Brand Creator • Creative Director • Copywriter • Visual Branding • Content Strategy • Community Management
Weird History is a digital publishing brand I created and developed during my time working at Ranker.com. Originally pitched as a cross between Gawker and History Channel, Weird History successfully channeled tabloid-esque human interest framing with deep, obscure historical topics to give a fresher spin on history content.
Weird History’s addictive, explosive, and educational content found a massive audience, currently tallying just under 8,000,000 Facebook fans, 3,800,000 YouTube subscribers, and 770,000 Instagram followers, in addition to landing a deal with Roku TV to host its large library of original videos.
As Weird History’s brand director, I led a team of dedicated editors and freelance writers, heading all pitch meetings to guide what types of articles fit the brand’s mission, in addition to designing all of the brand’s original visual assets and writing all of the brand’s headlines and post copy.
Weird History was the second original Ranker social media spin-off brand (after the geek-focused Total Nerd vertical), and under my careful direction, it quickly became Ranker’s most successful brand in terms of page views, followers, time spent on site, email newsletter subscribers, ad revenue, ad spend efficiency, and multi-platform audience development.
Rather than detailing dates and places, battles and treaties like History Channel’s boring, sanitized, classroom-esque content, Weird History found its niche in delving into the obscure, R-rated, deeply human side of history with articles on the bizarre love letters famous historical figures would write to their mistresses, the brutal working conditions of early 20th century Hollywood film sets, and what the sex lives of Roman peasants were actually like.
This snarky, humorous, human-interest framing of historical topics proved to be a gold mine — there was simply nothing else like it appearing on our audience’s social media feeds.
At Weird History, I developed an innovative content-development system to ensure we were only focusing our efforts on “winning” content that would reap clickthroughs: instead of pitching and writing an article, and then developing a framing to sell it as a post on Facebook, we did precisely the opposite: I would write a catchy headline and design an attention-grabbing visual to serve as the thumbnail first, and if we could find a solid combination of catchy headline and vibrant visual, we’d then turn it over to our army of writers to flesh out into an article.
This way, we were never guessing if any given article would be a success on social media, because we already knew the post we would send out for any given article would be too enticing not to click.
Below is a small sample of the posts I designed for Weird History’s facebook page, the type of content that would reap massive unprecedented levels of clickthroughs that let the brand evolve and grow into the online behemoth it is today.
