How short cooking videos took over the web and are about to surpass television
Video sites such as Tastemade and Buzzfeed’s Tasty are racking up hundreds of millions of views per month and earning billions of advertising dollars
With the solemnity of a priest, Tastemade programming chief Oren Katzeff paces near his TV-grade studio kitchen and assesses his media giant’s latest creation: apple-pie latkes, baked on camera for five seconds of Snapchat fame.
In four years, his video network has transformed food porn designed for digital natives into a global juggernaut. But the competition is fierce – and the demands are endless – if he wants Tastemade to stay one of the most-watched media empires on the web.
“There is something about being maniacal, right?” Katzeff says outside the soundstage during one of the day’s half-dozen recipe shoots. “We are so laser-focused on all this stuff. We don’t sleep that much.”
Short, viral videos have become more than digital-age curiosities. They are a central economy of the web and a serious business on which future media fortunes will be gambled, won and lost.
Pumped out cheaply and quickly, most web and mobile videos make a fraction of the money of a Hollywood film. But they also carry a fraction of the risk: for their makers, a flop doesn’t break the bank – and a hit can mean everything.