I am Laura Vitale and this is my husband, Joe.
We created Laura in the Kitchen about four and a half years ago.
It's now one of the most popular cooking channels on YouTube.
She had a crazy idea one day. It was, I want to write a cookbook.
I said, Well, we could do that but we'll spend our life savings publishing it.
You'll probably sell eight copies to your friends that are interested
and then you'll have about 992 copies sitting around that you haven't sold.
Then she says, Well, how about a TV show? I'd love to have a TV show.
Again, you just can't go knock on TV's door and say, Hey,
can I get a TV show? and expect them to say yes because there's thousands
of people doing that. So then we had this crazy idea to build a kitchen studio
in the basement of our house and that's where we filmed Laura in the kitchen.
That's where it started. Before we uploaded, we didn't know what we should be posting.
We actually went to Google and used auto complete as our analytics at that time.
We literally typed in "How to make" and then the letter "a" and then "how to make"
and the letter "b". That's where bruschetta came from in the first episode.
As we went on, we decided to take a look at who we were reaching the most.
It was no surprise. It was 13 to 17-year-olds that were on the platform
more than most people at the time.
Then we started trying to figure out: who should we be targeting with this show?
Who's the audience that we're really interested in?
To be honest, the 13 to 17- year-olds category made sense
because we didn't feel like they were watching cooking shows on television.
We felt that this was the audience that would grow up with Laura.
We actually started running ad campaigns against videos
that were really resonating with that audience.
We started our channel in January 2010. Then in the summer of 2011, I thought,
I'm really building my audience. At the time, we had about 20,000 subscribers.
We were uploading about once or twice a week. That's when we came home
and I said I'm going to upload every single day.
I'm going to upload a new recipe every day for as long as I possibly can.
Just to build my library. Anytime somebody searched for something,
I want it to be what came up. Whether it was brownies or pizzas or cinnamon roll.
Whatever it was, I wanted to be the result.
That's what we did. We uploaded every single day for nine months.
We built a really good library. I think, at the time, we had a couple of
100,000 subscribers and we thought we can scale it down to every other day.
That's the current schedule we have now. It's every other day.
When it comes to getting ready to film an episode, it starts with an idea.
First of all, I think about the time of the year and then I see
what my audience has been requesting. I see what's trending. I see what people
are pinning. I see what people are searching for.
These are my apple fritters. They are to die for.
I see what's really popular that I can maybe do a twist on.
I take all of that into consideration. We film in bulk. We don't film
one episode here and there. We'll film for two days and
we'll film enough content to have for about two weeks or so.
It takes me about a week to come up with the recipes that we want to film.
Then I have to test the recipes. If it's something that I've made before
over and over again, there's no need to test it. But if it's a recent recipe that
I had this crazy idea for, I'll get in the kitchen and I'll start playing around
see what works, what doesn't. I think from the very beginning
to the day that the episode goes live, it's about a week.
We knew from day one what we wanted this format to be.
In fact, we actually sat down and watched several other cooking shows
to see how they intro their show and to see if there were any patterns
that we really thought we liked. As far as the format of the show
and the way it's outlined, it was very utility. It made sense.
Go over the ingredients first that way you're not getting into something
without having everything laid out in front of you.
On television, you don't see that a lot. You don't see it laid out that way,
the way we do it because we expect people to be watching it on their iPad
or on their mobile device in their kitchen.
We've gotten to a point where we know what the audience likes, what they don't like,
what they're going to respond well to, what they're not.
Of course I take that into consideration when it comes to what recipes
I'm going to choose. Then, we're also at the point where we know
what's going to perform best and when.
For example, on Saturdays, you've got to post something sweet.
People have time to bake so we know that something like a cake or a muffin
is going to perform really well. Starting from the thumbnail because now they
get up on Saturday mornings. They see that chocolate cake. It might need a couple of
hours to set but they have the time and the day, so it makes sense
to post it on Saturdays. The thumbnails are always similar in terms of
they're on a white background because the thumbnail is as big as a postage stamp
you need to be able to just see the dish.
If it's got a beautiful cup and silverware and a beautiful plate,
it doesn't really work for a thumbnail. We might have to retake the pictures
several times in order for it to look right but that's really, really important.
I'd say we average about 50 thumbnails before we get the one we want
every time we shoot. The food in the thumbnail is the food that was made
in the episode. It's not a second dish. It's identical.
When you see a thumbnail, you're actually going to watch that dish be made
as opposed to something that sat through hours of beautification.
That's really important to me because I don't want people to be like,
Well, mine doesn't... why does that one look so amazing? This doesn't look
that way. I want it to be... You're going to get what you see.
We actually have a subscriber counter, which I made myself.
That's a big four-inch numeric counter that sits in our kitchen
It updates every half an hour to show us how many subscribers we have because
we want our subscribers to know how important they are to us
that they actually have a place in our home.
If I had to measure the engagement in levels, I'd say a view is at the bottom.
Obviously it's important but that's the first measurable piece of success.
A view, then a like, then a share, then a comment, then going out on social media
and finding someone who made the dish and recreated it.
That's the top. That's the ultimate measurement of success because
at that point, you have changed somebody's behavior and you have
people who are that engaged and that interested in what you're doing.
When you see something six hours after you posted it and someone else has
already gone and recreated it, there's just something special about that.