Food Creator Monetization Strategy in a Short-Form Video World

Content featuring food and restaurants has seen tremendous growth on TikTok and other short-form content platforms. Food and short-form content go well together because food videos are easy to remember, have quick cuts, and pack enough action in a short clip to satiate peoples’ short attention spans — all themes of a successful short film. Just look at how Emily Markio’s Salmon Rice Bowl Video, that had almost 8 Million views, took over the internet for a brief period. It was quick, easy to make, and short. This video is just one of many examples that show the impact food short-form content can have on the world. Additionally, this content has also helped many find new recipes and restaurants to try. A study found that 36% of people get food from a restaurant after seeing it on TikTok.

Food creators are not the only ones sensing the opportunity in short-form content. Startups have also identified gaps in monetization and have built products to support it. There are four key categories where these short-form food creators can leverage startups’ technology to help monetize: affiliate grocery shopping, paid recipes, drops, and paid community. This market map will dive into the key themes and how startups and creators alike can make the most of this opportunity

On the monetization side, this new content format, short form-video, has seen creators receive limited revenue through traditional social media partnerships and ad revenue, but overall it has been trickier to monetize due to the content length. The audience only has so much attention span, and advertising is less of a priority than keeping people watching your content. People only spend an average of 1.7 seconds per video before swiping, so there is not much room for anything besides the main message. Still, the creators need to monetize to make a living. Building their brand by having ad-lite content will help, but they need to find ways to monetize the video and there are still opportunities to do so. Below is a market map of startups in the space.

Affiliate Grocery Shopping

Instacart controls a large hold on the grocery delivery market, but it does not do much direct work with influencers. However, the natural connection between purchasing groceries and creators piqued some entrepreneurs’ interest. Using APIs and existing affiliate programs, startups have built a layer on existing delivery marketplaces that helps customers plan out their meals and then send the order to Instacart, Walmart, Target, and others. To stand out and acquire customers, these startups are partnering with creators to host virtual storefronts. Unlike the aforementioned main platforms, such as Instacart, the central branding of the website is the creator, not Instacart or the grocery store fulfilling the order.

Creator-Focused Branding of Jupiter

Instacart and Aldi branding rather than the creator

The startups attacking this problem can be broken into two categories: web-based and app based. Jupiter and Unipantry are web-based, while flavrs is app based. Creators work with these startups to make it easy for their fans to purchase the ingredients to make the recipes in the content. For instance on Jupiter, you can purchase the ingredients to make Half Baked Harvest’s Roasted Garlic Butter Smashed Potatoes, add in the rest of your groceries, and have it delivered to your doorstep. For some recipes, an additional monetization layer is added, as you have to pay a monthly fee to unlock it. For creators, this is a great, light lift to add ways to monetize, and the startups are able to collect affiliate fee revenue. It is too early to tell whether fans will adopt this technology.

The biggest challenge for these startups and the creators is going to be eCommerce grocery penetration, which hovers around 11%. For those fans that already purchase groceries for delivery, using influencer recipes is a nice way to start their order, but for those fans that don’t use delivery, they will most likely take the recipes and purchase the ingredients themselves; the ingredients typically aren’t too hard to find. That customer behavior narrows the aperture of who would use this product. The winner in this space will need to build a solid strategy to win people who don’t typically do delivery and prove the value of going to an Instacart or Kroger directly. For creators, they will need to figure out a way to convince their audience to buy through them, and not just add the product to their normal grocery shopping routine.

Paid Recipes

Another low-lift monetization strategy for these creators to monetize is selling their recipes. Especially since these videos are so quick, they are not exactly the best guide to follow when you are trying to recreate the recipe yourself. Many creators put the recipe in the caption or on a blog, but there is a balance where you can put some of these behind a paywall, without alienating your core base who are coming for free content.

One startup, Provecho, has identified the problem of recipes not being digestible and formatted for social media. They created a builder where the creator puts in the recipe and out comes an optimized recipe with an Instacart purchase link, combining recipes with some of the aspects of the prior channel. Provecho claims their creators are able to make 5x what they make with Google ads by posting recipes. This recipe builder is another example of a low lift for the creator to add additional revenue channels, especially since the creators are able to use Provecho’s builder to easily create recipes. The main difference between Provecho and the startups highlighted in the grocery shopping section is that Provecho is recipe first, while the others are grocery first.

Overall, creators should have a strategy on recipe monetization to diversify their revenue streams, while startups in the space should continue to expand the product’s features to enable revenue growth for both sides.

Drops

When food creators are focused solely on creating excellent content and not monetization, their fans can have an enhanced appetite for monetization when it does come. They have benefited tremendously from the creator, likely making them more open to monetizing. One area this strategy can be especially impactful is for merchandise, events, and CPG goods, as the fan is receiving something tangible in return. On the events side, recently, one of my favorite food youtubers, @FrenchGuyCooking, did a ramen pop up with @ramen__lord that sold out tickets in 40 seconds. Since they both have been pumping out content for years and fans have a great benefit in return for (paying to) attend, people really wanted to participate. In the video, you can see @ramen_lord has this down to a science — he has done pop ups before.

However, for creators who are new to this, there is a lot of trial and error, which ultimately eats into the profitability of these events. That is where startups are attacking the problem. One startup, Hotplate, has created a front-end splash page for fans to order and a back end management system for the creators, which helps solve two of the biggest pain points in this process. Hotplate is mostly catering to micro-influencers in their local areas, but larger creators have the opportunity to utilize their services as well. On the merch side, Spring, and others like it are well established enabling drop shipping of merch. Creators can focus on content creation rather than immediate monetization, allowing fans to develop a stronger appetite for monetization through physical offerings like merchandise, events, and CPG when they do come around.

Paid Communities

After advertisements and sponsored videos, one of the first monetization opportunities for creators was Patreon. Founded in 2013, six years after adsense was enabled for Youtube, patreon allowed creators to have a paid community. However, Patreon is very transactional. Here is a video a week early. Here are plans for a shelf the creator built. Here is a video with additional commentary.

What is missing from these interactions is the back-and-forth that is the heart of a community. That pain point is where Circle emerged after being started in 2019. While not focused exclusively on creators — I have seen everyone from VC funds to Youtubers use it — creators have capitalized on the opportunity to create a paid community focused on them. Patreon is very prominent in the experience, while on Circle, they are in the background. Depending on the creator, each platform has its benefits and drawbacks, but every creator should have a paid community strategy.

Conclusion

Of the four themes outlined in this market map, I am most bullish on Paid Recipes and Paid Communities. As content gets more compressed, people are going to want to have something to follow when re-creating content they observed. On the community side, these creators are obsessed over by fans. For someone’s favorite person, they would be willing to pay. If a creator with 1 Million subscribers can convert 1% at $9.99 per month, that is ~$100k in additional revenue per month. By leveraging these new technologies, creators can meaningfully boost their bottom line while also improving their follower experience. Regardless of which theme and technologies they are leveraging, creators need to be utilizing new technologies and ideas to continually deliver value for their audience.