LBG Media, the Manchester-based owner of LADbible, SPORTbible and the US brand Betches, today said adjusted EBITDA for the year to September 30, 2026 is expected to come in at approximately £16.5m, down 35% from £25.2m, as income from advertising placed next to its content on social platforms and its own websites fell by half. Revenue still rose, to approximately £106.0m from £92.2m, carried by content the company makes directly for brands and by a £27m agency acquisition completed in June.

In Short

LADbible's parent company makes most of its money in two ways: brands pay it to make content for young adults, and platforms like Facebook share the ad money earned next to its posts. This year the brand-paid side grew fast, but the platform share fell by half, and that platform money used to be the more profitable part. So the company sold more but kept less, and it borrowed to buy a social media agency called Uncovered, moving from cash in the bank to a small net debt.

The numbers in the trading update

The trading update, published today and headed "Performance in line with FY26 market expectations," covers the 12 months to September 30, 2026. All figures are described as approximate, pending audited results that LBG Media intends to publish in February 2027.

Revenue of approximately £106.0m compares with £92.2m in FY25. According to LBG Media, that is an increase of 16% at constant currency. Unadjusted, the increase works out at about 15%, on PPC Land's arithmetic. Stripping out the acquired agency Uncovered, organic revenue grew by 8%.

Profit moved the other way. Adjusted EBITDA of approximately £16.5m is down 35% on FY25's £25.2m, a decline the company says it had previously indicated. On an organic basis, excluding Uncovered, adjusted EBITDA fell 40%. That puts the group's adjusted EBITDA margin at roughly 15.6% of revenue for FY26, by PPC Land's calculation. LBG Media's FY25 results, published on February 3, 2026, reported a margin of 27.4%.

Two small differences in the comparatives are worth recording. The October 2025 trading update had put FY25 adjusted EBITDA at approximately £25.0m; the audited figure used today is £25.2m. And the half-year statements in April and June used £30.8m for the group's cash position at September 30, 2025, while today's release gives FY25 net cash of £30.1m. The release does not reconcile the two.

Direct grows 69%, Indirect halves

LBG Media splits its revenue into two streams, and the gap between them this year is the story.

Direct revenue is, in the company's definition, "content for brands and media agencies to reach young adults." In practice it is branded content - a form of native advertising that LBG Media's teams produce and distribute across its social accounts and websites for paying clients. Direct revenue grew 69% year on year, and 57% on an organic basis, "with continued strong contribution from Betches, our U.S. business," according to the release.

Indirect revenue is income from "revenue-sharing agreements with social media platforms that display adverts near our content and owned websites." Platforms and programmatic partners place the ads; LBG Media receives a share. Indirect revenue fell 50%, which the company attributes to "the continued sector-wide decline in Facebook video and Web revenues."

The release does not give the absolute size of either stream. LBG Media's FY25 results put Direct at £49.7m and Indirect at £41.5m. Applying today's growth rates to those bases, Direct would be roughly £84m for FY26 and Indirect roughly £21m. Those are PPC Land estimates, not company figures, and they are sensitive to rounding and currency effects. They imply that Direct now accounts for close to four-fifths of group revenue. In February, the company had said it expected Direct to exceed 50% of revenue in FY26, potentially reaching 70%.

Why the mix matters for profit

The two streams do not earn the same margin. When LBG Media published its FY25 results in February 2026, it said it expected Indirect to grow at a low single-digit rate in FY26 with margins above 50%, and Direct to deliver margins before central costs in the mid-20% range, according to the company's results statement. Indirect instead halved. Each pound lost on the high-margin side takes considerably more profit with it than a pound gained on the Direct side adds back, which is how revenue rose by about £14m while adjusted EBITDA fell by about £9m.

A weaker second half for Indirect

LBG Media's half-year results, published on June 9, 2026, reported Indirect revenue of £14.5m for the six months to March 31, down 41%. Within that, Indirect Social fell 44% to £8.0m and Indirect Web fell 36% to £6.5m. The company said at the time that it saw opportunities to grow social revenue from YouTube, where it described its share of a growing market as very low.

If full-year Indirect revenue is about £21m, the six months from April to September contributed only around £6m - less than half the first-half figure, and well below the roughly £17m Indirect earned in the same period a year earlier. The release does not split the year by half, and rounding in the 50% figure moves that estimate by about £1m in either direction. Even so, the arithmetic points to a decline that deepened rather than eased after the half-year mark.

The group-level half-year split tells a similar story. First-half revenue was £52.4m and adjusted EBITDA £8.0m. Subtracting those from today's full-year figures leaves about £53.6m of revenue and £8.5m of adjusted EBITDA for the second half. Take out Uncovered's contribution and the existing business generated about £47.5m of revenue and £7.0m of adjusted EBITDA from April to September, both below its first half, on PPC Land's arithmetic.

How guidance narrowed during the year

Today's figures land at the end of a year in which LBG Media's guidance moved twice.

