'We Have the Largest Gen Z Audience Outside of Social Platforms:' This Website Stays on Top by Sharing One Random Fact — That Everyone Wants to Know FamousBirthdays.com wants to be the IMDb of online creators.
By Jason Feifer Edited by Mark Klekas
The internet is good at cataloging things — but it has a blind spot for creators.
That's something Evan Britton noticed back in 2012. He thought about how, if someone achieves news-making status, they'll get a Wikipedia page. If they appear briefly in a movie, they'll be cataloged in IMDb. But what if they rack up 2 million TikTok followers? Back then, there was nowhere to list that person. Nowhere a fan could go to learn more.
"There's demand for people to learn their bio," he said.
So he decided to build it. The site he created, FamousBirthdays.com, is a collection of creator bios — kind of like IMDb for the internet set. And Britton was right: There was demand. The site now draws more than 25 million users a month, and is ever-expanding by adding, ranking, and organizing teenagers' favorite social media stars.
Related: 5 Simple Tips for Incorporating Gen Z Into Your Workplace
Famous Birthdays is not alone in filling this gap. There are many sites like it — but most are full of inaccurate information and sloppy (or possibly artificially written) copy. Britton says all his site's profiles are researched and written manually, and that being listed on the site has become a sought-after status marker for online creators. (Personal note: I made the list!)
Britton won't say how much the site earns him, but he does say "the business is healthy." So how did Britton turn online profiles into such a money-maker? He explains.
When is someone famous enough to be listed on Famous Birthdays?
We only add a creator once they pass 100,000 followers. And we see who's being searched by our search engine on our site. FamousBirthdays.com is searched 20 million times per month. Those searches show how popular people are on our site and what we should add. When a creator gets added, that's like their verification status symbol. They'll tell their fans, "I'm on Famous Birthdays," and they'll get hundreds of comments congratulating them. We get hundreds of emails per day via our contact form from people trying to submit themselves to Famous Birthdays.
Aside from being early to the game, what do you attribute that success to? How did you build this thing in a way that people are using it and that it's grown the way that it has?
First thing, focus. We've stayed in our lane. We could have launched a social network, we could have launched merch, we could have launched influencer marketing. Charli D'Amelio, who has 150 million TikTok followers — we did her first-ever interview in our office when she had 300,000 followers. Because we saw the demand from people looking her up. We could have signed her, but that wasn't our business.
Our business was to build the new IMDb. For over 10 years, we focused on the same thing again and again. So eventually, users just learned, "Wow, this site is giving me what I want for this search."
Second, we were early. We were doing this before the creator economy was a thing — when it was just Vine, and Twitter shut down Vine, which shows that nobody knew the creator economy was going to be huge.
Related: This Is the Future of Brand-Creator Relationships as the Creator Economy Grows
And lastly, user experience. That's my passion. That's what I care about. I get out of bed to fix bugs, not to grow my social following or sell to advertisers. You'll see how fast every profile loads if you click the random button on Famous Birthdays. It's instantaneous. And that's taken years of effort to get there. And that's not exciting like a Super Bowl ad, but that's been a tailwind.
I'm curious about how the profiles are written. Mine, for example —
Oh, are you on the website?
I am on the website. I'm looking at my own profile right now.
Okay. So yeah, we've manually written 250,000 bios over ten years.
And who's doing that?
Our team of freelance writers. We see who's being searched, and we'll manually research them to see if they deserve a profile. It's never about who we like or our opinion — it's all about the data. We don't let our friends on the site just because they are our friends. An NBA player messaged me on Instagram asking me to add his manager. I was a fan of the ball player, but his manager only had 20,000 followers then, so I said, "I can't."
So just to be clear, this little bio of mine is not scraped information. It's written by someone?
Yes, we manually research and write all the bios. The biggest tailwind right now is the creators on social media. We've been able to showcase all the different awards and challenge videos celebrities have done — in a mobile-friendly way.
Related: The Business of Harnessing the Power of Social Media
The profiles evolved over time between our good editorial writers and edits submitted to us from the creators. They'll let us know that they just signed an exclusive deal with Twitch or they signed with Creative Artists Agency.
Tell me about the team that is producing this. How many people do you have?
We have nearly 50 to 55 people on our team — a mix of staff and freelancers.
