The Cost of Content and Why Carla Lalli Music left YouTube

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are thrilled to welcome Carla Lalli Music. Carla has been a fixture of food media for the last 15 years, including the six years she spent as the food director of Bon Appetit. You might also know her from her incredibly popular YouTube series, Carla’s Cooking Show her two cookbooks, Where Cooking Begins, and That Sounds So Good, or her Substack newsletter, Food Processing. In this interview, Carla dives into her recent viral Substack post about her decision to leave YouTube, including her very transparent breakdown of the costs of creating content on YouTube. In the post, Carla shared in detail the cost of producing the four videos she posted to YouTube every month, including the production, editing, food, everything it takes to create content on YouTube.

And spoiler alert, she was losing a lot of money. Carla shares more about the challenges of balancing this creative work, financial sustainability, and also explains why she doesn’t create recipes for SEO. Carla uses her connection with her audience as her North Star when she makes business decisions, and that really comes through in everything she says in this interview. I’ve been personally a fan of Carla for many, many years, and I was so excited to have her on the podcast. I love this interview and I know you guys will too, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Carla, welcome to the podcast.

Carla Lalli Music: Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be talking about two things that I love. One is business finance, and the other is the broadly speaking the internet and reach and building a following. And what so many of us are trying to do is find the intersection for business finance, the internet and our passion, the thing that we love most. And if we can find in that Venn diagram right in the middle there, if we can find that, that’s a really incredible thing, but it’s really difficult as well. And I want to hear a little bit about your story because you’ve been able to align that Venn diagram in multiple different ways through your career, and it sounds like one of the things you’re trying to do now is move those circles a little bit, but to find that middle spot. So before we dig into that middle spot and your experimentation around that, tell us a little bit about your background for those who aren’t familiar, and then we’ll get into this journey that you’ve been on.

Carla Lalli Music: Sure. So most people will know me most from the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen. I was the food director at Bon Appetit for nine years, from 2011 until the January of 2020, and

Bjork Ostrom: We could record another podcast breaking down that world. We’ll save that for another time.

Carla Lalli Music: Well, I segued into being an editor at large at the beginning of 2020 because I had signed a contract to write my second book, which is called That Sounds So Good. And I wrote the first one where cooking begins while I was still full-time employed at BA and just had a vision for doing the second one differently. I did not know exactly how differently it would be where I would be at home with my family and trying to develop a cookbook. But before I got into food media, I was in restaurants for about 10 years. I worked as a line cook and then kind of worked my way through back of house management and into operations and ultimately as a general manager. But before that, before I went to culinary school, I had a liberal arts degree and worked in book publishing for a couple years before I transitioned to a career in food.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk a little bit, one of the things we talk about is the value of our previous experiences rolled into our next journey, our next season. I think the restaurants to Bon Appetit makes a lot of sense. Can you talk about Bon Appetit into building your personal brand? What were the things that you took with you that you learned from that experience? And then maybe what are the things that you had to unlearn a little bit as you started to do your own personal brand building as opposed to working as a individual with a brand underneath a bigger umbrella?

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think the most important thing about my career at Bon Appetit is that I came into Appetit without a journalism degree. I had not been hired as a writer in other places. I grew up in a media family and also in a food family. So my parents are both journalists and my mom, her particular expertise is in food writing and cookbooks and restaurant reviews. But as a line cook, I thought I had completely chosen a different path. When I got to Bon Appetit, I had a good understanding of recipe development and recipe branding, and I had worked in kitchen, so I knew how to talk to cooks and also how to translate what the cooks were doing into something that was palatable to a consumer. But I had never written a full length article before. So my time at Bon Appetit was incredible learning as far as really being put through it as an editor, as a writer, being edited by really good editors, recipe development in terms of pitch meetings and how to create a diverse story.

The editorial and the art department were worked very closely together. So I was on set. I was on almost just dozens of photo shoots a year in studio, being around food stylists, watching food photographers really bring things to life. That was huge as far as having a visual training in what makes food look beautiful, what kind of light, what kind of atmosphere. And then also I had to navigate that transition from editorial to creative to bring something to life. And that was also where I got my training as an onscreen personality. We had about an hour of actual media training where we went and did someone put us in front of a camera and sort of coached us about how to look into lens and stuff. But after that, all of my experience presenting as a host was just like, we’re just going to shoot it

Bjork Ostrom: On the job. Yeah, it’s like press record. There’s nothing that quite accelerates the learning process as the record button. You could sit in class for a, or you could record for a week and it feels like you might get further if you record for a week, watch back what you recorded, make changes, make edits.

