Welcome to Creator Close-Up, TheWrap’s new monthly feature that spotlights the people who are changing the creator and entertainment landscape.
If you’re addicted to watching recipe videos, you’ve seen Nick DiGiovanni. With 36.1 million YouTube subscribers, DiGiovanni hit a major milestone at the end of March, surpassing Japanese creator Bayashi (35.7 million YouTube subscribers) to become the most followed culinary creator on YouTube.
That stat is just one of DiGiovanni’s many accomplishments. Often called “Gordon Ramsay’s protégé,” DiGiovanni first came into the media spotlight by becoming the youngest-ever finalist on “MasterChef.” He’s since been included on both Time and Forbes’ lists of top creators, launched his own line of Michelin-quality pantry staples and has featured celebrities like Ramsey, Matthew McConaughey and Tom Brady on his channel. And though YouTube is his primary platform, it only accounts for part of his more than 55 million followers across social media.
It’s a staggering amount of fame and success for someone who’s just shy of 30. It’s also a growing empire that DiGiovanni doesn’t take lightly.
“I told everyone on our team call that I’m looking at this new position of being the most followed food and cooking channel on YouTube as a responsibility and not so much as a trophy,” DiGiovanni told TheWrap. “It is important for us to be excited about it and celebrate it. But we feel more responsibility to be really thoughtful with our next steps. We’re in a really fun spot, and this path hasn’t yet been carved.”
DiGiovanni first started posting on YouTube in 2019. His first video was actually him spotlighting his final dessert on “MasterChef.” During those early days, he was really only posting because he liked sharing recipes and food videos with his followers. But after his account blew up on TikTok, everything changed. A little more than six years after that first post, DiGiovanni and his team hired their 15th full-time team member and work with anywhere between 40 to 50 contractors on everything from making video thumbnails to lighting bigger shoots. That’s without counting DiGiovanni’s support team — at least two different types of lawyers, a business management team and a PR team.
“It’s gotten to be quite bigger than I would have anticipated,” DiGiovanni admitted. “My goal is to provide content that is beneficial and positive for people watching it, and to get them to watch it for the longest amount of time possible,” he said. “That, to me, says they’re on YouTube to spend time, not kill time.”
Fresh off the heels of his subscriber sweep, here’s how social media’s culinary king is planning to continue his reign and what he thinks may be ahead for the creator ecosystem.
At what point did you realize this could be more of a full time option?
Nick DiGiovanni: There wasn’t a lightning bolt moment, per se, where I knew that everything was going to work out. But I started seeing really great traction on TikTok videos first.
People always tell you to do what you love and the money will follow. You really never listen to that, especially when you’re younger because it’s a really frustrating thing to hear. But in that moment, I had tunnel vision, and I was focused on doing what I loved. Genuinely, I was having so much fun making these videos. I loved doing it. I love food and cooking, and everything was coming together in the most beautiful, perfect way. But there was no money yet.
Once I got my first couple of brand deal inquiries, they weren’t huge. I think the very first one I did was for just a couple thousand dollars. Having to piece together a couple thousand dollar paychecks a bunch of times throughout the year to make it a full time job, that’s not easy. So I was just chasing it for the love of the game for a while and hoping it would work out.
What platforms are you focused on these days?
My No. 1 by far, is YouTube. And YouTube, a few weeks ago, became the biggest media company in the world. Then we became the largest food and cooking platform on YouTube. That’s not to say that we have the biggest food and cooking platform on the planet, but I do feel like is we’re in a really exciting place at a really exciting time.
I’m fully focused on YouTube, really, above all else. It’s important to keep a presence on places like Instagram and TikTok. I care about those platforms, but I’d rather really excel at one platform than try to do them all almost as good.
@nick.digiovanni Cookbook out NOW!! @Gordon Ramsay #cookbook #thankyou ♬ original sound – nick.digiovanni
How have you seen the culinary creator space evolve in the past few years?
When I started, food on social media was more geared toward recipe tutorials. It was very functional in that sense. Now, I feel like it’s entertainment first.
The production quality has gone up … There are better cameras that are more compact and easier to slide under the radar if you want to film in a restaurant or film some street food around the world without spooking people with these giant cameras. Everything has trended in the right direction to make for a wider range of content and not just videos that are stuck in some studio-lit kitchen.
I’m trying to ride both sides of the line now. I’m trying to keep in touch with my roots by providing high-quality recipe content. We have a channel, “Nick’s Kitchen,” that we created about a year plus ago that S.Pellegrino sponsored [about two weeks ago], which is really cool because they’re letting me do what I was doing anyways and are already great partners. They’re allowing the recipes to shine, and they’re not trying to take over what we’re doing in any way, which I love. If I could have picked a dream partner, it would have been them. I’m not just saying this. As people may know, S.Pellegrino sponsors The World’s 50 Greatest Restaurants. They’ve always been pretty involved in high-quality food.
So that’s one side of things, which we call the recipe and cooking side of our channels. Then we also have that food entertainment side of our channels. On our main big channel I’ll do things like cooking for a lion or tasting street food from a bunch of different countries in Southeast Asia. The YouTube space has definitely shifted towards being more entertainment first as opposed simple cooking and recipes. But I’ve tried to find a little path in both, because I think they’re both really important.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far as a creator?
Scaling without losing the thing that made people care and watch my videos in the first place.
I always said that I would never hire so many people that I didn’t know everyone’s name. And by that, I meant more than just knowing their name. I wanted to know about them. It just feels weird to me to show up to work, even if someone’s remote, and not have any idea of what that person does when they finish work that day … But we’re just getting to that point where it’s genuinely becoming difficult for me to really know everybody.
When you go from one person with a camera in a small apartment that wasn’t meant to be filmed in to a full studio with a big team, it’s hard to keep the authenticity of the channel and the quality of food and videos. I’m also trying to think every day like a leader. I don’t know if that tension will ever fully resolve, but I want to get better every day at managing it. We’re constantly working on how to fill in all the gaps, and I feel like it’s a constant struggle to try to figure out how to fix, streamline and better manage things.
What trends do you think are going to emerge in the creator space in the next two to three years?
Creators are becoming the new media companies. That’s already happening. It’s amazing how fast the shift happened because, just a few years ago, I feel like many creators weren’t taken seriously … I think we’re going to start to see more and more creators who own equity in different things and who are taking the place of of what we used to know as traditional linear TV.
It’s such an exciting space to be in. I could not have predicted this when I started doing it five or six years ago. I have to attribute some of this to being in the right place at the right time. I will be the first to admit that I think I really got lucky in being at the right place at the right time. But I’m also lucky to just have this team that’s been so excited to go into battle with me every day.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
