Like it or loathe it, Unilad and The Lad Bible and Sport Bible are the current kings of viral content. These three have leapfrogged everyone else and consistently make Facebook posts that dominate all others. Christopher Lee died last week. These were the top three Facebook posts globally covering the story:

It doesn’t matter that they built up their fan base with short form clips in the style of ‘America’s Funniest home videos’, or pictures of ‘email humour’ type tweets like this:

It’s been easy to ridicule and sniff at, but now, impossible to ignore. With such a huge active audience between them, you can be sure that advertisers have noticed. Monetising through native advertising is the plan with Buzzfeed, and so it appears to be the case here. Take this example of a popular video posted by Unilad last week (it’s good, watch it!):

https://www.facebook.com/uniladmag/videos/1404942549528800/

With over 100k shares and 7.5 million views on Facebook, it’s exactly the type of viral/organic exposure advertisers dream of. Well it is an advert. This particular video is for the Entourage movie, which you’ll see alluded to a few brief times during the film. There are a few other posts made on Unilad about the Entourage movie as seen here:

If you follow this area then this sort of advertising will come as no surprise – but now it appears to be happening in earnest. This is a particularly good example as it marries shareable content that resonates with the core audience to a product (in this case a film) that appeals to the same demographic. Look out for more of this in future, and next time a meme like “Cheeky Nandos” goes viral, look closer – it may well be an advert too.