How to Outlast 5-Minute Internet Fads

We live in an online world made by Tasty.

Beginning in 2015, Tasty’s close-up videos featuring hands speeding through recipes for goodies like cheese-stuffed mashed potato balls or sliders four ways seemed to be all over Facebook.

Tasty, which is part of the online media company BuzzFeed, called these “hands and pans” videos, and — I am not exaggerating — they helped shape the internet as we know it.

Today, Tasty’s DNA is in the TikTok food manias for baked feta pasta or pizza panini. People posting social media videos of hands-focused tasks like household cleaning and organizing owe a debt to Tasty. So did the 2020 social media craze of knives cutting into cake that looked like a Crocs shoe or a pickle. And broadly, Tasty and other 2010s food brands helped establish smartphone videos as a dominant way that we interact through screens.

Tasty’s influence might be everywhere online, but that doesn’t mean that it’s smooth sailing for Tasty itself. The food entertainment website is now overhauling itself to lean into our 2022 habits, including for constantly churning food novelties and a zeal to create our own recipes and not just take the advice of cooking pros.

Tasty’s transformation will be a test of how to create an enduring identity in the digital age, when fads burn bright for five minutes and anything novel — including practically disembodied hands in videos — is copied by the internet’s great Xerox machine.

Allen Adamson, co-founder of the brand and marketing consulting firm Metaforce, told me that the speed of change has made it more difficult for products and companies to have a long life.