How BuzzFeed turned Tasty’s recipes into a viral video hit – Recode

How do you make a recipe exciting? BuzzFeed figured it out.

“The world of recipes had not been reinvented beyond a list of text and an image forever,” BuzzFeed Entertainment Group President Ze Frank said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka.

On the new podcast, Frank shared the behind-the-scenes story of Tasty, a.k.a. those top-down recipe videos you’ve probably seen in your Facebook feed. Last year, when Facebook started autoplaying those videos as users scrolled past, BuzzFeed started experimenting with different types and lengths of videos to surface to its followers.

When those videos were about 40 seconds long, they got viewed and shared a lot — a “sweet spot,” in Frank’s words — so the company formed a team called FB40 to make more of them.

“We tried a lot of different stuff. We looked at hacks, we looked at facts videos, we looked at all sorts of things,” Frank said. “What we do at BuzzFeed is we go back and we look at things that have been successful in the past and we put them through that kind of platform lens.”

“The food group did an amazing quick cellphone-shot Nutella hack, and it just went from there,” he added. “It became obvious that food, itself, was a sweet spot, on top of all those things.”

Today, Tasty’s five Facebook pages have more than 100 million likes combined — more than Beyoncé’s paltry 64 million, Frank is quick to point out. Frank attributed a big part of the success to the team’s realization that almost all of the viewers on Facebook would be amateur chefs, not gourmands hunting for a Michelin star.

“They thought very carefully about things like making sure it was okay if the flour spilled on the table,” he said. “Even the food, the categories of food that were explored were back to a simplistic view.”

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