Doing the math on why Bon Appetit should pay its contributors fairly
"It's been a long, a long time coming / But I know a change's gonna come, oh, yes, it will" – A Change Is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke
I was supposed to publish this essay last Friday but ended up binging Indian Matchmaking on Netflix instead. Ultimately, my efforts are meaningless if the stars are not aligned.
A few weeks ago, a video titled “Sohla being the most qualified chef at Bon Appetit” with over 200k views popped up on my YouTube homepage. Curious, I watched it thinking it was just a fan’s compilation video of their favorite contributor on the wildly popular cooking channel.
However, YouTube’s “Up Next” sidebar quickly dispelled that notion by recommending videos like this one, or this one, or this one. Unbeknownst to me, I had stumbled into a major controversy that has brought the Bon Appetit channel to a standstill with no new videos uploaded in nearly two months.
The YouTube channels Philip DeFranco and ramen have covered the controversy in greater detail, but here’s a quick recap:
A photo of Bon Appetit editor-in-chief Adam Rappaport in a racist Halloween costume resurfaces on Instagram.
In an Instagram story, contributor Sohla El-Waylly demands Rappaport’s resignation and for Bon Appetit to pay its non-white creators fairly. Sohla mentions that Bon Appetit paid her a measly $50k/year to assist senior white editors who were less experienced than she was.
The story goes viral, with fans outraged and other contributors refusing to appear on the channel without workplace reform.
Amidst growing pressure, Rappaport resigns as editor-in-chief of Bon Appetit.
Paying contributors a fair wage is the right thing to do morally but is it also the right thing to do mathematically? Not only is the answer yes, but the numbers also reveal something truly extraordinary.
Consider this boxplot of video views per Bon Appetit contributor:
Right off the bat, we see that Claire is extremely popular with almost 3M median video views compared to 2M for the rest of Bon Appetit. The rest of the Bon Appetit cast is remarkably consistent with median video views between 1.75M and 2.25M. And then there’s the former editor-in-chief Adam Rappaport with under 1M median video views.
At first, I thought this might be because he was only in 4 videos over 52 weeks, while other creators were in an average of 46 videos (~1/week) over the same period. It turns out that’s not the case after looking at the video ratings (ratio of likes to the sum of likes and dislikes, normalized to a 5-point scale).
Apart from a video where Twitch streamer Ninja fails to live up to his name by slicing bread wrong, most Bon Appetit contributors have very favorable ratings with a median of 4.94. The only other video with a score under 4.75 is one where Molly and Adam make broccoli bolognese, which one commenter described as “Adam mansplaining for 16 minutes and Molly trying to correct him without getting fired”. Comments on other videos featuring Adam echo this sentiment as well, most notably Bon Appetit’s panel at 92nd Street Y, where Adam mixed up contributors Priya and Sohla onstage.
After looking at the data, it’s clear that the weakest link is Adam himself. If only Bon Appetit had been a data-driven organization, they would have forced him out sooner and compensated the rest of the contributors fairly for their consistently excellent results.