Carla Lalli Music: It’s very similar to six months of culinary training versus one week of being on the line. I mean, I learned more in two weeks in a restaurant that I did in the whole six months, but without the six months would’ve learned as quickly. That kind of,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, there’s some foundational element to having that information that then you can apply and accelerate. So one of the things that we sometimes talk about is this idea of product and marketing, and we understand that really well within the world of you make a widget and then you have the widget, the widget’s really good, and then you go out and you market the widget. Hey everybody, look at how good this widget is in the world of content. You have the product and the product is a recipe. It’s the photo, it’s the written text around it. And then you have the marketing of that, Hey, we have this great product, which is the recipe, the photos perhaps that could maybe be some of the marketing. But then you get into marketing that product, which is kind of the thing that you’re selling, for lack of a better word, is exposure to that thing that you’ve created the product. And it sounds like in your decade of restaurant, you were refining your understanding of the product food recipe. How do you create something that is really compelling and bringing that over to bone appetit and at that time also then developing some of the skills around the marketing component. We have this thing, you have the skill around creating something that is appealing to people. They’ll go through the process of creating it and be like, this is awesome. And then how do you get that in front of people? How do you get people excited about it?

How do you get people energized by it? Does that feel accurate at a really high level or anything that you’d add to that?

Carla Lalli Music: I actually think that they’re almost reversed in a way when it comes to talking about recipes. I’ve thought about this a lot in terms of ai, in terms of the way that people are looking up recipes, finding recipes. They’re actually divorced from the source at this point. And the types of recipes that I develop, I’m not reinventing new flavors. There are chefs who do that. There are recipe developers who do that. That is not my thing. I want you to make some of the classic Italian pastas. I want to show you a way to get just optimize the best roast chicken. So I’m not reinventing flavors. And because of that recipes like the type I do, there’s thousands of them. You do not need necessarily meat to get that recipe. I think the reason why people chose my recipes is actually because of the personality, which is more the marketing. And

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a very much so a personal brand,

Carla Lalli Music: A hundred percent. And I’ve been aware of this for a long time and very grateful for it that people choose to watch my videos or make my recipes because they like the way that I explain it to them. They maybe like the way that I’m not reinventing flavors, that I want you to use the things that are maybe already inner house. I provide spin, its for my recipes, which means you can not have to do a lot of guessing about substitutions offering that to you in every single recipe I write. So it is the way that I perform the recipe, I think that sells

My recipes. And then on top of that, I think there’s some of what goes into maybe more of the product side is that I am trained in recipe development. I spent nine years writing every single headnote that appeared in print in Bon Appetit. I was very entwined with the test kitchen process. So my recipes are written properly, it is a technical document, and my recipes are written well and they work, which if you pull up an AI recipe, there is no way of knowing that recipe has not gone through some editorial process of being checked and DoubleCheck and copy edited, et cetera.

Bjork Ostrom: And I

Think the other thing that I think about as you talk about that is a contrast in stories. Let’s say for the next decade, you were showing up on the internet and you weren’t a part of the content you were creating. It was just a recipe. It was not you. It was not story. It was not your experience. You were just literally publishing recipes. Maybe it was even on YouTube, but you didn’t ever mention who you were. You didn’t never mention your story. You do that for a decade or you show up and you tell story. You’re a part of the content. You talk about your experience, you talk about the reason why you’re creating a thing. You do that for a decade. If I’m going to place a bet on over the next decade as a creator, where are you going to find the most success, man?

It’s the one where you’re leaning into your story, your humanness, your experience, and people follow people. But there also is a place on the internet where people are looking to transact and just get a recipe that they can make for a thing. So when you think of, and then we can talk about some of the YouTube conversation as well. I think that’s super helpful. But this is, I think really important for us to think about as creators. When you think about the looking forward as a creator, recipe creator, but also a digital content creator, how do you view your story, your brand, your personality, intertwining and interweaving with the recipe and the food content? And you hinted at a little bit by saying that’s almost the thing that you are putting front and center as opposed to just a recipe in and of itself. It’s both of those things. Is that accurate?

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, I think I’m in the next kind of iteration of how my recipes are going to show up. I am definitely leaning into the personality of it, the individual nature of me as a human. And I think if I were to describe kind of that editorial or media background as being very service oriented, very voicey, but also very pointed, a lot of learning, a lot of like, this is how to do it. If you do it this other way, you’re doing it wrong. And recipes that had really gone through multiple rounds of testing that was all very service oriented. And my first two books were very service oriented. I think the inflection point for me now is that I’m prioritizing connection over some of it’s not that the service isn’t there, the recipes are still going to work, but I am prioritizing connection and leading with connection rather than leading with the service of it all.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. We hear people talk a lot about the importance of community, especially as content shifts on the internet, how content is created. One of the things that’s really hard for transactional content, AI as an example to cannibalize is connection and community. And your intuition around that is interesting in that you’ve probably tasted that a little bit to say, okay, you can create, and there are people in our world who have done this at scale, you create a site, it gets a ton of traffic because you’ve kind of optimized the science around the content creation. But that’s always has been, and especially now is vulnerable. And something that is a little bit more deeper from a foundational aspect is that community and that connection piece because it’s really hard to replace that. What does that functionally look like when you talk about connection being the north star, how does that show up day-to-day, week to week for you as a creator?

