Meet the cupcake queen who has drawn a bigger audience than Star Wars
Jemma Wilson is part of a new generation of British cooks making a fortune from their internet videos
MEET Cupcake Jemma, an art school dropout with a penchant for tattoos, who also just happens to be a culinary phenomenon in the digital age.
Online videos of Cupcake Jemma (real name Jemma Wilson) have been watched by more than 30million people – twice as many as have seen the new Star Wars film in the UK.
Miss Wilson is one of a new breed of internet-savvy chefs making a name for themselves – and a small fortune – posting videos of themselves cooking and baking. Most are amateurs, but they attract online advertisers and sponsorship deals with supermarkets and kitchen appliance manufacturers.
Their viewing figures are startling. Videos of Miss Wilson baking cakes have been viewed 31.5 million times, according to the latest figures compiled by YouTube. One recipe alone – the Best Ever Rainbow Cake – has been watched more than two million times.
“What is surprising is just how many people have told me how they have made my cakes after watching me on YouTube,” said Miss Wilson, “Even the really complicated ones. The rainbow cake video is 16 minutes long and people sit through it. That’s a long time by YouTube standards.”
Miss Wilson, 36, who lives in central London, dropped out of art school and spent years working as a barmaid. In 2004, driven by “my sweet tooth” she began baking and started selling cupcakes at a market stall. She now has a shop in central London called Crumbs & Doilies and employs a staff of 15.
Miss Wilson says of her internet success: “I’m a girl, I’ve got tattoos, I bake cupcakes and they look really nice. Kids watching me can identify with baking way more than they can with a marinara sauce. It’s visual. It’s a treat.”
An amateur chef who has turned YouTube cooking into an occupation is Barry Lewis, who posts videos under the tag My Virgin Kitchen. He has been watched 34.4 million times.
Mr Lewis, 33, only started cooking five years ago. “I was a typical bloke,” he said, “I had no interest in cooking. It was easier to order a takeaway. But I made a new year’s resolution to learn to cook and I decided to record my ‘journey’ online. The plan was to do it a couple of times but it just carried on from there.”
For the first two years, Mr Lewis would drive back to his home in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, from his workplace in Wales and record his cooking attempts with a cheap video camera perched on a biscuit tin. His two young daughters would help him.
He is now so successful – his recipe for potato cheesy balls has been watched 400,000 times – that he earns more from his cooking than he did as a well-paid surveyor, a job he has packed in. Money comes from ads on his YouTube site, product placements and sponsorship deals with supermarkets and the like. He even has an agent.
Ben Ebbrell has received 166 million views for videos of him cooking with three lifelong friends he met at school. Mr Ebbrell, 28, and his best friends Barry Taylor, a wedding photographer, Jamie Spafford, a marketing executive, and Mike Huttlestone, a teacher, set up SortedFood in 2010. The friends, who met at school in Hertfordshire, were sitting in the pub bemoaning their terrible diets when Mr Ebbrell, who was training as a chef, began writing simple recipes for them that could fit on to the back of a beer mat. They began demonstrating their talents online on their SortedFood YouTube cooking channel. Only Jamie Oliver – with 167 million viewings – has a bigger audience.
“It’s crazy,” said Mr Ebbrell, “When we first posted videos we were watched by a few friends and family. Now we get six million views a month.”
Their easy charm and sometimes jokey recipes – one to make a chocolate cake in a mug has been viewed more than a million times – are a hit. SortedFood has a tie-in with Tesco, and sponsorship from Kenwood, the kitchen appliance manufacturer, and even Rennie, makers of indigestion tablets.
British chefs dominate the rest of Europe when it comes to attracting YouTube views. More than 1.6billion viewers around the world have tuned into videos made by our chefs, with uploads growing at 60 per cent a year. Cooks from France, which lays claims to having the best cuisine in the world, have racked up fewer than half that number of views.