TASTEMADE HAS ALL THE BUZZ WHEN IT COMES TO MOBILE FOOD VIDEO VIEWS
The three partners who dreamed up Tastemade cooked up one winning meal for Millennials — food shows for mobile viewing.
“There’s a whole new generation of young people” who were just as interested in food as their parents when they watched it on TV, says Joe Perez. He founded Tastemade in 2012 with partners Steven Kydd and Larry Fitzgibbon. “They wanted to see it with people of their age, as opposed to having older stars doing it.”
What the Food Network is for cable, Tastemade is trying to be for the mobile-friendly social networks and streaming services — Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Spotify and Apple TV, among others. The venture-backed start-up sells advertising and sponsorships for videos its team of 70 makes in a former TV production studio here.
Tastemade videos average 1.5 billion views monthly, with 100 million active users. It competes with the more heavily financed BuzzFeed, whose Tasty channel on Facebook and YouTube averages 2 billion videos monthly, according to market research firm Tubular.
Tastemade’s video views are far more than some food shows manage to garner both on and off cable networks.
The Food Network, owned by one of Tastemade’s investors, Scripps Networks, is one of several food properties also rushing to create content for social networks. It averages just under 500,000 daily viewers on TV.
Food’s most popular video on YouTube, a clip from the Chopped Junior TV show, got 300,000 views; Tastemade’s most-viewed video on YouTube, about a killer chocolate milkshake, has some 2.5 billion total views.
Tastemade “has managed to do something fairly unique and rare in today’s world,” says Nick Bell, vice president of content for Snapchat, “which is create a digital brand with a really strong voice. Too many digital publications are about driving the audience with click bait. Tastemade’s approach is very fresh.”
All three founders of Tastemade met at Demand Media, the once high-flying company best known for creating content that fed search engine queries on Google. Demand Media saw its stock price dramatically fall and major executive changes when Google changed its algorithm and Demand content got dramatically downgraded. The company, once valued at $2 billion, has lost 95% of its value, according to Bloomberg. The risk for Tastemade is having partners pull a Google and watch their monthly views plummet.
But this time around, Tastemade has more than one outlet, notes investor Geoff Yang, a partner with Redpoint, one of Tastemade’s investors. From the Demand experience, the founders learned to diversify.
For Tastemade, job one has to be to continue creating good content, notes Rich Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG.
“The only reason Facebook or Snapchat cares about them is because they’re making great content,” he says. “If they fail that, they’ll be in trouble.”
Tastemade has yet to start turning a profit, but the company brings in revenue, with big advertisers such as General Mills, Stella Artois beer, Grey Goose vodka and Hyundai. Profits will come as the company gets bigger, Kydd notes. Tastemade declined to offer revenue details, saying it is a private company.
The partners founded the company after a dinner talking about their love of food and went from there, starting with videos that were at first primarily shown on YouTube. From there, they expanded to travel and lifestyle, using young folks as hosts who had contacted them as fans. “We saw that the world was more social than it had ever been before,” Perez says. With travel, “video can take you to a place so much more emotional than just a photo.”
Tastemade has raised $80 million since its founding in 2012. Other investors include Comcast Ventures and Liberty Media, the John Malone-controlled company that has many cable TV investments in channels such as Discovery, QVC and Starz.
Peter Csathy, CEO of Manatt Digital Media, which advises and invests in tech start-ups, puts Tastemade in the category of mobile production firms such as Maker Studios, bought by Disney for $500 million in 2014, and Fullscreen, acquired by Disney, AT&T and the Chernin Group for a reported $200 million to $300 million that year.
It’s “inevitable” Tastemade will be bought and acquired, he says. “They will be another digital-first success story.” Kydd had no comment, nor have the three investors.
Besides Tastemade and Tasty, the online food video space includes Pop Sugar and legacy magazines such as Epicurious and Bon Appetit.
The Tastemade mobile factory here is a lab for food and travel porn-delectable dishes. Content is created in a cavernous studio that once was home to TV series such as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
As producers churn out food recipes and tasting videos in a studio, editors work in another room making different versions — in square format for Facebook and Instagram, vertical for Snapchat and full-frame 4K for Apple TV and YouTube.
Kydd says this type of approach — carving up content for multiple partners — “is a different type of storytelling, but a unique opportunity. If you focus on the consumer and how they’re using your product, that leads you to a very different place.”
Fidji Simo, Director of Product for Facebook, says Tastemade has succeeded because it understands how to create for social media.
Tastemade’s videos “are perfectly designed to pop in News Feed,” she says. “In addition to using compelling food imagery, Tastemade’s videos work well with auto-play by grabbing the viewer’s attention from the beginning and overlaying text so that the videos are interesting even without sound.”
The company was chosen by Facebook to showcase its new Facebook Live mobile video feature by producing 100 live shows monthly. The company got a leg up by purchasing a cafe near their studio, which serves as a live lab.
Tastemade and the Food Network are featured on Snapchat’s Discover platform, where media companies showcase short-form video content for Millennials, alongside others such as Mashable, Comedy Central and CNN.
While both entice with mouthwatering recipe videos, Tastemade is more personality driven.
What the Food Network is for cable, Tastemade is trying to be for the mobile-friendly social networks and streaming services.