On April 22, 2026, in a half-year trading update, the company raised its FY26 revenue expectation to approximately £110m on the strength of Direct, while setting adjusted EBITDA at approximately £22m. Market consensus at that point stood at £105m for revenue and £25.4m for EBITDA, according to that statement. LBG Media blamed lower referral volumes and "previously announced changes to Meta's algorithm for Facebook" for the lack of recovery in Indirect.

Seven weeks later, on June 9, it cut the ranges to £100m to £107m for revenue and £15m to £20m for adjusted EBITDA. The half-year results said the low end of the EBITDA range reflected a continuation of the then-current monthly trend. Daily web sessions had fallen 53% to 2.3m in the first half, which the company linked to algorithm changes by Meta and Google and to lower search traffic from AI Overviews. Hargreaves Lansdown reported that the shares fell 21.4% to 27.50p that morning.

Uncovered was bought ten days after that cut, so the June ranges did not include it. Excluding the agency, the existing business delivered about £99.9m of revenue and £15.0m of adjusted EBITDA, on PPC Land's arithmetic - at the bottom of the June EBITDA range and fractionally below the bottom of the revenue range. The headline figures sit inside both ranges only once Uncovered is added. The release itself describes performance as "in line with FY26 market expectations," a measure that, by October, would have included the acquisition.

Around midday today, LBG Media's investor website showed its shares at 32.75p, down 0.85p or 2.54% on the day.

Uncovered: £27m for a social-first agency

Uncovered, a London agency that designs, produces and manages social media strategies for brands with a focus on Gen Z, was acquired on June 19, 2026. The release calls it "an award-winning Gen Z-native, social-first agency that brought new capabilities to the Group." It contributed approximately £6.1m of revenue and £1.5m of adjusted EBITDA in the roughly 15 weeks from its acquisition to September 30.

The deal announcement in June provides the terms. LBG Media acquired 75% of Uncovered Holdings Limited for an initial cash consideration of £26.8m, subject to adjustments, with an earnout of up to £7.0m payable in cash based on Uncovered's performance in calendar 2026 and 2027. Put and call options cover the remaining 25%, exercisable at nine times adjusted EBITDA for each of 2028, 2029 and 2030. The minority holders receive no dividends, so LBG Media takes all of Uncovered's profits in the meantime, according to the June statement.

Founded in London in 2017 by Chris Cookson, its chief executive, and Catherine Orr, who both stayed with the business, Uncovered employed around 120 people at the time of the deal. LBG Media described it as the number one TikTok partner in the EU, said it had recently launched US operations, and named Tesco, KFC, Stellantis and Taco Bell among its clients. Tesco and KFC also appear among the UK Direct clients LBG Media named in its own half-year results. Uncovered recorded revenue of £10.2m and adjusted EBITDA of £2.7m in calendar 2025, and LBG Media said in June that it expected the agency's revenue to grow by at least 50% in 2026.

Set against those figures, the £6.1m booked in those weeks is equivalent to about 60% of Uncovered's revenue for the whole of 2025, and the £1.5m of adjusted EBITDA to about 56% of its 2025 total. The implied margin in the period, about 25%, is close to the roughly 26% reported for 2025. These are PPC Land calculations; agency revenue can be uneven from month to month, and the release does not annualise the figures.

From net cash to net debt

The acquisition changed the balance sheet. LBG Media reported net debt of £5.8m at September 30, 2026, against net cash of £30.1m a year earlier - a swing of £35.9m. The release attributes the move to three things: the Uncovered acquisition, "with an initial cash payment of £27m," lower Indirect profitability, and continued investment in content.

To fund the purchase, LBG Media arranged a facility of up to £50.0m with HSBC UK Bank, made up of a £35.0m revolving credit facility and a £15.0m accordion, maturing in June 2029, according to the June deal announcement. It drew about £17m from the facility and used about £10m of existing cash to pay the day-one consideration and fees. Further obligations sit ahead: the earnout of up to £7.0m and the option payments on the remaining 25% from 2028.

The release describes the position as "modest net debt." By its own figures, net debt of £5.8m is about a third of a year's adjusted EBITDA.

What the chief executive said

Solomou described the year as mixed. "While Direct performed strongly, FY26 was a mixed year. As expected, we saw a market-driven decline in Indirect, whilst growth in Direct revenue and Uncovered reflected our strategic intent," he said in the release.

He pointed to client relationships and the US market. "Direct revenue growth remained positive and we believe our focus on original content will continue to drive growth. Our relationships with our top 20 clients have deepened, the US continues to provide exciting growth opportunities, and Uncovered, which we recently acquired, is already trading ahead of the Board's expectations."

On the outlook, the release says the board "remains confident of delivering growth in FY27, reflecting continued momentum in the Direct business, the Group's expanding presence in the U.S. including Betches, and increasing contribution from Uncovered." It gives no figure for that growth and does not say whether it refers to revenue, profit or both.

