![]() Users can contribute to trending or most popular rankings by hitting a “boost” button on their favorite star’s profile, or they can see how their favorite stars stack up in various categories. Part of Famous Birthdays’ appeal, aside from the reliable biographical information it provides, is its sophisticated ranking system. Because making it on Famous Birthdays was now a badge of honor, fans campaigned hard to get their favorite YouTubers or Instagrammers represented. The company also began to get flooded with submissions. But by 2015, Famous Birthdays was so well known in the industry that when Britton brought his 18-person team to VidCon, an annual convention for online-video creators, teenage fans and YouTubers alike kept mentioning the company at events and panels one of his employees was even accosted by fans while wearing a Famous Birthdays T-shirt in line. I started the website because I’m passionate about, not celebrity culture.”īritton has never employed advertising, marketing, or PR staff, nor has he taken outside funding. Famous Birthdays is not about me … I don’t need to be here when the celebs come in I need to make sure the website is fast. ![]() “I get about 20 likes per post,” he joked. His personal Instagram account has barely 200 followers and is set to private. Framed behind his standing desk is an article about user experience and mobile-site design. He’s unfazed by the steady stream of stars that visit the office (about three a day), and can talk at length about optimizing for page-load time and the benefits of programmatic ad networks (the primary way Famous Birthdays monetizes). When we met in his Santa Monica office recently, I was struck by how removed he seems from the flashy world of online influencers. It was another way to be verified, because these people weren’t on Wikipedia.”īritton is thoughtful, earnest, and eager to hear feedback about his site. Teenage fans were happy to finally have a place to get reliable information on their favorite celebrities, and the influencers “were thrilled,” Britton said. The more people he added, the more traffic grew. Britton worked with them to set up profiles on Famous Birthdays, complete with preapproved pictures and fact-checked info. Some of the biggest stars in the internet world on Famous Birthdays.īritton and his small team slowly began building profiles for these new internet stars, often relying on information from the stars themselves-unlike traditional celebrities, influencers were easy to track down. “I realized there was a big gap between who the industry thought was famous and who really had the fame,” Britton said. But they looked into it and realized that they all had huge followings on platforms like YouTube, Vine, and Tumblr. “We were like, Who are these people?” he said. At first, Britton and his team thought it must be spam. They were navigating to the Famous Birthdays search bar and typing in names like Cameron Dallas and Nash Grier. An increasing number of people weren’t searching for old-guard Hollywood stars. After about a year, Britton told me, Famous Birthdays reached “1 or 2 million users.” He thought it had peaked.īut then something strange happened. ![]() So Britton built a simple site and populated it with easy-to-skim stats on stars such as Rihanna, Tom Hanks, and Jennifer Lawrence, hoping the site would become a respectable home for information on A-listers. At the time, Wikipedia pages were clunky and poorly formatted, packed with low-quality photos and too much information. Back in 2012, he saw the shift to digital beginning and recognized an opportunity to build a mobile-first celebrity encyclopedia that could be easily read on a phone. The site’s founder, Evan Britton, never set out to build such a site. Is it adult mainstream yet? No, but that doesn’t matter.” The site has 20 million unique visitors a month-more than a million more than Entertainment Weekly, and four times as many as Teen Vogue. “But you definitely know about it if you’re a kid, and you definitely know about it if you’re a creator. “You might know about Famous Birthdays if you’re a parent,” Porch says. Louis.Ĭharles Porch, the head of global creative partnerships at Instagram, says that Famous Birthdays is like the younger generation’s Tiger Beat. “They have everything you want to know about everyone who is important,” says Grace, a 14-year-old in St. If you want to know who the biggest TikTok star is right now, who is in Emma Chamberlain’s squad, or where Baby Ariel grew up, only one website will give you the answers: Famous Birthdays.ĭespite its name, the site contains more than just birthdays-it’s more like a constantly updated, highly detailed map of who matters to the teen internet, featuring a mix of biographical information, photos, videos, rankings, and detailed statistics on every social-media star you could think of.
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