If you love pizza and like to connect with people, and earn money from your passion, there is a new career for you as a pizza influencer. You may never have heard of this, but sources assure us that it is indeed a new career path for you to choose. Axios writes that “The world of online pizza creators and influencers is flourishing, due to the food’s popularity (so convenient!) and photogenic possibilities (drippy cheese pulls!).”
Not only can you indulge your passion for pizza as your influence makes or breaks pizzerias, but apparently you can earn some good money as well. Slice, an online ordering platform, recently advertised a job opening for a “pizza influencer” at a salary of up to $110,000 a year (plus a weekly pizza stipend).
Dave Portnoy — founder of the sports and entertainment platform Barstool Sports — has a separate pizza-reviewing operation (on YouTube and TikTok, with 1.2 million subscribers and 3.4 million followers, respectively).
Aydan Fabian — who uses his first and middle name professionally — is a pizza influencer with a whopping 358,000 followers for his Instagram channel, @pizzofart.
“There’s a whole community of us, and we all know each other and comment on each other’s stuff,” says Aydan, who has done collabs with Eamonn Murphy (@themayorofpizza, 47,000 followers).
FeedSpot, a database of bloggers and podcasts, has created a list of the Top 70 Pizza Influencers in 2023. The list is aimed at pizzeria owners seeking influencers for outreach campaigns or for branding/marketing collaborations.
“When ranking these pizza influencers, we’ve considered not just their following, but also engagement, as well as overall influence in the pizza space,” the list’s introduction states.
Topping the list is Monica Wojnilo, a Boston-based influencer better known to her followers as @pizzablonde. On her website, she posts reviews of pizzerias and related products, including sponsored reviews, as well as pizza news. She has more than 33,200 followers on Instagram, which seems to be her primary social media platform (she hasn’t posted on Facebook since January 2021.
Aydan Fabian, started his Instagram channel in April of 2022 in his home kitchen in Los Angeles,. Since then he has racked up millions of views and comments on his videos, which show him making pizza from scratch.
A savvy marketer, he’s sponsored by companies that make pizza cutters, pizza “peels” and baking equipment — and gets free product from a flour company and other ingredient makers.
His subscription channel, which offers pizza-making tutorials and recipes, has drawn a fast-growing number of paying viewers.
“There’s a couple of companies that want to send me pizza ovens, but I had to turn them down because I can’t have wood, fire or gas at my apartment,” says Aydan (who refers to himself as a “pizzatarian”).
Aydan says that the secret to being a successful pizza influencer is “making the food look as appealing as possible.” That will involve genuine skills in filming videos, like good lighting “and cutting the video with a pacing that has the right flow, to keep someone’s attention.” But that is not enough. You’ll need to be a great pizza maker as well. The bubbles on the crust, the char marks on the bottom, all has to be irresistible.
“If I make a mediocre pizza, it doesn’t really matter how well I light it,” he says. “It’s just not going to perform the same as one that just jumps off the screen like, ‘Wow, that’s the best pizza I’ve ever seen.'”
