The New York Times crafts personality-led video in Cooking push to drive subs

The Times has long experimented with loosening its paywall around certain news events – like its COVID-19 coverage in March 2020 and presidential elections. Now it’s applying that same playbook to Cooking, aiming to use recipes and food content more strategically as a subscription driver for new and younger audiences.

“This is a new audience play,” said Camilla Velasquez, gm of NYT Cooking. “There is such a big audience out there for baking that maybe don’t know us yet. And we really want to get them … We’ve really tried to open our access model to allow people to try things a little bit more.”

Vreeland’s series “Bake Time,” which launched on Sept. 25, is also part of the Times’ broader move into more personality-led video, where the publisher increasingly builds franchises around individual talent. That’s a strategy Cooking has pushed more aggressively in the past 18 months, Velasquez noted. 

Publishers from The Washington Post to the Guardian and News Corps are experimenting with formats anchored by recognizable personalities, in part to compete with creators and influencers who dominate younger audiences’ attention.  

For many publishers, leaning into video and creator-style franchises is a hedge against declining referral traffic, particularly as Google AI Overviews threatens to siphon off casual readers. The Times is less vulnerable than most thanks to its subscription base, but Cooking remains a key funnel product. (The Times doesn’t break out the number of Cooking subscribers from its total digital subscriber base of 11.88 million. Cooking has more than 1 million Youtube subscribers.) 

Free recipes and personality-driven video around producers like Vreeland are designed to keep new audiences flowing into that subscription pipeline, making the strategy as much defensive as it is growth-driven. 

The strategy also doubles as a hedge against the threat of AI: if fewer readers end up on publisher homepages, putting recognizable names and faces on external platforms helps extend brand recognition and trust — at least in theory.

“What the Times is doing here serves as a good example of how legacy publishers can differentiate themselves in an increasingly AI-disrupted environment, particularly with content that is highly susceptible to disruption – like recipes,” Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital, said in an email. “By pairing a recipe with an engaging personality, they create an experience that is far more difficult for AI summaries to replicate.”

Chowning said the strategy gives audiences more reason to engage directly with a title like The New York Times, as opposed to AI-generated recipes. Video content also “enhances their potential for discovery on social media platforms,” she added.

According to Steve Paine, marketing manager at SEO platform Sistrix, Google AI Overviews were triggered for about 11% of the keywords Cooking ranked for in Sistrix’s dataset, which he noted was “average” compared to other publishers.

“Video and imagery and human connection [are] becoming the language of the internet,” Velasquez said.

In 2024, people watched over 4.3 million hours of NYT Cooking videos on YouTube, according to the Times. And 70% of subscribers return to the Cooking platform week over week. NYT Cooking has two other recipe-focused series, including “The Veggie” and “Cooking 101.” (Vreeland counts 86,000 followers on his own Instagram account.)

“There’s [a] new audience and younger audience where cooking weeknights for them is not something that fits into their schedule, but it could fit in on the weekend,” Velasquez said.

Each monthly episode of “Bake Time” will dive into the inspiration and development journey behind the featured baking recipe. Vreeland calls it his “video diary.” The newsletter will be published weekly, he said. Audience feedback will be a big part of both – Vreeland plans to include photos of viewers’ bakes in his videos and newsletter, as well as tailor the theme of the newsletter around readers’ recipe requests.

“I’m humanizing the recipe,” Vreeland said.

The videos will be distributed on the Times’ own Cooking site and app, YouTube, and social platforms.

For all the momentum behind publishers chasing video, the bigger question is whether these efforts actually reach the audiences they’re meant to — and whether they deliver for advertisers, noted Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at consulting firm TVRev. He cautioned publishers like the Times from producing video that may be seen as “amateur” alongside hard news reporting on a homepage.

“The idea of having video is a good one, and if they used these videos on TikTok or even YouTube it would work. Ditto encouraging the reporters to promote the videos on social. But context is everything,” said Wolk. “Whether it is effective or not is another story, but it’s definitely a way to bring advertisers into a different part of the paper.”