Bustle publisher BDG has been spending this year putting more focus on originality and exclusive access to make its brands aimed at young women “stronger and more intentional”.
US-based BDG had already moved away from putting search and social traffic front of mind, executive vice president of editorial Charlotte Owen told Press Gazette, and it is now embracing the things it can uniquely deliver that its audience would not otherwise be able to get for themselves.
Owen leads Bustle as editor-in-chief and also oversees women’s lifestyle and fashion brands Nylon, Elite Daily, TZR (The Zoe Report), fandom and culture site Inverse and parenting brands Romper and Scary Mommy as EVP. Their core audiences range across Gen Z and millennials. All these brands are digital-only but embrace a magazine-style ethos.
BDG, formerly Bustle Digital Group, was founded in 2013 by a team led by the current chief executive Bryan Goldberg and gradually built up its portfolio including by acquiring Elite Daily from Daily Mail publisher DMGT in 2017.
BDG (which does not publish full accounts as a private US company) told Press Gazette revenue for the first half of 2025 is up 25%.
It said flagship brand Bustle has seen revenue grow by 38% in H1 2025 compared to last year.
The publisher is expecting to achieve a 10% profit margin on a nine-figure ($100m+) revenue in 2025.
Owen said: “I think that all media brands in this moment have to fight for attention and I wanted all of the BDG brands to be really intentional about how they’re doing that and specific about the ways they’re trying to reach their reader.
“So in the last six months, we’ve really been honing that editorial strategy and I would say the key tenets of that have been trying to focus on more original reporting – so more robust, original stories that only appear on our sites or our social channels.
“I think for all of the brands, we’ve been really focused on access – everyone has an iPhone, but not everyone has the kind of access that our editors have. And I think that that’s a key part, especially on brands like Nylon and Bustle. We’re really intentional about taking our readers where they maybe can’t go otherwise.”
For example, Owen cited monthly digital front covers for TZR being shot in tastemakers’ homes, or giving people a sense of being on a night out for Nylon or a delve into a celebrity’s bookshelf for Bustle’s One Nightstand feature.
Owen carries out many of the One Nightstand interviews and described the appeal behind launching a format like this: “The internet’s full of lots of small talk and throwaway moments and we wanted to try and make something that would stand the test of time and that was something that our readers could enjoy going back to, whether they watched it in five years’ time or today.
“I think we’ve been really intentional about trying to build a series that feels special and feels like something you don’t get elsewhere.”
One episode with actress Julia Stiles did more than five million video views across the social channels, Owen said. “That, to me, is the absolute sweet spot of you doing something that you think is the A+ of your editorial game, and it actually does A+ performance as well.”
Owen also gave the example of sending a journalist to a red carpet to “capture this original video footage that feels really intimate and revelatory” rather than just writing up stories about what’s going on there with an “army of writers” from the newsroom.
A video of actresses Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick at the A Simple Favor 2 premiere received around six million views on Bustle’s Tiktok. Owen added that behind the scenes footage of photoshoots, such as actor Lewis Pullman with farm animals, does “really well – as much as the really produced images”.
@bustle #BlakeLively and #AnnaKendrick doing the simple favor of taking our breath away on the #AnotherSimpleFavor ♬ original sound – Bustle
The focus on originality at BDG ties into the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews and industry-wide fears of growing zero-click searches. But Owen said: “I often think about it like, if AI could write this story, it’s not a story we should be writing…
“On Nylon, we do these incredible stories where we get ready with talent when they’re on the way to fashion shows. And I think there’s definitely an era where the version of that story might have been a news post that you hoped popped on Google, and like ‘X celebrity attends X show at New York Fashion Week’.
“And now we get original photographs, we talk to the talent who gives us original quotes that are exclusively for us. And so that idea that we are producing something that can’t be churned out by AI, I think, is really important and again, the fact that our readers are connecting with it is what’s most important.”
BDG on social: ‘Very much verticals in their own right’
Another part of BDG’s recent focus has been on building their brands on Tiktok and Instagram as a destination themselves rather than just an offshoot of the main websites.
Owen said that in the past five to ten years people saw the words and pictures on a media brand’s website as “the top of the pyramid” with social as a brand extension.
“It was the way that we helped these stories come to life,” she continued. “But I think now social is no longer an extension of the brand. It sort of is the brand… of course, the site is as well and all those other elements. But we’ve been really focused on refining and growing our social dominance.”
As of 12 June, this year so far Instagram engagements across BDG’s lifestyle portfolio (including Bustle, Nylon, Elite Daily and TZR) are up 326% compared to two years ago. On Bustle, the average reach per post is up 258% versus 2023.
Owen emphasised that they are “really hot” on making sure their engagement rates are “really robust” and that their audiences are real people. Brands can access them via social-only deals or wider packages.
