Meet our YouTube baking queen

Small business Growing Franchising

Ann Reardon, Australia's YouTube baking queen.

Ann Reardon's home-baked show 'How To Cook That' has taken the cake for Australia's most popular YouTube baking channel, the third most popular worldwide, and is still rising fast.

It is a business with humble beginnings - a way to occupy sleepless nights while on maternity leave.

'Friends and family have always asked me to teach them how to cook. In 2011 my third son was quite unwell and I was up feeding him every three hours through the night until he was seven months old. To stay awake I typed up recipes one-handed while breast feeding,' former dietitian and youth pastor Reardon says.

She loaded them onto a cooking blog, and HowToCookThat.net was launched via social media and word of mouth.

The YouTube channel started by convenience, with Reardon uploading the video tutorials onto it in order to embed them on the website.

Despite the steady growth of clicks, the trickle of income from Google ads on the website was barely enough to cover costs. The end of the maternity year was crunch time for Reardon and her husband.

'We decided if it maintained the current growth rate it would pretty quickly pay me enough to stay at home,' Reardon says.

An added consideration was the sudden onset of a rare allergy to sunlight which made it difficult for Reardon to return to work.

'We knew there were no guarantees but decided to take a risk,' she says.

Before long, the Aussie baker began to gain a strong audience, first in the thousands and then millions each month as word spread about the unusual culinary creations, with almost 40 million viewers tuning in online for Twitter Cakes, Minions, Macarons and the largest Snickers ever made.

Last year the BBC approached Reardon to produce a video promoting the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Her chocolate Dalek cake was subsequently featured on the BBC and in Hollywood's industry bible, Variety magazine.

HowToCookThat now has 450,000 subscribers and averages 3.7 million views every 30 days, while the website attracts another 900,000 page views every month.

Reardon agrees the recipe for success has a lot to do with her penchant for quirky cooking.

'There were lots of home-baked channels hardly getting any hits. The comment I often get is that it's really creative, not just a repeat of another recipe but something they didn't know was possible,' Reardon says.

'I break it down and make it simple enough that anyone can do it.'

Reardon's geeky bent has helped widen her audience. Her Instagram Cake was an instant hit - voted recently on US television as one of the most impressive and hardest desserts to bake. The cake, which featured on The Huffington Post and over 500 other websites, has had 2.7 million views and growing by 10,000 clicks a day.

Signing last year with USA YouTube network DECA, Reardon agrees that business nous has been another essential ingredient.

'Early on I had heaps of offers from networks. When I looked into other channels I saw their growth rate didn't change when they signed.

'I realised no network can make your channel grow. I was more interested in the business side of it - how networks can direct sell ads, which gives you more bang for your buck.'

Reardon waited until her channel had grown sufficiently to enable her to negotiate the best contract.

'The signing bonus allowed me to get a professional camera. Before then I was just filming with my iPhone, but on long tutorials it would overheat and get green pixels across the footage.'

Another boost was the invitation-only YouTube workshops Reardon attended.

'One of the best things that came of that was collaborations. Just this week I'm doing a joint show with another home-baker. We both get new subscribers without having to pay for advertising,' Reardon says.

The bake-off continued. Reardon realised the next best way to capitalise on the channel's success was to sell and advertise its own products such as cake templates.

Inspired by a gaming app, in January Reardon released the 'Surprise Cakes' app - the world's first augmented reality app for cakes on the Apple store and Google Play. Using computer gaming technology, the app brings an average dessert to life with realistic 3D fireworks bursting from the top.

To this end Sydney game developer Brendan Votano was brought on board on a profit sharing basis. The duo are already working on several updates to be released in coming months.

It all sounds peachy cream, except for one major occupational hazard.

'Trying not to eat too much unhealthy food!' Reardon says. 'Every fourth video of mine is chocolate.'

Perhaps a small inconvenience in the life of Australia's queen of desserts.