The modern social media landscape is filled with large accounts that feel ephemeral: pages built on aggregation, vulnerable to algorithm changes, and difficult to translate into long-term businesses. What makes Pubity Group unusual is not just its scale—roughly 170 million followers and an estimated 240 billion annual views—but the fact that it has sustained that scale for nearly a decade, across multiple platform cycles, without outside capital.
At the center of the company is Kit Chilvers, a 25-year-old founder who began experimenting with social platforms as a teenager and gradually developed an unusually systematic understanding of how attention works at scale. Pubity’s evolution offers a useful case study in how platform-native media companies are attempting to move from reach to resilience.
In a recent interview, Kit broke down how he cracked early Instagram growth, why wholesomeness turned out to be a massive business opportunity, and how he’s trying to turn platform-native virality into durable media brands, original franchises, and real revenue.
Learning the Platforms Before They Professionalized
Chilvers’ advantage was timing. He began posting seriously on Instagram in 2014, when the platform was still largely chronological, lightly monetized, and underserved by professional publishers.
“I was treating it like a game,” he says. “I’d post something, see what worked, and then do more of that.”
His early success came from identifying gaps in how platforms were being used. During the World Cup, he noticed that while live sports updates were common on Twitter and Facebook, Instagram lacked real-time coverage. By posting frequent, text-based score updates—sometimes up to 30 times a day—he was able to exploit Instagram’s early Explore feed mechanics.
“If you could get engagement in the first few minutes, you’d get pushed straight into Explore,” Chilvers says. “And from there, it could go exponential.”
This period rewarded obsessive iteration. Chilvers studied post performance, formatting, image composition, and timing, often sharing insights with a small, informal network of other teenage page operators around the world. That experimentation laid the foundation for what would later become Pubity’s operating philosophy: treat platforms as systems to be learned, not just distribution channels to be used.
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