalantari when they were still students.

CEO Alexander Solomou: ‘We got one of my little brother’s friends to wear a hotdog suit while he tried to break the world record for eating hotdogs. That went off.’ Photograph: Shaw and Shaw

The Lad Bible now boasts 70 staff, who curate a mixture of articles, pictures and videos, almost always based on content from elsewhere. The range of material is broad, but most of it would not look out of place in a traditional men’s magazine: stories of bravery or stupidity, practical jokes, sporting or drinking feats. On a day picked at random, the homepage features an eclectic mix, from Woman Accidentally Snapped Her Husband’s Penis When She Jumped Up To Shop Online, to Man Tweets The Police After Buying A Disappointing Pasty, and Meet “Scouse Pammie”: The Woman Who Spent £20,000 To Look Like Pamela Anderson.

This week, the Lad Bible announced the appointments of Tom Toumazis, formerly of Yahoo and Disney, as non-executive director, and Jonathan Durden, co-founder of media agency PHD, as a senior adviser. Last month, they hired a content director from Vice, and there has been a considerable uptick in conventional news stories; the most-read section last month was dominated by coverage of the Paris terror attacks. But the team are going to have to work harder than that to shake off the image that, in the words of Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates, it and sites like it represent “a culture of misogyny sickeningly disguised as ‘banter’”.

Few words in popular discourse are more problematic than “lad”, which has become shorthand for a kind of boorishness that is not purely a hangover from the boobs-and-beer excesses of the 1990s and early 2000s. At its worst, today’s university “lad culture” has been connected with rape culture, where any tactic – drink, drugs, lying, physical force – is seen to be justified in pursuit of sex. And in its early days, the Lad Bible was often accused of sexism, a claim strengthened by regular features including the now retired Bumday Mondays and Cleavage Tuesdays. But Solomou is keen to emphasise a break. “We realised that certain things needed to change if we wanted to compete with those guys in the States,” he says.

“Those guys” mean Buzzfeed and Vice, the US media organisations that started out on the margins of the internet, but have since become mainstream players. Conservative industry estimates suggest that the firm’s annual revenue is £2m; given the pace of growth some think the true figure could be higher, perhaps as much as £4m. Yet it must manage its reputation carefully: investors can be spooked by a business that doesn’t toe a squeaky-clean line.

One early Lad Bible “commandment” stated, for example, that “Any female proving hard to bed shall be referred to as a Nobstacle course.” Does Solomou regret this earlier content? “I wouldn’t say I regret it,” he says. “It was a learning curve, and I’m glad we’ve ended up where we are. We are strong enough now and big enough to influence what people think about ‘lad’. That old-fashioned idea – I prefer the word lout – is not something that we believe in. In my eyes, the lad is someone who spots a grandma crossing the road with heavy shopping, someone with manners, who is polite, who can be a hero.”

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If the proto-studio downstairs is surprisingly dusty and sad, the main Lad Bible office, upstairs in the same building, is truer to type. A fridge shaped like a VW camper van contains soft drinks. Jack Nicholson is spray-painted on to one wall and a selection of great footballers – Pelé, Zidane – on another. A large, curved sofa serves as a meeting room-cum-gaming pit, and a sign on the wall next to it lists Fifa “apologies” – computer games in which a staff member has been beaten by five goals or more and has to apologise for a poor performance.

The VW camper van fridge. The Lad Bible has 70 staff. Photograph: Shaw and Shaw

Around 40 men and five women, mainly in T-shirts and trainers and more bearded than average, sit in a large, open-plan space, hunched over computers and looking up at TV screens. Those in the Sport Bible section show Sky Sports News. Others show real-time data from the site: how many people are looking at Lad Bible content – around 27,000 as I watch – and how widely that content is being shared.

“We can usually tell within two minutes of a piece’s launch how well it’s going to do,” Mike Vaughan, the Lad Bible’s creative lead, explains. Vaughan came to the company’s attention by running a spoof Mario Balotelli Twitter feed, Mario BaLOLtelli. “Initially we bought the rights to the feed off him,” Solomou says. “Then he started a new one that overtook the original. That’s when we realised we had to hire him.”

In fact, many of the staff came to Solomou’s attention by running fake Twitter accounts, or submitting free content to the site. A knack for what will be shared is far more valuable than a polished prose style. Affixed to a whiteboard is a checklist of qualities the editors are after: Funny, Informative, Community, Viral/trend, Influential, Relatable. Pieces that fulfil these requirements are thought more likely to go viral, the main measure of success. The most-shared Lad Bible piece this year was Father Tackles Suicide Bomber In Beirut, Killing Himself To Save Hundreds Of Lives, with 191,000 shares. But The Struggle Is Real For Americans To Understand What A Cheeky Nando’s Is also did well. “It’s fascinating trying to quantify something emotional,” head of data science, Sean Durkin, says. “We’re trying to see what we like and feel as a complex system. It’s not only positive pieces. People respond to negative emotions, too – being shocked or saddened.”