Why this matters for marketers and publishers

LBG Media is one of the larger UK publishers built on social distribution rather than search, and its disclosures offer a rare view of what platform revenue-sharing is worth to a publisher at scale. A 50% fall in a year is not a marginal adjustment.

The company is not alone. A UK peer, Digitalbox, said in September that a Meta distribution change in early April cut Facebook reach for some of its brands by as much as 75%, with its website audience down 28% in the first half. The direction of travel at Meta has not changed since. In July, Meta said it would test a version of Facebook that opens directly into full-screen video, with the classic Feed moved to a second tab, beginning in video-heavy countries.

There is a tension in the data. Meta reported in April that Facebook video watch time rose more than 8% globally in the first quarter of 2026, and in October that its creator-led partnership ads had passed a $15bn annual run rate, up more than 97% year on year. More video is being watched on Facebook, and more advertising money is flowing through creators. Yet the Indirect revenue of one of the UK's largest social video publishers has halved, a decline the company ties to Facebook video and the web. Why would one rise while the other falls? Meta's monetisation rules have changed more than once. It merged In-stream ads, Ads on Reels and the Performance Bonus into a single Content Monetization program in October 2024, with earnings remaining performance-based, and in July 2025 it said it would reduce distribution and remove monetisation access for accounts that repeatedly reuse other creators' content. LBG Media's release does not say which of Meta's changes affected it most.

Web revenue is under pressure from a different direction. Search accounted for 12% of North American publisher pageviews in the third quarter, down from 21% a year earlier, according to Chartbeat. In the UK, Reach reported in July that Google referral volumes had fallen 55%, with its own indirect digital revenue down 16.2%. Future's profit before tax fell 67% in the six months to March as search traffic shrank, and BuzzFeed's advertising revenue fell 23% in its second quarter. Facebook's role as a traffic source had already faded: referral traffic from Facebook to publisher websites fell by half in a year, according to Chartbeat and Similarweb data reported in May 2024.

What LBG Media's response shows is a publisher turning itself into something closer to a production studio and agency. Brands are buying content that runs on social platforms, rather than ad space next to it. That fits a broader shift PPC Land has tracked, in which brands increasingly treat creator content as a paid media asset, and in which platforms such as YouTube market creator trust among young viewers, with a Google-commissioned survey finding that 79% of Gen Z viewers trust creator recommendations on YouTube. LBG Media's release names YouTube as "a growing focus" for its Indirect business.

For advertisers, the shift is visible in the client lists. LBG Media's half-year results named Google, KFC, Domino's, Allwyn and Tesco among its UK Direct clients, and Netflix, Dunkin', PepsiCo and NYX Cosmetics in the US. The company reported 16 UK clients delivering more than $1m in annual revenue, up from 12, and seven US clients with campaign spend above $1m, up from five. The Uncovered deal adds an agency that already works with some of the same brands. Whether that consolidation of creative and distribution gives clients more leverage, or less, is a question the release does not address.

The trade-off is margin. Direct business requires people, production and sales teams; Indirect revenue arrived with little of that cost. The UK advertising market grew 6.4% to £46.7bn in 2025, but two of every three pounds went to Alphabet, Meta and Amazon, according to the Advertising Association and WARC. A publisher that depends less on those platforms for revenue still depends on them for distribution.

What the release does not say

Several points remain open until the February 2027 results. The release gives no absolute figures for Direct or Indirect revenue, no split between Indirect Social and Indirect Web, and no breakdown of Facebook against other platforms. It does not quantify the US contribution or Betches separately. It gives no audience figures. It does not say how much of the £35.9m swing in the net cash position came from content investment as opposed to weaker Indirect cash generation, and it does not list the Betches earnout payment made in April 2026, disclosed in the half-year results, among the reasons for the move to net debt.

Timeline

Summary

Who: LBG Media plc, the owner of LADbible, SPORTbible and Betches, led by co-founder and chief executive Solly Solomou and chief financial officer Darren Singer, together with Uncovered, the London social-first agency it bought in June 2026.

What: LBG Media expects FY26 revenue of approximately £106.0m, up 16% at constant currency, and adjusted EBITDA of approximately £16.5m, down 35%. Direct revenue from brand content grew 69%, while Indirect revenue from platform and website ad-sharing fell 50%. Uncovered contributed approximately £6.1m of revenue and £1.5m of adjusted EBITDA, and the group moved from £30.1m of net cash to £5.8m of net debt.

When: The trading update was published today, October 27, 2026, and covers the year to September 30, 2026. Full results are due in February 2027.

Where: The group operates in the UK and the US, distributing content on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, YouTube, TikTok and its own websites.

Why: The company attributes the Indirect decline to a sector-wide fall in Facebook video and web revenues. The figures show the financial cost of that shift for a publisher built on social distribution, and how far it has moved toward selling content directly to brands, including through an agency acquisition funded partly with new debt.