WHO would have known that the world’s ninth highest ranking Facebook page for news was run out of a Narrabundah home?

sciencealert.com.au, an Australian science news website reached 1 million Facebook followers on Saturday night; the website already more popular than any other Australian news website on the social network, and sitting above “The Economist” and closely behind CNN on the worldwide top 10 list.

Managing director Chris Cassella, a father of three who runs the website from his home says people, particularly young people, love science.

“It’s not just Australia, it’s actually predominantly the world,” he said. “What’s really amazing is we are finding that young people from all over the world are engaged with science.

“About 1 per cent of our audience is Australian, a very small percentage.”

Mr Cassella, formerly a programmer with Microsoft in the US, came to Canberra to study at ANU to pursue a life-long passion for science. He studied neuroscience and later a Masters of Science Communication.

As part of his masters project he joined Science Alert, which was founded in 2004 by Canberra-based science author Julian Cribb. The website, publishes outcome-based science news coming out of Australian universities.

What started as a “labour of love” soon became a full-time job.

Mr Cassella says the key to its success is “content and conversation”.

The website posts between four to six stories a day, attracting more than 100,000 visitors a month. Since joining Facebook in 2012, the website found significant growth; with more than 1 million followers, its posts attracts up to 1000 likes.

Recently, Science Alert has recruited a content editor and a sub-editor. It’s also amidst creating an iPhone application with hope of creating an Android application and Spanish and Chinese versions of their Facebook page.

“The website, has become a smaller portion,” he said. “In the short term, we would like to figure out a non intrusive business model meaning that we can provide information to our audience that they won’t rebel against…

“One aspect, is to get it so it can fund itself, to make it self sustainable because right now it’s only been Julian and I putting in our time and money.

“Outside figuring out a business model, we’ll take the Mark Zuckerberg approach, we’ll grow our audience and then think about monetarising it later.

“Ultimately there’s something there but we have to be subtle about it.”