Charlie Mock, social director at BDG, told Press Gazette: “We view our social media accounts as extensions of the BDG websites rather than direct reflections of them; they’re very much verticals in their own right.
“Doing so has given us the room to produce highly engaging, shareable, and timely social-first content that has been created with each platform and its audience front of mind.
“It’s not about mimicking our onsite content, it’s about giving it to our social followers in a way that makes the most sense where they’re consuming it, in-app and at speed.”
Owen said the way BDG is managing to connect to its audiences at scale “feels exciting and has allowed us to think differently about editorial strategy – and it feels honestly closer to the kind of magazines of lore and how we thought about these media brands and print magazines when I was younger.
“It was like 200 pages of: this is really what we believe are the most important things that are out there this month. And I feel like what we do now on our site and on social is really much more focused on that mission again.”
Events help BDG create ‘moments that don’t exist anywhere else’
An extension of that feeling of connection and curation is through in-person events, Owen went on. In April actor and comedian Bowen Yang was on Bustle’s digital cover for its Queer Love issue and then attended a screening of his new film and cocktail hour hosted by the brand in Los Angeles.
Owen described this as “trifecta of – I feel like we’re creating moments that don’t exist anywhere else, that our readers are engaging with, and that access that they can’t get otherwise.
“Because I think that’s how we make ourselves really essential to people’s lives.”
Fashion brand Nylon hosted a party at the Coachella festival in California in April sponsored by Ulta Beauty, with a performance from singer Dove Cameron. Owen said “the events actually offer us an opportunity to create some of our most interesting editorial”, for example by producing a mini print edition to give away.
She added that events can take a magazine cover and expand it “into something that feels even more special – and advertisers are into that”.
Even with magazine covers in their usual digital-only format, Owen said they “really are still king: talent love them. Our readers love them… The audience loves to see their favourites put on the cover of a magazine.”
Nylon has a monthly It Girl series that has been reworked as digital covers to be shared on social as Owen said “they perform exponentially better than when we just publish them as photo shoots”.
Although Owen spoke about creating “intimate moments” through social and video, she emphasised that she “still really believe[s] in the written word as well.
“I know I’m talking a lot about social but the words are really important. The quotes are important. We want our materials to be deeply additive and revelatory and interesting. And I think again, that is what success looks like. I really care about us breaking news. I want us to be driving conversation in really authentic ways, on things that our readers care about too.”
[Read more: Why DMG online fashion brand Eliza ditched its website]
Owen was speaking soon after Press Gazette attended a conference in London with the provocatively-named panel “death of the website”.
She argued that it “really depends on the story. Some stories need to be told in a written way, and some stories are best told in a video way. And I think that it doesn’t help us to pick one side and stick to that side. You think about the story and think about the best way to tell the story.
“When you want an in-depth explanation or a discussion on what it’s like to spend an hour having coffee with a celebrity, I still really believe in the value of a brilliant profile and a brilliant intimate, long Q&A.
“I did Khloe Kardashian and Dakota Johnson for some of our covers last year and when I write those up, I’m trying to strike that balance of giving the reader the sense of what it’s really like to hang out with them when you’re in a restaurant, or hang out with them on the phone, what it’s like to have a conversation with them. I think written words can be brilliant for that, and I think it still has its moments.”
Owen added that conversely if the purpose is to disseminate breaking news “it might be that people want to hear that on a morning podcast, or they want to hear it on a quick video on social.
“So the way I think about it is what the story is trying to achieve, and then you sort of have your menu of options – and you see it with the popularity of books, people want to read good things.”
Owen said that what she has been “most proud” of this year so far is “how much advertisers are buying the stuff that we’re most proud of”.
She cited a celebrity wellness package that went live on Bustle in May which had full sponsorship from Hulu, while Bustle’s 2025 Sexual Wellness Awards were sold through.
“We’re seeing that advertisers are keen to invest in real things and real content that helps them tell narrative stories,” Owen said.
She added that they love doing awards “because those are ways where we say we’ve got expertise, we’ve got access, we’re promising you these are the products that are actually the really good ones”.
Another aspect that Owen has been thinking about since taking on the EVP role last autumn is increasing the differentiation between the BDG brands.
“We’re a small team at BDG, a small editorial operation, and a lot of us work across multiple brands. And when you do that, you really have to force yourself to give yourself tough feedback about, like, actually, is this too similar to what I’ve just done for Elite Daily?”
Asked about her plans for BDG in the year ahead, Owen said she is thinking about in-person events and “how our brands can be creating moments in culture, not just reflecting things that already happen in culture”.
She added: “I’m also really motivated to try and, especially for some of our smaller brands like the TZRs, the Elite Dailys, really grow their capacity to break news and drive conversation, because I think that Bustle and Nylon are doing an incredible job of that and I think there’s huge opportunity for us on some of those other brands.”
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