With Rupert Murdoch’s Help, Tab Media Targets Young and Cheeky on Campus
Tab Media has two parts: The Tab, which publishes the college-centric content, and Babe, a website for young women
that specializes in “good news reporting, trash trends, personal stories” and stories about men with certain unappealing qualities and “the pettiest celebrity drama.”
Ten million people a month visit Tab sites, with roughly two-thirds going The Tab and the rest to Babe, according to Tab’s Google Analytics data.
Other publications should beware, said Mr. Rivlin, 28, who jokes that he has only recently begun to grow facial hair: “I want to eat their lunch.”
In Tab’s Williamsburg office — there’s another in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood — story ideas slingshot around the room, from the
Pennsylvania State University hazing trial to wedding training programs at high schools to potential Dream Act-related deportations.
Jack Rivlin, who founded Tab Media with two other Cambridge University students in 2009
and now splits his time between New York and London, envisions the enterprise as a generation-defining media brand à la MTV.
Mr. Rivlin and The Tab’s other founders came up with the idea for company while working for the
Cambridge student newspaper, a stuffy publication that none of their friends read, he said.
Roughly 70 percent of Tab Media’s revenue — $600,000 in August, the company said — comes from sponsored
stories commissioned by companies like Spotify and Unilever and written to resemble news articles.
But the website, which soon spread to other British campuses, also featured exclusive stories about a student who fought for ISIS
and a Cambridge student in white tie burning cash in front of a homeless man.