A feature that originally appeared in The Sunday Times
‘I couldn’t get the non-minty stuff,” says Jamie, stretching a stubby piece of dental floss through a supermarket slab of brie. A girl is wearing a hoodie back-to-front, its hood stuffed with popcorn. The kitchen surface is splattered in tomato seeds.
This is the north London kitchen of Sorted Food, one of the most popular cooking channels on YouTube. Ben Ebbrell, Mike Huttlestone, Jamie Spafford and Barry Taylor founded it four years ago, when they were all in their early twenties. They now have more than 800,000 subscribers and 60m total video views, and people around the world spend at least 9,000 hours a day watching these four ordinary but good-looking lads messing about in their Kenwood-sponsored kitchen.
Their new food-based social network — in the guise of an app — contains 500 recipe videos for users to access, the most on any recipe app, and is now in the top five in the food and drink category of the App Store in more than 20 countries.
Their audience will post recipes and photographs, chat about their favourite food and videos on the Sorted channel and generally interact in a space that isn’t controlled by Google, which owns YouTube.
This is the future. Television is struggling and Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Nigella — whose YouTube channel languishes with a rather pitiful 1,000 subscribers — are all trying to establish presence on the site as well. (Sorted has almost double Gordon’s numbers.) To many teenagers, even people under 30, the idea of scheduled programming seems counterintuitive, limited and quaint.
Ebbrell is the only trained cook: the other four hold the cameras, edit, market, work on collaborations and arrange sponsorship deals. The channel now generates enough cash to support its four founders as well as four other staff, who help with editing, camera work and running the office.
I’ve come to help them make a Food Life Hacks video: the first one, filmed last spring, has had more than 300,000 views (that’s nothing: others made subsequently have more than 1m.) These hacks, kitchen tips, really, have ranged from the gimmicky — separating an egg by sucking up the yolk through a bottle — to the relatively useful: using frozen grapes to chill a glass of white wine.
I watch Taylor and Spafford josh and grin. There’s an affecting hamminess in their interactions with the camera: they have a sweetly amateurish way of taking turns to hold the camera and of making triumphant or disappointed faces.
Ebbrell has a gift for finding shortcuts and compromises: one of the most popular videos is a microwaved “cake in a mug”, ready from start to finish in four minutes.
“A typical member of our audience might be a twentysomething woman in LA or London,” says Spafford. “Jamie Oliver’s audience tends to be a bit older and a lot of the most active users on YouTube are still young.”
Collaborations are key to building a successful YouTube channel: filming videos with other successful YouTubers so you can pool your audiences. It is no accident that Sorted’s second most-popular video was filmed with the YouTube star Jenna Marbles, a 27-year-old Californian with more than 1bn views, her own range of branded dog treats and a net worth of millions of dollars.
To hang out with Sorted for the morning is to feel like you’re witnessing a pronounced change in the dynamic between audiences and performers, or “content creators”, as the modish and unlovely phrase has it. After we wrapped — though nobody used that word — and I went out into the sunshine of Islington, Sorted were busy planning a trip to America and then, I am sure, to greater success.