If there’s one thing Rhett & Link have learned about their Good Mythical Morning audience over the last decade, it’s that people love food.
Specifically, they love watching Rhett & Link taste food: good food, bad food, cheap food, ungodly expensive food. Their Will It? series, where they submit various food items to questionable transformations, is one of the most popular on their channel, and taste tests of all kinds have become a staple of the content that’s driven their channel to nearly 20 million subscribers.
Rhett & Link also love food. That’s why, almost exactly two years ago, their Mythical team launched Sporked, a foodie-focused site with debut articles like a definitive ranking of uncomfortably sexy cereal mascots, an (objectively correct) argument for why it should be normal to consume sauces like soup, and “why Easter candy absolutely rips.”
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Sporked has since grown to nearly 2 million pageviews per month, editor-in-chief Justine Sterling tells Tubefilter.
Sterling has been in the culinary publishing sector since 2007, writing for outlets like New York Magazine, Time Out New York, EatMeDaily, and Delish. She’s been Senior Digital Editor of Food & Wine, Executive Editor at Group Nine Media‘s spirits-and-cocktails site Supercall, and Director of Branded Content at The Foundry.
When Mythical tapped her to lead Sporked, it was “super exciting,” she says. “I was there when we were talking about the design and coming up with the content plan, and to see how that’s evolved over the past couple of years, and the way we just keep seeing such great success, has been really exciting.”
Sporked–which is now a team of five people, publishing between seven and 10 articles per day–has had to be light on its feet, adjusting to trends they see in readership data. Sterling says the Mythical team went into this project expecting Sporked’s main fare to be Good Mythical Morning-esque taste tests and product rankings, plus a healthy dose of hot takes and personal essays.
Taste tests and product rankings have proven to be popular, but two other categories eclipsed hot takes and personal essays.
“The two main things are new product reviews and the news vertical,” Sterling says. “It turns out personality-driven breaking news and personality-driven, single-product reviews have done really well for us.” She was also “amazed,” she says, at just how passionate Sporked’s audience can be about soda.
“I’ve been working in food media my whole career and I had no idea there was such a fandom when it comes to something like the new Red Bull flavor, or a new Mountain Dew flavor,” she says. “People really care about what Mountain Dew Purple Thunder tastes like, and the fact that they want to know about the winter Red Bull flavor leak is huge. There’s this whole underground of message boards where beverage detectives are scoping things out, looking for patents, seeing what these companies are doing. That world has started to really open up for us.”
Sporked is at 1.7 million pageviews per month now, with nearly 300,000 followers across platforms. Sterling says the outlet is focused on growing its newsletter, because “that’s the place to reach people and give them the content they’re looking for directly.”
“We’ll be doing some experimentation there,” she adds.
Readers can also expect more interactivity: The site just wrapped its annual regional food bracket, where, this year, it invited readers to vote for their favorite regional soda.
“That’s been really fun,” Sterling says. “We love to get fans involved, and we’re always looking for new ways to do that.”