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, it’s tricky because there are always going to be smaller buckets inside of that bigger connection bucket. If that’s one of my main reasons is to, I want these recipes to resonate with people. I want them to bring them into their homes. I want them to report back to me what the cooking has done in their life, which I get these dms and emails every single day. They mean so much to me from people saying how the food has changed their life, and that’s why I am doing it. That is how I remain creatively charged because I am very deeply aware of how important my relationship with food has been to the joy in my own life. So it is the thing in order to stay true to that is kind of rejecting the idea that we would develop recipes for SEO trying to pretend that there is not an algorithm trying not to chase trends unless they spark that same kind of, I really want to make that and I really want to do it my way.

I think what is happening on the other side, whether it’s through an AI kind of mechanism that is not responding to anything in the world or is I think what I see in a lot of other video creators and recipe creators, which is that the entertainment value is huge, but the practicality is a zero. It’s like I need to be entertaining still, otherwise I can’t keep anybody with me, but I still have to do things that feel true to me. So sometimes I have to get over myself a little bit in order to give a recipe that I’m like, actually, I should just publish this. So things that, this is a good example. So I’ve been working on recipes for my third book and I post little teases of what they look like. And I had put up a story that was four slides of recipe development for the book. And on each of them I captioned for the book, for the book, for the book. And then I posted the thing that I eat when I have 15 minutes and I have to eat something and I captioned it for me. And the amount of dms I got about, I want that the last thing you posted, which was the worst photo,

The what even is it? There was no, and all these people were like, recipe, recipe, recipe, recipe. And I was like, LOL, I’m working on all this stuff for the book and this thing that I keep making because it’s really fast, it’s easy, it’s nourishing, it’s all of the things that’s what everybody wanted. And so I sat with it for a couple of days and I was like, oh, I should just write that up. And I did, and it’s this brothy kimchi noodle bowl. So I wrote it up and I published it on Substack. And it was a very different type of recipe for me because sometimes I make it with noodles, sometimes I make it with rice, sometimes I make it with rice cakes. And it did great. The engagement was huge and people were making it. So that’s coming from, I’m making this thing all the time and I’m going to post it. And then kind of listening to my audience being like, oh, we want to make that. And not being like, this is just a random throwaway nothing For me, it was like, oh no, if I’m making it all the time because it’s super easy for me to grab, then that does have value for other people. But it started with just this thing I’m throwing in a pan.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, Lindsay and I just had this, so our quick backstory, I don’t know how much, so Lindsay, my wife has a food and recipe website called Pinch of Yum Instagram, and a blog is primarily where content is published there. And we just had this long conversation last night where she was kind of talking through future content looking forward, and she’s like, we’ve done this thing called the SOS series. And she’s like, for those I am front and center, I’m talking people through a recipe. I know people make these because they send me messages around how helpful it is, and they don’t go viral. The videos consistently get 200 to 300,000 views, but people make it.

Or we did this video and she partnered, it was actually with Ramsey County where we live in Minnesota, and it was around reducing food waste, and it was kind of this viral hack kind of thing. And it was like, oh, multiple millions of people watch this video that was around freezing mashed potatoes and then using them later. And it’s super entertaining, it’s novel, it’s creative. How many people actually did that? I don’t know. But the sentiment was probably maybe the same amount as a number from the people who watched the SOS series. And so for as creators, there’s this interesting almost decision that has to be made around are you trying to be a viral creator? Which you can do that and there’s a place for that and you can get a lot of views for it, but it might not be the best place to then run an adjacent community or to grow deep connection.

And so there’s all of these levers and sliding scales that we have as creators where it’s all on the same platform, but we’re almost using the tool. If it’s a paintbrush, the canvas is a little bit different and the painting is a little bit different. And I think sometimes it can be confusing because we’re all showing up in the same building and we all get the same tool, but then we paint a different thing. How have you navigated that? Because it feels like a hard decision to make because you could have these viral pieces of content, and that’s not a bad thing, but it’s almost like knowing yourself in a lot of introspective work maybe,

Carla Lalli Music: Right? So when you guys did this mashed potato thing, this hack, did you think it was going to go viral or did it surprise you?

Bjork Ostrom: I think it surprised us a little bit. I can’t speak too much. I can’t take any credit for it. And I also can’t speak too much to it because it’s all credit due to Lindsay. I think we’re maybe surprised by it.