What's the breakdown there? How many are actually on staff?
Going remote has changed our company structure just a little bit. We also scaled in other languages, including Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Japanese. With all the bios being written manually, we need help translating and ensuring all the information is accessible to other languages if those celebrities are being searched for on our site.
Our team will do the structured data, like birthdays and emails. Then we start to write the bios and personally reach out to the creator. We respect copyright laws. So we've manually interacted with about 100,000 celebrities and creators to ask for their headshot. And they'll either send their headshot or give us the approval to grab it from their Instagram. So if you look up TikTok on our site, all those photos have been manually approved by the creator. And the advantage we have is that we will add a creator early.
Addison Rae, who just signed a nine-picture deal with Netflix, has over 100 million followers. In an interview for the LA Times, she mentioned that the first email she ever got was from Famous Birthdays when she had 300,000 followers when she was in college. We add the creator so early in their journey that they're very excited about their profile. We can get in touch with them, and they approve photos.
Tell me more about how you use search data. Is it someone's job to just go through all your searches, looking for new celebrities?
One of my earlier innovations is you don't go to the results page when you are searching for someone. You either go right to a person's profile or "not found." We don't believe in a results page; we're about adding value directly to the search.
Now we have movies, TV shows, and bands. Because if we see searches for Stranger Things, we will build out a profile about Stranger Things. So that's how we also know who to add to the platform. If we see someone being searched 50 times daily, we can say, "Well, this warrants a profile."
Is that to say that the reason that I am on here is because enough people searched for me on famousbirthdays.com?
That probably happened. I also think there's a notoriety component as well. So obviously, your stature for Entrepreneur magazine and your podcast — it's all manual. So we see what's being searched and then we will add the creator. It's easier for creators because it's based on followers. But then our team will add specific things they've done, like podcast host or singer.
We have 250,000 bios because we're manually doing the work. If we were automating this, we would have 50 million bios.
You also built an enterprise version of Celebrity Birthdays that clients pay for. What is that?
The search engine on our site is searched 20 million times per month. In real-time, we can see who people are interested in. And since we write these profiles on everyone, we can look up who was last month's most-searched YouTube star with DIY on their profile. Or who's the most searched Twitch star with Fortnite on their profile. And just how we knew to contact Addison Rae and Charli D'Amelio and be the first company to contact them — that has a lot of value as the creator economy grows. So we built a creator discovery platform that brands, social platforms, and talent agencies can use to discover creators in real time by category.
That's a smart application of that data. How did you launch that?
We had a major social platform come to us, so we initially did a beta test with them. And then we had a talent agency that had been fishing around the same interest. It's going very well.
I'm looking at my profile right now, and I have to say — there are far fewer ads here than I would expect. You could load this thing up with ads, just as your competitors do. How do you find the balance?
There's no science to it. It's kind of based on different factors. If I knew the world was ending tomorrow, you'd have seven ads on the page. And if I won $5 trillion in the lottery, the page would have zero ads. We want the business to be profitable, but we are also in this for the long term. We don't have investors' numbers we have to hit. And we want to make sure that we always prioritize the user. So we're going to run ads to keep us profitable and to keep the business strong, but we're not going to overdo it to try to squeeze out more revenue.
How large is this business? How much money does this make?
We're serving billions of ad impressions per year. And obviously, we can make more. We have the largest Gen Z audience on the web outside of social platforms. So I could take that and sell to brands that want to hit Gen Z on a brand-safe platform. But that's not going to help our vision in terms of users. Revenue is not the main focus.
Right. Sure. But I have to ask! Because your overhead is probably pretty low, and this has got to be a healthy business, right?
Well, yeah, we have 25 million users, which are all funded by the operation. In programmatic ads, many people talk down on them, but the beauty of it is automated. That is what automates our ads. We spend no time dealing with advertisers. The money gets wired. Since we're a top-thousand site, we have the top 10 programmatic bidders.
So we do solid programmatically without having any effort on it. And I know we're leaving money on the table for not going direct with ads, but that will be a big focus and commitment. So yeah, the business is healthy. If it weren't healthy, we'd have to run more ads on the site.
This conversation originally appeared on the Entrepreneur podcast Problem Solvers.
Famousbirthdays.com also has other features on its website, including trivia, video content, quizzes and a trending section.
