The Tab: the student website making headlines

For Tom Julius, a history student at Oxford Brookes University, it was quite a New Year's Eve. At the Shimmy Beach Club in Cape Town, South Africa, he had a chance encounter with pop star Cheryl Cole – apparently resulting in a brief New Year's kiss.

Student journalists Tom Jenkin and Cat Byers interviewed Julius about "the best moment of his life" and their quotes were then picked up by numerous national newspapers.

A Twitter spat ensued, with Cole branding the reports "ridiculous". Behind the story was the Tab – a tabloid-style student newspaper website, with editions for 34 universities around the country. A mixture of Buzzfeed-like humour and serious hyperlocal reporting, the site had 1.3 million unique users last November, according to co-founder Jack Rivlin.

Stories range from students hospitalised by dodgy drugs and vice-chancellor pay rises to "UK's horniest student bollocked by bigwigs" and "The most annoying hashtags on Instagram". Unlike so much student journalism, the site's content is lively, brash and, perhaps more importantly, perfectly designed for sharing on social media.

For a student publication, it has had an impressive number of its stories covered in the nationals – from freedom of information requests on Cambridge University's disciplinary procedures to the viral "milking" craze.

Founded by Cambridge University students Rivlin and George Marangos-Gilks in 2009, the Tab's name comes from "tabloid" and "cantab", a common abbreaviated form of the word Cantabrigian – meaning a student or graduate of of Cambridge University. "We were pretty pleased with ourselves when we came up with that one," says Rivlin, 24, the current editor-in-chief.

In 2012, the pair landed £200,000 to expand the Tab nationally from four investors, whom they met through an enterprise event at their Cambridge college. The team are in the process of securing their second round of funding.

Initially created as an antidote to what its founders regarded as the dry student media at Cambridge, the Tab aims to speak to students in the language they speak to each other, says Rivlin. "World news, Premiership football or Hollywood reviews are all perfectly valid things to write about, but no one was covering a lot of stuff students cared about and that's the formula we've expanded."

The online student paper's various editions are created by volunteer editors and an estimated 1,000 unpaid contributors, with a team of 10 paid staff in London overseeing the operation.

"The distinction I've always made between us and print student papers is that those papers are mainly produced for the people who work on them," Rivlin says. "Whereas we're produced for the reader. That's the reason for our mass-market populism."

The Tab has seen its fair share of controversy. It attracted 80,000 hits in its first week, largely down to its Page 3-inspired feature "Tab Totty", which included photographs of female Cambridge students posing in their underwear and was condemned by sections of the student body. "We can do better as a university," said the university's then women's officer Natalie Szarek.

"We've outgrown all that now," says Rivlin, who studied social and political sciences. "I won't lie and say it [Tab Totty] wasn't a brilliant marketing exercise. Everybody in Cambridge heard about the Tab overnight. But we've grown up a bit since then and it's not something I'd want to do again. I think it's actually a bit grim and sexist."

In the publication's launch year, the Cambridge Tab also had to issue an apology to the BBC's entertainment correspondent, Lizo Mzimba, for publishing an article making false allegations about his behaviour while in the city filming a BBC documentary. The paper was forced to admit none of the allegations was true. The Independent, Mail Online and the London Evening Standard, which all picked the inaccurate story, apologised and paid undisclosed damages.

"We had no idea what we were doing," says Rivlin, who was working on the Tab at the time. "It was very early days. We got that wrong and learnt a lot. Obviously, it was also quite an amusing experience."

Not that it has left controversy behind altogether. The Cambridge Tab recently announced plans to launch a #WheresWills liveblog for the arrival of Prince William at the university for a 10-week agricultural management course. "The funniest photos of the prince will receive a free Tab T-shirt," wrote its Cambridge editor, philosophy student Will Heilpern. However, talking to the Daily Express, criminal barrister Bernard Richmond QC warned that it could lead to harassment.

The Tab's Cambridge editor has Rivlin's full support: "I would never encourage them to do something defamatory or illegal, but if it's just winding people up who don't get the joke, I always support them."

The Tab pays a retainer for a media lawyer and a number of their 10-strong team in London have formal media law training. The team in London spend time training their student journalists around the country in basic reporting skills before they are let loose on the website.

Rivlin is convinced that – eventually – the business can be profitable. "I don't think we're ever going to get 80 million unique visitors a month, like Buzzfeed does, because our focus is so narrow." But, he says, the Tab's model is potentially more valuable. "We know who our readers are and they're very loyal. They're clearly defined, as is our site's identity. That's really valuable to advertisers."

Although he declines to reveal the Tab's current annual revenue, all of it comes from advertising sales, some generated in-house and some outsourced to W00t! Media, an agency that targets young adults.

The team count their mentors as some of the most senior people in the media industry – including James Bromley, former managing director of Mail Online. Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie has also sung their praises.

The ultimate aim is for there to be a Tab for every university in the country, with scope for the project moving to other countries or even losing its strictly student focus.

Rivlin himself, who blogs for the Telegraph, claims he isn't interested in a job on Fleet Street for the time being. He wants to stick with the business he lovingly helped build. But he does say of selling it: "if we were offered a huge amount of money, it would be mad not to."