To an extent, all media organisations are fighting a similar battle: how to get things shared without resorting to clickbait, where an enticing headline is let down by underwhelming content. Although data science can point you in the right direction, there is a kind of unknowable mystery at the heart of shareability. You can approach it, but you can never really tell why If You Like Your Coffee Black You’re More Likely To Be A Psychopath goes viral, and something else doesn’t.

Nor is the Lad Bible above an old-fashioned publicity stunt. For the launch of its app in early December, the site sent an iPhone into space. “We wanted to go the extra mile,” Solomou said.

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Solomou is not easy to get hold of, and does not like talking to journalists. As the firm’s highest-profile female employee, Turner (pictured above) has until now taken centre stage in publicity, keen to convince the world that the Lad Bible is more than boobs and banter. “I was told early on not to talk to the press,” Solomou tells me, “but I’m starting to think it might be time to raise my profile.”

A thoughtful, bearish young man with a calm manner and a wry sense of humour, Solomou’s only visible concession to “laddishness” are a couple of semi-cauliflowered ears, the legacy of a childhood playing prop. He was born in Buxton in 1991, to a Cypriot father and an English mother; the family moved to Stockport when he was five.

“Nobody believes the Cypriot thing,” he says with a smile, a reference to his Celtic colouring. “My grandfather ran his own business, so maybe that’s where the entrepreneurial side comes from.” Solomou got his first taste of commerce in his early teens, trading clothes on eBay while he was studying at Stockport grammar. “I’d find a brand that everyone was going crazy for at school and buy the clothes cheaply in the low season,” he says. “I made about 10 or 15 grand off that, but it wasn’t really about the money. It was the thrill of the transaction, of buying something and then setting a price for it, and watching it go up and up.”

After school, he studied business and management at Leeds University. Initially, his plan was to go into stockbroking. “My father and grandfather had been in business, but my mum had this idea that I would work for someone. She got me work experience in M&S womenswear and I hated it. After that, I got a kick. I knew that I wanted to work for myself. I’d been a bit low at university; I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t necessarily my thing.”

His course included a sandwich year during which students went out to work. Solomou decided to spend the year trying out a business idea: Rate Our Student Life. “I had a friend who always knew where the coolest places were, and I thought it would be great if they were all in one place [online].” Using prize money from a university competition, he set up the site and then began selling it door-to-door. “It’s embarrassing, looking back. I bought this suit and went around local businesses trying to sell space. God knows what they thought of me.”

Around this time, in early 2012, he encountered the Lad Bible. It had been founded by Alex Partridge, also a student, and featured content, submitted by users – mainly funny photographs and stories of university antics. In this early stage, there was plenty of beer and boobs. (Partridge also founded UniLad, a site that is similar to the Lad Bible’s earlier incarnation; it has 9.5m Facebook likes to Lad Bible’s 10.7m.)

“I thought, ‘You know what, not a lot of people are doing this’,” Solomou says. He bought the site, and all its assets, for a sum he prefers not to disclose, but which represented most of his savings at the time. “All my chips were on the table. I was living in this horrible houseshare, my room had mould in it, and I remember thinking, ‘What if this doesn’t work out?’ I knew I had no option but to make this work.”

Despite the extra traffic now being sent by Lad Bible, Rate Our Student Life failed to take off. Local businesses were paying £150 to be featured, but Solomou realised he would need a lot more than that to make any real money. He switched his attention to the Lad Bible, leaving the student site by the wayside. “I felt like I’d failed. I didn’t want my mum or dad or anyone else to know.”

But Lad Bible gained momentum from the start. The early days were chaotic. “We’d have these mad spikes in traffic that would cause the servers to crash. One time, we got one of my little brother’s friends to wear a hotdog suit while he tried to break the world record for eating hotdogs. That went off,” he laughs.

Eventually he brought an old friend, Arian Kalantari, on board as co-founder, and recruited students as software developers. He saw out his final year of university, gaining a 2:1, although by now his efforts were fully focused on the site.

In its early days, the Lad Bible was often accused of sexism, a claim strengthened by regular features including the now retired Bumday Mondays and Cleavage Tuesdays. Photograph: Shaw and Shaw

Around this time he was introduced to Mahmud Kamani, 50, co-founder of boohoo.com, the online fashion retailer valued at £840m after it floated last year. Kamani took a small stake in the company – he’s still the only other serious equity holder – and rented them space in his building.

“I liked the boy and I liked the model,” Kamani says. “It had a good vibe about it. It’s a boys’ magazine, it’s a football magazine. And as long as it remains relevant to the audience, it will translate into any language.” And Solomou? “He’s very ambitious, but very smart. And he listens.”

