Famous Birthdays’ Wish for Cultural Relevance Is Coming True

In 2012, Evan Britton founded a website premised upon what the web arguably does best: help people obsess over celebrities.

Britton launched his first site in 1999 as a senior in college and has since made his living monetizing web clicks.

When he created Famous Birthdays as a sort of Wikipedia of celebrities nine years ago, TikTok wasn't even born and Snap had barely launched. The term "influencers" had yet to seep into the mainstream. But as social media created a new form of celebrity, the site has morphed into a pillar of the teen-centric world of online personalities and creators.

This month the company said it will surpass 35 million unique monthly visitors across its app and website. Third-party data providers, which use various methods to estimate web traffic, peg that figure anywhere between 4-6 million (Comscore) and 29 million (Similar Web). Many of those users are teens who use the site to browse celebrity profiles, contribute to popularity rankings and see who's trending.

"It's a pulse of the Gen Z community," said Talia Kocar, VP of Content at Mammoth Media, a Gen Z-focused mobile entertainment studio.

And as that community has expanded and entrenched its online presence, Famous Birthdays has ridden the wave. Britton's profitable website makes money from billions of programmatic ads that are generated from places like Google and Amazon and it has become a useful resource for the growing industry of monetizing online celebrity.

In April it will launch its third international off-shoot in French, joining Spanish and Portuguese, as the company anticipates the spread of influencer fever beyond America.

"Famous Birthdays is essentially the Wikipedia of influencers," said Ryan Detert, CEO of Influential, a leading influencer marketing firm. "It has become a very valuable tool within the influencer industry to do quick research on creators and it's also very popular with young fans. They have found a unique niche in the fact that influencers are the new celebrities for Gen Z."

Britton hadn't originally intended on serving that niche. He'd started Famous Birthdays with A-listers in mind and a user-first focus on growth. The plan was to add new profiles to the database based on users' search patterns.

"The internal search data guides our roadmap," he said. About 90% of user searches on Famous Birthdays yield a hit. The other 10% help to indicate what else users want.

"We built technology around analyzing those missed searches," Britton said, adding that Famous Birthdays' search engine now receives over 1 million inquiries a day. "It lets us know before anyone else what's happening."

Early on, it became apparent that users wanted something more than A-listers.

They wanted social media celebrities. So Britton and his now team of 30, including freelancers, took to reaching out to up-and-comers that the data suggested were on the rise.

In late 2018, for instance, Famous Birthdays contacted Paige Mackenzie, an Arkansas-based teen who at the time had about 600,000 followers on still-nascent TikTok.

"I was like 'oh my god'; I had a fangirl moment," Mackenzie said. "I was a normal girl with a couple of followers, and they want to know about me? That was the coolest thing."

Mackenzie has since grown her TikTok following to 7.5 million. She typically regales her fans with comedic videos she describes as "relatable," like when "your brother annoys your mom right when you're about to ask something important."

When Mackenzie was added to the platform, Famous Birthdays had about 20 million users. That has since exploded beyond Britton's imagination.

"The platform has evolved quite a bit over the years – much like how Gen Z's (and my) definition of a celebrity has," said Kocar, who added that Mammoth "constantly references" Famous Birthdays to inform its content decisions.