Food Blog Financials

Welcome back to a day in my life as a food stylist. Just kidding. A normal food stylist would probably kill me for that because they do like 10-12 recipes a day and I am only doing 4 today. But if you missed part 1, I'm a food blogger, I'm refurbing old recipes for my blog, and today we're gonna talk about the financials.

Cause you all are nosy. Okay, so first, what do I percentile of food bloggers because there are lots of legacy food blogs and they do very very well So how most blogs get paid is a thing called rate per mil and that's the rate of money that you're paid per mil Which confusingly means a thousand people rate per mil ranges for a lot of reasons But a key indicator is how long somebody spends on your site So my rate per mil when I first started my blog was two dollars and seventy five cents now cents. Now it's around $35 to $55 depending on the day, depending on the time of year. So if you're one of those people who really hates going to food blogs because how dare those people

paid for their work, do not sweat it. You're giving them like three cents. Now where this gets interesting is you have these blogs that have been online forever. So they're getting like 3 million hits a month, 4 million hits a month. And if you're doing the math, 1 million $25,000 so you see how these blogs can become incredibly lucrative really quickly So whenever I see a Forbes article about like men crushing crypto or like having a podcast I'm like I would rather see the multi-million dollar food and mommy bloggers Thank you These women are running the world quietly and by providing value

But of course a lot of bloggers are not in that upper echelon and that's the next interesting thing, which is AI so over the past five years obviously is AI. So over the past five years, obviously, there's been a big change with AI and how we interact with the search bar in Google itself. And a lot of food bloggers have seen a decrease in revenue of up to 40%. My blog was rising during that time because I was just starting, so I didn't see that impact until this year. Okay, one more recipe to go. But what's sad about this is it's the first example of ChatGPT making a system where the cost gets passed on to the consumer. The best example would be paywalled recipes because I know every time I press publish on a public post,

I am feeding an AI model whether I want to or not and it's something that is driving me a little crazy. And I've had friends start to compensate through like ads on their podcast or making a membership fee for their community. or making a membership fee for their community.

So just like any industry, we've had to adapt because of AI.