How Tastemade has eaten the internet with Facebook and Snapchat
Food on the internet. It's a big deal, debatably even bigger than cats (and puppies). All over the internet (especially Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat) are plates and plates of food, and some people are making a business out of it.
Tastemade is just five years old, and it has become one of the biggest brands for food, reaching more than 200 million people per month, around the world.
Larry Fitzgibbon, CEO and cofounder of Tastemade, joined Mashable's Biz Please to chat about what good food content is and where we can find it. We learned about the good and the bad of distributed media business. Turns out YouTube may no longer be the best for video, even with food.
First thing to know about Tastemade: It's not The Food Network. But it wants to have the same brand power as that older cable network does, just by having kickstarted itself on digital.
"If you think about the early days of cable television, there became these brands, things like MTV, the Food Network, the Travel Channel," Fitzgibbon said. "They became these iconic brands that we as consumers really gravitated towards for that area of distribution, which was largely cable and satellite."
Now, people are more likely looking at their smartphone than a television set, and so, Tastemade has built up its presence on the largest digital platforms.
The company has a channel on Snapchat's Discover network (Mashable is also partner) and makes video series, like Tiny Kitchen, for Facebook that get millions and millions of views.
Cue stomach growl:
It's not as easy as taking a snap or posting on Instagram. Fitzgibbon said Tastemade specializes in "TV-quality production" on mobile. They create about 30 minutes of original programming per day for the Snapchat Discover channel along with posting daily to Facebook and Instagram.
Tastemade also has a presence on YouTube, but Fitzgibbon said it's still under Facebook and Snapchat.
"We're still there. We program there every single day," Fitzgibbon said. YouTube is "just not as much scale as those other two platforms."
Television isn't out of the picture, either. The Cooking Channel picked up The Grill Iron, a web series on college tailgating.
What's next? Facebook has recently started to test its mid-roll advertisements on videos, creating a new revenue option for brands like Tastemade. And definitely more food.
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Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