Solomou wanted only a few desks, but Kamani knew he would soon need more. “I told him, ‘Take the whole floor, don’t worry about payment, just fill it up with desks and get to work.’” It was Kamani who told Solomou not to talk to journalists. “Once you raise your head up and start listening to a million different people, you change your model, and you don’t want to do that,” Kamani says. “I told him to stick his head down.” Solomou has done just that, and by all accounts has a modest lifestyle. He has a flat in London which is “home” with his girlfriend, but spends about half his time in Manchester, where he lives in the Hilton on Deansgate, because it’s “more convenient for the station and the office”.

The site’s rapid growth has brought other issues, with payment and attribution: accusations that other people’s jokes had been uploaded, driving traffic and cash to Lad Bible. Solomou says they are more careful now, with a full-time employee checking rights. But in October this year the company apologised to a blogger, Gareth Arnoult, who had published a piece attacking it for posting his content without attribution, titled The Lad Bible Are Monumental Wankers, And Not For The Reason You Think. The Lad Bible threatened to sue, and Arnoult published the threat in a follow-up post entitled The Lad Bible Are Suing Me Because I Called Them Wankers. This went viral itself, whereupon the Lad Bible stood down.

“We’re certainly not going to take action against these guys, who are clearly very funny and whose work we admire,” Turner said at the time.

“It should never have got that far,” she tells me now. “I don’t want to say much more about it, but I think Gareth was happy with the situation in the end.”

The Lad Bible may be able to appease individual detractors, but what about the broader accusations of sexism? An NUS survey in 2014, of a self-selecting sample of 2,000, found that nearly two-thirds of female students felt that sites such as UniLad and Lad Bible contributed to an unfair representation of women.

And it’s hard to escape the impression that the Lad Bible site is still a boys’ party. The staff is overwhelmingly male, the content still blokeish. Even “female-friendly” material is filtered through a male perspective: two women working on Pretty52 describe a popular feature about “what women really get up to when they’re getting ready to go out” (something most women already know). Solomou, meanwhile, references a comedian, Cian Twomey, who contributes popular content to Pretty52, mainly videos in which he acts out both parts of imagined conversations with his girlfriend. Sample topics: When Your Girlfriend Wants To Lose Weight, and When Girls Are On Their Period.

Accusations of outright misogyny are harder to stand up, at least on the site itself. In the Facebook comments underneath, there is still a fair amount of crudeness. Under a recent video of a woman in shorts trying to push a reluctant dog through the house, the top-rated comment was “Dat Ass”. Under a story titled This Lad Used The Most Unlikely Person To Get The Ultimate Revenge On His Cheating Girlfriend, the top rated comment is “Who else was expecting him to bang her mum?” A picture of a tree-shaped air freshener is labelled “The student Christmas tree…”, and the Lad Bible comment has added “Nailed it…” “Nailed what Lad Bible? Your mum?”

Elsewhere, the response is more nuanced. Under an article about a trend in which men are paying to have their small penises mocked online, the top comment points out that if this was about women’s bodies, there would be a feminist outcry. A piece about a man left badly wounded by a woman he was trying to sexually assault provokes an outpouring of support for the woman. And heaven help the Lad Bible follower who makes a factual error about video games, wrestling or the military.

Another way of looking at the Lad Bible is as a democratic outpost for a demographic excluded by much of modern media. Research by YouGov, published in January, surveyed 3,300 people in the UK who described themselves as “laddish”. “The quintessential lad is a young, northern man at the lower end of the income scale,” stated the report. “Sports are his defining interest; he prefers dogs by far; and his food tastes are as manly as they come: chips, burgers, bacon sandwiches and fried chicken.” Lads shop at Asda and like Jeremy Clarkson, the Inbetweeners and Cheryl Fernandez-Versini.

But earlier research, in July 2014, found that only 21% of men and 13% of women identified as at all laddish. Even fewer said they enjoyed the company of men who are lads: 16% of men and 12% of women. In this context, the Lad Bible is a place where boys can be boys, with traffic to the readership to prove it.

Still, clicks are not everything. The challenge for Lad Bible is how to move from a very cheap model (taking content from other sources and turning it viral) to one where they create their own. With video ever more profitable compared with print, that studio could yet prove the difference between the Lad Bible remaining a part-player or becoming a global brand.

Currently, Solomou and his team are working on video games videos and sports videos. In November, they published a clip of the boxer David Haye preparing for a comeback. In August, they posted a social experiment in which actors walked away from an ATM without taking their cash, to see how people reacted; this has had more than 90,000 views on YouTube. “Our focus is how we become better storytellers – whether it’s a 10-second story, a 30-second story or a one-hour story,” Solomou says. “Young people aren’t seeing newspapers as much any more, and the environment is incredibly fast-changing.”

He says he can see the pace of change in his own family. He has an 18-year-old brother studying at Lancaster University. “There’s a generation between me and my dad, but it sometimes feels like there’s a gap between my brother and me, too. He is incredibly in touch with things. The number of channels in which they’re consuming information is so much more than I had. The youth market has changed,” Solomou says. “We’re changing with it. If your community is providing your content and driving it, you can never go out of date.” The lads might be changing, in other words, but their bible is keeping pace.