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Carla Lalli Music: I mean, I think that’s been my experience with anything that did go wider than I thought it was going to go. It was not engineered thinking that that was going to happen. And the times that I did try to play to SEO to do something because, oh, lots of people want this and I’ve never done it, and so I do it, it never works. So I would love to have unlocked the science of that. And if I, and I was having viral video after viral video on YouTube and making four times or five times as much money as I did, I would probably still be doing it because it is a business and because the money and the income would’ve been a huge motivator. But I don’t know how to figure that out.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think this is a really important piece, and it’s a little bit squishy to talk about it because it’s not concrete, but I think it’s important for creators to think about this. I think you probably also weren’t super excited to figure it out. It’s not like the thing you wanted to show up every day and figure out. It’s like my guess is what you wanted to figure out is how to really nail a certain recipe that you’ve been developing and working on, and then how to communicate that as perfectly as possible. So then somebody could send you a DM and say, Hey, it’s been a super stressful season. My family sat down to this meal and we all loved it. That’s a different game than creating a viral piece of content. And so much of what we need to decide as creators is what type of creator are we going to be? And then standing solidly in that place to say, here’s how I’m going to show up and create. And there are some people who create differently than I do the painting analogy. It’s like their painting is going to look a little bit different, but here’s what I’m going to do.

And it might not be the game of figuring out a search algorithm or the game of figuring out a social media algorithm, but maybe it’s the game of figuring out how to consistently communicate a recipe that people have success with. And almost your success metric is user feedback on how successful were people with creating that recipe. Does that resonate at all with you processing some of the decisions you processed? And then we can jump into specifics of YouTube? Yeah,

Carla Lalli Music: Sure. I think for sure it does. It also, I at a certain point, sort of messed around. We try to chicken and waffles thing and we try to this and like, oh, people like this, so try that. And it was fine. The recipes are fine, but they didn’t feel like native necessarily to, I made a great chicken and waffles recipe because SEO was like, do chicken waffles. And I was really happy with what I developed. It was delicious. It worked, but I’m like, have I made it since I shot that video? Absolutely not. And I think that the audience sees that. So

In addition to having recipes at work and that I’m excited to talk about or that I think are going to visually translate and look good on screen, it’s also really important to me to enjoy the process. We really wanted to have good vibes on set to have fun. My producer Omega was always kind of pushing me to take it to another place. We anthropomorphize food. There was a lot of whimsy and silliness to it, and that was fun for me. There are people who like that, and then there’s people who are like, you think you’re funny and you’re not. And it’s like, I’m not going to bother trying to win that

Bjork Ostrom: View. They will always exist on the internet

Carla Lalli Music: A hundred percent. So are people like, you talk too much? And I’m like, yes. I get that comment where people are like, this video could have been eight minutes and you had to make it 19. And it’s like, right. But I told this, we went on a tangent. We told a funny story, and that’s how I want it to feel to people that this is a bright spot in your day. Cooking should also be a moment in your day that even on the crappiest day you’ve ever had, you’re like, yeah, but I get this thing where I have to feed myself, and that could be one part of the day that didn’t suck.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes.

Carla Lalli Music: So we wanted the videos to feel like that light and bright spot, in addition to it being useful to have recipes and we need to eat every day and all of that other stuff is like I couldn’t have maintained shooting in my house for three and a half years if I didn’t have fun on set because everything else about it is really hard.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. Let’s talk about that. So you released this great post. We’ll link to this in the show notes. I’m going to read just kind of the first section here, and then we can talk it through some of the specifics. So you said, I started my YouTube channel in earnest in October, 2021 after your second cookbook came out. Cookbook is called, that sounds so Good. A little over three years later on January 29th, 2025, I uploaded the hundred 77th video or episode of Car’s cooking show. That video for Cheddar Burger named after my mom is my last for now and possibly forever. And then you go in to talk through your subscribers. You had grown it to 230,000 subscribers, grossed almost 190,000. But then you get into the specifics of saying, what did that actually look like from a cost perspective? So tell me about the moment where you sat down, you took a hard look at the numbers and you said, maybe I’m not going to do this moving forward.

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I was having those moments all along the way and actually had cut costs. So where we ended up was on average, my videos cost $3,500 to produce, and that includes the day rates for my crew and the editing expense, which most people don’t realize. The editing is like unless you’re self editing, it is the biggest time suck and the biggest money investment in videos, long form videos. So it was costing me $3,500. And I think the first year and a half, maybe I still believed in growth over time, like a normal business arc. And I kept sort of comparing it to opening a restaurant. The first six or 12 months of a restaurant, you overstaff a little bit, you have extra people on lunch and dinner service because you’re still figuring out what the balance is going to be and you want to do a really good job as you establish your audience or as you establish your consumer, whatever it is. And also at the beginning, the numbers were better. So three plus years ago on YouTube, I think for myself, I can speak very

Bjork Ostrom: Factually, these are hard numbers.

