Please don’t put pasta in a fl*shlight

Part 2

The other week I dove into how Facebook’s pivot to video laid the foundation for today’s cheap engagement bait video ecosystem. I went through how we got from Tasty to Toilet. 

Reminder, I’m out on vacation this week, so past Cameron is sending you this newsletter without any platform update links. Bon appetit! 

Thumbnail Menus 

When you open up YouTube, you are presented with a feed of thumbnails and video titles. Depending on your device and settings, there might be some limited silent autoplay, but the thumbnail still plays a big role in telling you what the video is about across the platform. With an image and a few lines of text, you have to convince me to give your video a watch. This is why repeatable series formats do so well for many channels. Think Vogue’s 73 Questions, Wired’s Autocomplete Interview, or Architectural Diget’s Open Door. 

The playbook for a lot of YouTube channels is to try a lot of different repeatable formats, see what gets views, then build that into an ongoing series. Repeatable formats make content production easier, and audiences know what they are getting. When I see Ellen Pompeo’s face, the AD channel logo, and the words “open door,” I know I’m gonna see what kind of house that Grey’s Anatomy money can buy. 

Food creators did this too. Before its implosion, the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen channel used this strategy to turn that channel into a cultural powerhouse. It’s Alive with Brad, Gourmet Makes with Claire, and Reverse Engineering with Chris. Find a format that works, turn it into a series audiences can recognize from a thumbnail and headline, then watch the views roll in. It works for independent food YouTubers too, not just the big magazine-backed channels. Binging with Babish rebranded to the Babish Culinary Universe as the volume of formats, and chef hosts expanded. One of my faves, Ethan Chlebowski, has the Low Cal vs Restaurant Style ongoing series with his channel. 

This is a huge simplification of YouTube strategy. There’s a whole SEO side of making things work on YouTube, so you show up in the right searches. You’ve got to optimize the openings of your videos to keep people engaged after they click your thumbnail or if they get served your video as an autoplay. But I think the fact that a big chunk of how people find and view content on YouTube starts with browsing thumbnails informs why these templatized formats thrive there and why our current rash of bonkers food trends aren’t originating there. 

TikTok-Core

TikTok loves naming a trend. Cottegcore, Clean Girl, Corecore. The app and its users are skilled at defining and replicating niche aesthetic styles. This is partly because a successful TikTok page requires a lot of content. According to the social media management software company Sprout Social, the average optimal posting schedule for TikTok is between 1 and 4 posts per day. For Instagram, they recommend 1 to 2 posts per day. 

Things move fast on TikTok, and you need to publish a lot of video content to have any chance of catching the waves of virality its algorithmically powered trends generate. One way to keep up is to browse the trending audio, conversations, and video effects for opportunities to talk about your niche interest or skill (or for brands, your products and services). What happens when your niche becomes a trend of its own? You’ve gotta evolve somehow. This is what I think powers the constant creation of new aesthetic labels that need to create new trends and niche aesthetic categories from which to engage with trends. 

[trending sound A] + [niche aesthetic Y] = [today’s video]

Both parts of that equation eventually get tired and need to be recycled.

This brings me to the butter videos I shared last week. Butter boards were the trending thing in the fall of 2022, but that idea has long since fizzled out. If you are had some success making a butter board video, how do you build on that success? Swap in a different weird butter hack. Like the butter candle. 

Amuse-bouche

Before we go, here are some stray thoughts on other food content and trends that didn’t fit into the other sections. 

Secret Menu Hacks - I feel like this started as a Starbucks thing. Someone would come up with a complicated Starbucks order and call the heinous thing they are ordering a Menu Hack in their video about it. The other week a Waffle House put a stop to this trend with a sign reading, “we are not making anything you saw on TikTok!!” Never mess with Waffle House employees. They have seen more than you can possibly imagine. 

Rotisserie Chicken Guy - We love a main character that’s just a weird guy. A big part of the enthusiasm for the guy in Philly who ate a lot of rotisserie chickens was just that, we like having someone offbeat but seemingly neutral to root for. I also think the rotisserie chicken was a big part of the internet’s collective enthusiasm here. Don’t underestimate the rotisserie chicken fandom. I’m in a group chat called “Rotisserie Chix” where all we do is share chicken content with each other. 

Unhinged Fridge - This fridge is so upsetting. 0/10 not for humans. 

NSFW - Um… this guy fucks different pastas. My guess is that the need to go viral on sites like Twitter to drive traffic to OnlyFans is creating some weird feedback loops here. The first part of the video doesn’t have any NSFW imagery, but def don’t watch the whole thing in the office.