The Tasty Phenomenon
Tasty is one of the brightest and most successful ideas that ever came to BuzzFeed, the online news magazine known for its listicle, articles in the form of lists composed of 10 points or, more successfully, 29 points. BuzzFeed's concept is simple: cooking information like preparing a snack: quick, light, appetizing and satisfying. The idea was a huge success and today BuzzFeed is worth more than the "New York Times" and the "Washington Post" combined.
It all started in August of 2015 when BuzzFeed started a page Facebook in which videos were offered which filmed, with a camera placed on the chef's head, the speeded up execution of a recipe. The videos lasted less than a minute and used the technique of early comedy cinema, they were moderately accelerated to convey the frenzy of the action.
They certainly didn't want to be a handbook for the creation of a dish, but only to ignite the viewer's imagination. This flash feature has led to their enormous success. For Tasty, many have spoken of food porn, using a metaphor that illustrates well the technique with which these videos are shot and the senses they aim to stimulate.
Just after six months the Facebook page had achieved 24 million likes with some recipes having totaled more than a million. Among the most popular: pizza, ice cream, meatballs, potatoes, cheese. Anyone who wants to know more can read this article How to make the most watched videos in the world, after porn and music, published on the "Post". Pure the "New York Times" has dedicated various services to Tasty showing, in one of these, how BuzzFeed now he's making a ton of money with Tasty: BuzzFeed Is Turning Food Videos Into a Profit Empire.
Farhad too Manjoo, the media columnist of the New York newspaper, analyzed this viral phenomenon, focusing on BuzzFeed's strategies to take the Tasty concept off the network and make it into spin-offs, just like Disney does with its contents. It is precisely on one of these spin-offs that we want to focus, the self-published Tasty the Cookbook by BuzzFeed and an instant bestseller.
The book, however, cannot be found in any official classic precisely because it is not distributed in any bookstore. As Gerry Smith wrote in “Bloomberg”: “BuzzFeed famous for its viral quizzes, listicles and explosive watermelons has added another ace to its colorful resume, that of blockbuster publisher. He has sold more than 100 copies of his Tasty the Cookbook in less than two months. This initiative marks the most successful of BuzzFeed Inc.'s foray into e-commerce territory. It also shows how new technologies are allowing authors, especially those with large online followings like BuzzFeed, to leapfrog the traditional gatekeepers of book publishing."
A Lego book written from a database
The concept of Tasty the Cookbook is nothing short of brilliant. There is no book, but there are infinite books. The principle is that of Lego: there are many bricks that can be assembled to give shape to a customized construction. But how can this mode be applied to a book. BuzzFeed shows it to us. All you need is a good content database and an automatic pagination algorithm.
The customer accesses https://tastyshop.com and here he starts building his personalized book: he can choose the recipes (or let the recommendation engine do it) within 7 thematic areas: entertainers (for the Entertainer), lovers carbohydrate eaters (for TheCarb Lovers), health fanatics (for the Health Nut), ingredient obsessed (for The Ingredient Obsessed), too busy to cook (for The Too Busy To Cook), global travelers (for The World Traveler). Each of the seven subject areas contains three selectable sub-areas (so a total of 21 options). The user must indicate the sub-areas from which he intends to take the 49 recipes to be inserted in the spiral bound book.
Once the sub-areas have been selected, the book construction procedure invites you to write a 300-character welcome message that will be printed on the first page. Next you are asked to choose the type of hard cover (hardcover, $35) or flexible (paperback, $24).
Tasty's engine layouts the book, produces a pdf to be processed by the printing machine which also applies the spiral to keep the pages together. Finally, the book is sent to the customer's home. A process that doesn't last more than two days, such is the maximum wait to be able to dispose of it and give it as a gift to a friend, if you wish.
Guaranteed success but not easily repeatable
BuzzFeed didn't disclose any sales figures, but analysts estimate the book brought in revenues among 2,4 and 3,9 million dollars. A really nice nest egg, also considering the rather high price for 114 pages in relation to the competition from traditional publishers. Lorraine Shanley, an editorial consultant, called Tasty's sales "impressive" since the book did not field any celebrity chefs, in fact the recipes are rather amateurish.
If we consider that the "New York Times" bestseller list requires sales of 25-30 copies in three months to enter the top 10, one can understand where Tasty the Cookbook could be with 150 copies sold (sales figure for August 2017 ).
The idea of a personalized book?—?said Ashley McCollum, the general manager of Tasty?—?would have seemed crazy to most publishers. Dealing with a traditional publisher would have taken a long time and many would not have agreed to publish a custom book. So we settled on self-publishing.
Of course, not all publishing products can follow this model. Fiction does not lend itself to personalization. Many writers aren't social media stars and can't boast the following that BuzzFeed has, so they have to rely on the marketing structures of the publishers.
The Disney/Buzzfeed Model for Intellectual Property
The greatest value of a content is given by the intellectual property which is inalienable, such as an organ of one's body. The question facing the beneficiaries of intellectual property is to fire up all the engines to monetize it. The arrival of the web has added other propellers to this possibility which in most cases still remains in its potential state.
Per esempio Tasty opens many commercial outlets that BuzzFeed begins to activate. The recipe book is one. A second was designed, Tasty Junior, aimed at children with a choice of 120 recipes. Another product is the Tasty One Top, an electric cooker designed to cook Tasty's recipes, 1700 of which are made available by a free app for iOS and Android. Tasty's one minute video is actually a decoy, no one will be able to cook a dish from those videos.
Here then is that the recipes contained in the app show the preparation of the dish step by step, describing it textually or showing it in a video. You can place your smartphone (there are special protectors) next to the electric stove and proceed to prepare the dish there.
There is a special BuzzFeed laboratory called Product Lab which is responsible for inventing new products intended as social commerce experiences that target social media users, especially Facebook.
A product that came out of this laboratory is "Fondoodler" a gun for spreading cream cheese for garnishes and fillings. Another one is called GlamSpin which is both an anti-stress fidget spinner and a lip humidifier.
Then there are the "nostalgia candles" aimed essentially at the Facebook audience. These candles, when burning, emit the typical scent of a region, for example they smell like apple for the nostalgic of Georgia, orange for those of Florida or fir of spruce needles for Colorado. BuzzFeed sells tens of thousands of candles of this type every month.
These apparently eccentric initiatives are essentially conveyed through the web and social networks for the new lifestyles of digital natives, they are part of the attempt to maximize the value of Tasty's intellectual property. McCollum summarizes this experience thus: After the cookbook, I realized that Tasty is not an experiment or even a lucky Facebook page that generates a lot of advertising revenue. What we are seeing is the possibility of creating massive intellectual property built solely on digital. It's the same model as the old media conglomerates. You make a movie that people love and then you build a theme park on top of it and then you extend that to any other product. The Disney model to be clear.
When building an intellectual property, the business opportunities are endless. Indeed, BuzzFeed is striving to become a Disney of the digital age, a brand that embraces all lifestyles and creates content, experiences and products for an audience that lives, works, trades, communicates and enjoys new media.