Carla Lalli Music: Also, anecdotally, you could look at any big food creator who you follow on YouTube, look at their numbers from three years ago and look at them from a month ago. I’m not the only person who was seeing a downward trend in views and engagement. So that’s where you’re fighting against this algorithm that is never going to make itself plain to you, is never going to be clearly communicated to you. And there’s no contact person at YouTube who’s like, Hey, here’s what we’re looking for. Let’s support you in getting that done. So as the views were coming down, my investment is staying the, and my goals also shifted. So at the beginning, it was very important for me to have a channel to stay relevant. I had a book out. I wanted people to buy it, to talk about the book on screen, to demonstrate recipes from the book and keep that alive, kind of keep the thread alive. I also at the same time was pitching production companies. I had multiple show ideas for hosted shows on a streaming network or a regular network. What are the networks? Whatever TV is.

Bjork Ostrom: What is tv? That’s one of the bigger questions right now. Yeah, it’s

Carla Lalli Music: What is tv? So I was pitching and I wanted, again, to be able to have something that came out every week and to promote, and you just have to, there’s pressure to just stay so new, something new, something.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a never satisfied beast that you’re having to continually feed. Yeah.

Carla Lalli Music: Yep. And I think about two years in, I was like, the numbers are getting harder, and now I’m trapped in a loop of selling branded sponsorships, paid integrations in order to make up for the money that I’m losing. Because the Google ad money was falling, basically covered one video out of four that I released every month.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Revenue. So it’d 20. Yeah,

Carla Lalli Music: I’m making four grand a month in Google ad revenue, and I’m spending 3,500 per video. I released four videos a month. So that’s one video is now paid for the other three. If I don’t supplement with a paid integration with income from my substack with book advance money with other random appearances, I’m losing money. So it’s sort of propping that revenue stream up with other ones

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of justifying it and saying, okay, I’m going to do this, view some of my substack income as covering the cost of this viewing. Maybe it’s speaking thing or book royalties or advances, maybe viewing it all collectively as coming in. But then my guess is you maybe stepped back a little bit and said, if I didn’t have this, would those things still come in?

Carla Lalli Music: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: If those things still come in, then I could make a lot more money. Exactly. And do I need this to fuel these other things?

Carla Lalli Music: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Was that a little bit of the analysis and how did you know? Hundred

Carla Lalli Music: Percent. So that’s 24. A lot of 20, 24 is me having that conversation. When I meet with my accountant every month, and we go over the p and l, I am having a lot of frustration with trying to promote my YouTube from my Instagram, which is twice as many subscribers or followers on Instagram as I do on. But every time I try to promote my work on YouTube, on Instagram, I get dinged, which could last 24 or 48 hours could be very, and

Bjork Ostrom: The theory there is Instagram doesn’t want you promoting. It’s like, stay here, stay here. Exactly. I

Carla Lalli Music: Mean, there’s a thing that’s like you’re following a link off of the thing. Are you sure you want to do that

Bjork Ostrom: Warning?

Carla Lalli Music: Warning? Not only that, when they know that you’ve put a link in and that story slide is not going to do as well. So I actually had stopped putting links in to YouTube or to my substack, and I really just used Instagram as we’ll, put the social cut up there and if people are aware enough they’re going to, but it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Like seek it out would be the idea.

Carla Lalli Music: So now what am I doing? I’m making a social cut to put on Instagram to entertain you on a reel without any actual benefit to me financially or for my business. And YouTube was sending almost zero traffic to Substack. So now I’m like, do my Substack followers. They want new recipe content from me. I know that. How much do they care if they get it with a video or not? And the answer is they might care a lot more about the recipe

Bjork Ostrom: And you don’t know until you try it.

Carla Lalli Music: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: And my guess is you tried it and what you discovered was it’s actually not a huge issue. I mean, there’s probably some people who are like, Hey, that was really nice.

Carla Lalli Music: Well, trying, it really meant stopping doing YouTube. And so in addition to just banging my head against the wall in terms of business strategy or what’s moving the needle, I’m chasing brand deals and paying an agency a 20% cut to get brand deals to cover the cost of the videos that I’m losing money on if I don’t have a

Bjork Ostrom: Sponsorship.

