Have you ever come across the Famous Birthdays webpage? Where over 250,000 influencers and celebrities birthdays are posted as well as their birthplace, age, ranking on the site, and succinct biographical details?

The website was created by Evan Britton who set out to create a concise version of Wikipedia focused on celebrities. People were shifting from using desktop computers to mobile devices, and he thought Wikipedia pages would be too busy for a phone screen. 

While the site was originally for celebrities in 2012, Britton made an interestingly observation in 2014; “I went to [creator conference] VidCon and saw screaming fans for Ricky Dillon, who was a Vine star. He wasn’t on Wikipedia and he was being searched on our site,” Britton, who is based in Santa Monica, Calif., said in a recent interview. “I saw a lane to build a place to learn about and discover creators.” 

This data allows the company to spot rising trends early, from emerging creators to the next hit TV show, based on searches from its heavy Gen Z audience. This makes the site very beneficial for brands looking for fitting creators. 

Famous Birthdays employees research and write all of the site’s profiles, which are also manually translated into languages including Spanish, French and Japanese. Creators typically need a minimum of 100,000 followers on social media to be included on Famous Birthdays. The company is bootstrapped and isn’t focused on raising venture capital, Britton said. Instead, it earns money through ads and a subscription offering for enterprise clients called Famous Birthdays Pro, which helps identify rising creators and includes additional information, such as talent representation details. It also has a licensing deal with Amazon Alexa, which surfaces results about the celebrities and creators on Famous Birthdays. 

Britton claims that the biggest ongoing challenge for the site is niches. “It started out mainstream, but now it’s gone niche where there’s people that most of the internet doesn’t know, but people in their niche know them very well,” he said.