Carla Lalli Music: Just

Bjork Ostrom: So it kind of became this circle

Carla Lalli Music: That was fully circuitous and weird. Then I’m like, sometimes a video would do okay. Sometimes a video wouldn’t do great. And there’s a lot, I put the same amount of work into every single video. So now I’m noticing, oh, when a video does well, I’m elated and I’m texting the team, Hey, this one’s doing really great. When it doesn’t, I’m really bummed. I spent a lot of money on that video for sure. And nothing is happening and it’s not

Bjork Ostrom: Appreciated. You live and die every video.

Carla Lalli Music: And then also just the grind,

Bjork Ostrom: Pre-production,

Carla Lalli Music: Production, post-production, giving notes on every two drafts of the video. I’m watching my own performance, I’m listening myself. I’m making self-deprecating jokes in my graphics at the cringey moments, and that’s a psychological sort of drain. So that had built up as well. And then I had signed a contract for my third book and I couldn’t start working on it because

Bjork Ostrom: Bandwidth

Carla Lalli Music: And because YouTube is on a very strict schedule, we come out every Wednesday and I have other stakeholders and I have to, we got to turn the cuts around my editors waiting for our notes so that she can export the final. And it just always felt like the book was just getting pushed lower and lower on the priority list. And I really care about the book that I’m writing. So there was no one moment. It was just kind of, honestly, if there was one moment, it was maybe the second to last round of shooting that we did at home. And I was extremely irritable. I was pissy, I was snappy, and I love my team I worked with, and I had the same team for all this time. And I was like, Ooh, I know this feeling and this is how I felt when it was time to leave BA. This is how I felt when I knew that I wasn’t happy working restaurants anymore. And I need to listen to, if the shoots aren’t fun anymore, the content’s not going to be good either. So that was enlightening.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and something has to change moment and whatever you want to call it. It’s like burnout, being tired, kind of being over a thing potentially. It feels like one of the ways you could look at it is successful experiment. The experiment being YouTube and the realization being with the way that you wanted to show up and do YouTube. That’s not going to work for how you want to show up within your business. And so much of what we’re doing is showing up every day,

Creating content, trying to create that content from the best place possible, which is inspired, excited, kind, and making changes along the way. And you’ve been doing this for a long time. We’ve been doing this for a long time, 15 years, more or less of showing up and creating content. And one of the things that it’s taken me so long to learn is that we go through seasons. And in those seasons we have to change and adjust what we are doing, how we are showing up. There’s life changes that happen, there’s also work changes that happen. Suddenly you introduce a cookbook, okay, that’s going to majorly shift things. At my worst, what I try and do is continually do all the other things and then stack another thing on top of it at my best. I look at it and say, okay, if I’m going to stack this thing, what does that mean? Has to go here. And it sounds like you came to that realization and said, for what I’m getting out of this, it’s not worth it for me to continue to do this. So what did it look like on the other side once you made the decision to not do it anymore?

Talk a little bit about that, because sometimes we continue to do these things and we think we need to do them, and then we stop doing ’em, and then we’re like, oh, wait, maybe I didn’t need to do that in the way that I thought that I did.

Carla Lalli Music: Yeah, I do think it was kind of an all or nothing as far as I’m either going to release these videos every month or I’m not, because we did talk about going down to an every other week cadence. I started doing marathons. So instead of having four original videos every month, it was three. I mean, not every month has four weeks, but essentially we would do three originals and then one of those marathon episodes that were super cuts of six soup videos all put together. And those were good for watch time and they were good. They did reduce my costs. But if you go down to then every other week, then you’re going to take a hit. Maybe each individual video might get more views because people are excited. They haven’t seen you in a week and a half. But overall, I don’t think your ad going to necessarily go up. It’s fewer integrations that you can sell. So that didn’t feel right. So I do think it was kind of an all or nothing. I think one of the hardest parts for me was I had been working with the same crew for three years. The people element. I pay that. So it’s like, hey, this steady gig that we’ve all been enjoying is over, and that’s a reasonable amount of income that it represented for everybody. So I felt like that’s letting people down a bit. It sucks. And then

Bjork Ostrom: In navigating that conversation, did it feel like that when you had the conversation or was it anticipating the potential of that feeling like that

Carla Lalli Music: It just is like I’m thinking about myself and what it means for my business and then realizing, oh, what is the actual impact that this is going to have on my editor who bills me X amount every month that’s going away. It’s just not fun. Right?

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. It’s one of the unfortunate realities of running a business, working with a team is like if you shift or change your, there’s ripples around that. And

Carla Lalli Music: It was no fault. It was not, not

Bjork Ostrom: Performance or anything like that

Carla Lalli Music: Job. We did a great job.

I think that the rest of it was pretty straightforward. It was like, okay, we’ve had these many videos planned. What is the rollout for them? When are they going to publish? I have a couple of branded deals that were longer term that were multi-video integrations. So we shifting with the client to like, Hey, I’m not going to be able to deliver YouTube video for video three and four. We’re going to shift to a reel, making sure that’s copacetic. But other than that, it was pretty straightforward. Also, because I talked about with my dp, with my producer, with my food stylist, we would talk about finances on set all the time and people, they were very

Bjork Ostrom: Aware of that. So it’s not like they caught ’em off guard

Carla Lalli Music: What struggle was.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. Can you talk about it just from a business standpoint? You don’t have to share specific numbers, but you talked about checking in with your accountant, reviewing this consistently. And maybe even from so much of what we do is we have these top of funnel things that we’re doing that lead into book sales or branded partnerships, maybe advertising. And so can you talk about in not moving forward with YouTube anymore, did you notice, I mean obviously you noticed a significant reduction in expenses, which is awesome. Did you notice any downtick, I mean maybe a little bit in ad revenue that wasn’t coming in, but did it feel like in looking at it now, net positive for the business in that you reduced a significant expense, you increased your, how much do I love doing work variable

Carla Lalli Music: And how much time I have to do

Bjork Ostrom: And time? You freed up a bunch of time without time, a ton of downside.

Carla Lalli Music: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s only

Carla Lalli Music: Been like six weeks. So my last video aired on January 29th, so I haven’t had a lot, I’ve had one full month really of revenue to compare it to. I have amazingly had three opportunities come up since I made the decision to stop doing YouTube that are just file under work smarter, not harder. So that includes being talent for hire in a way that creatively I’m not being asked to do very much. And in terms of my time is also pretty minimal,

But the paycheck is great for the amount of work that I’m putting in. So to feel like I got rid of this thing that was, it’s like a psychic weight. It’s also just a big heavy workload that’s looming all the time. And I took that away and then some astrological door opened and I’m like, oh, somebody asked me to just narrate a podcast. Not my podcast, not a podcast that I had to put creative work into. They just needed a narrator. I love doing podcasts. I love sitting down in front of the mic. I’m like, more of that. You just have more of that. So I think it’s just changing. I think writing the article was also something that I had thought about as very separate from YouTube. So in this weird way that doesn’t make any sense except in my head beforehand, I was like, okay, I got to tie up YouTube last video, the Cheddar Burger, Jan 29. And when I get to the end of all that, I do want to write this thing about my experience with YouTube, but it was almost like, let stop doing YouTube so I can write this article. There was a month in between, and then the article came out and was so widely shared, and the response was so incredible that it had a significant impact on my bottom line as far as my substack income. So I have a friend who was, that’s great. I was just explaining what was happening with my subscriber count hockey sticking right after this thing came out. And my friend was not the article about not making money being the thing that

Bjork Ostrom: Actually was making

Carla Lalli Music: You money.

Bjork Ostrom: I was

Carla Lalli Music: Literally a hundred percent. And then I realized, oh, actually what an amazing way to close that chapter in terms of, I think some people when they leave YouTube, they kind of slink away in the dark of night and just, I don’t do that anymore. And I leaned into doing the opposite of that. And so now I see my commentary about the work that I put into it and the work itself live together in this way that makes it, I can look back on all of the work that I put into it, all three years of video and feel like I gave it. I’m honoring it and I’m also unpacked it. And I think I also, which was the primary thing, was I really wanted it to helpful for other creators who were maybe starting out thinking about a channel, have a channel that they’re struggling with. It was really like I had a really hard time figuring out my costs and my expenses and my incomes, my income was going to be, and I had a lot of resources and connections. So I just felt like sharing that was going to help food people. I had no idea that it would be received the way it has been with all types of creators. Thast’s great. And that has been incredible, and it has led to all these opportunities that I did not, I just wanted it to get read and shared. So it was just, I’m putting it in public post. I hope people read it. And the amount of earned media I’ve gotten from that, it’s been so for me, it was very validating. I exposed a lot. I talked about my finances in a way that I know people make a lot more money than me, and I also know that I make more money than other people. And it’s just like

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a vulnerability to it, which I think is one of the reasons why it’s compelling.

Carla Lalli Music: And can we all just be like, yeah, I don’t expect to get paid 20 k per integration because I know that people who get that much have a million subscribers and I don’t, right? So that’s like, it’s actually good to know that and put it into context and not be embarrassed that I earned less. There’s definitely, from a business person perspective, it’s horrible. You know what I mean?

Bjork Ostrom: Well, yeah. But I think it’s also way more common.

Speaker 5: Yes,

Bjork Ostrom: All of us are out here trying to figure it out. And if it’s not money, then it’s time. And I think there’s an endless list that’s only getting longer every day around people putting a bunch of time, energy, and really, I feel like energy could be synonymous with time or money. Those are both kind of like energy and we’re kind of switching them around and using them differently. And people put years of their life into a business that doesn’t return anything. And so that’s the risk with doing it. And that’s why a lot of people don’t do it is because you might spend time or spend money and not get a return on that,

Speaker 5: But

Bjork Ostrom: You don’t know unless you show up and do it. And so much of it is showing up and then pivoting if you need to. And I think of Alan Watts was this philosopher, and he tells this, I think he calls it the parable of the Chinese farmer. I don’t think it needs to be a Chinese farmer. It could just be any farmer. But the idea is real quick, there’s this farmer and his son has left him. He’s doing all the farming on his own, and the son comes back and all the neighbors say, you must be so excited to the farmer. And he says, well, maybe. And then the next day, the sun is farming in the fields and he breaks his leg. All the neighbors come around and they’re like, oh, you must be so sad your son broke his leg. And he says, well, maybe. And the next day there’s an army recruiter who comes knocking on the door and says, we were here to recruit your son. And they’re like, he can’t come. He broke a leg. All that to say this feels like a great example of that in your journey, which is you could look at it and say like, oh, this is a bad situation. It’s like, well, maybe.

And what I heard you say in the last part there is it actually was a really helpful thing now, number one, but also it was a great passing of the baton into a thing that maybe is a better fit and more sustainable and more, and that feels like a really wonderful thing to have happened. And not only that, but my guess is, and you can talk a little bit about this as we close out having a little bit more headspace for your cookbook. So talk to us about your cookbook. We want to make sure to shine a light on that and thank you and give people the opportunity to pick that up.

Carla Lalli Music: So the cookbook’s due in 30, hold on. I have my tracker

Bjork Ostrom: Countdown,

Carla Lalli Music: 35 days. I have to turn the manuscript in. We have a title, but I can’t say what it is yet. But this is going to be a really different book for me. So there’s a lot of personal essays in this book I write a lot about. The book basically starts when my marriage broke up in May of 2023. The book starts from that moment where I am my first night not being home with my kids.

And it’s not a sad book, although it could sound that way, but it really is about this evolution through one of the hardest years of my life, but also resilience and strength and finding joy and realizing that my relationship to food was what was going to get me through this hard time just like it’s gotten through and been the source of so much joy in the best times in my life. So I was really just having all of this gratitude for food, for my ability to cook it for the creative outlet that gave me, for the way that it helped me with self-care and comfort, but also kind of like I redefined dinner. I went from cooking for four to just me and my teammate son being home, and the joy in that actually the things that I could make when it was two of us instead of cooking for four. So it really follows this really nice arc. And then for all of the writing that I do, there’s lots of recipes, but all of the recipes are really connected to something, either a memory of being a line cook or of when my kids were little or being cooked for by my mom. So it’s really like,

Yeah, it’s a book about how much I love food and how much it fixes everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Like food is therapy almost

Carla Lalli Music: A hundred percent. Yeah, my editor says comfort. What did he say? Comfort food is cooking.

Bjork Ostrom: And even in so far as scientific, you do studies on observing people who go through the process of cooking, and I don’t know what they’re looking at, brainwaves or whatever it is, but it actually may be similar to that painting analogy, which is it definitely does have an impact, and especially for people, that’s a love for what they do. So if people want to find out about that, don’t subscribe to YouTube. You can subscribe to YouTube, but where’s the best place? Maybe Substack, Instagram, YouTube.

Carla Lalli Music: If you want to just have my channel playing in the background, I’m getting a penny purview.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it

Carla Lalli Music: Ongoing.

Bjork Ostrom: Play it as a playlist. Have it on the background. It can be a companion. It’s fine. A lot of

Carla Lalli Music: People said my videos were part of their winding down routine.

Bjork Ostrom: Just keep

Carla Lalli Music: It on going. But yeah, on substack, you can find me under my name Carla Lolly music or just search for food processing, and I’ve always done the cover reveal, the title, reveal, the pre-order. I’ve always announced those things first on Instagram. I’m announcing everything first on Substack, so if you want to see what’s happening, just that’s where to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. We’ll put a link in there. We’ll also put a link to your YouTube as well. Thank you. People can subscribe and have that too.

Carla Lalli Music: I mean, hey, there’s 177 long short videos.

Bjork Ostrom: Doesn’t

Carla Lalli Music: Include all the shorts. We all,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s part of it too, is not to get too deep into it, but it isn’t ever present

Speaker 5: Portfolio

Bjork Ostrom: Of content that doesn’t go away. The value is still there. And so with that in mind, we’ll link to that as well. Thank you, Carla. Thanks so much for coming on. It was great to talk to you.

Carla Lalli Music: It my pleasure.

Bjork Ostrom: Really appreciate it.

Carla Lalli Music: Thanks a lot.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance, and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.