In 2014, BuzzFeed was the viral video behemoth churning out 80 videos a month on YouTube to satisfy social media algorithms. Video producers, who had the skills to create content all on their own, needed to turn out six videos a month to keep their jobs, finding new ways to keep an audience coming back for more daily uploaded content.
Keith Habersberger, a tall and quirky theater major, and Zach Kornfeld, a zany neurotic with an eye for editing, had just started working at BuzzFeed and were brainstorming what could do well during Facebook’s “pivot to video” era. This was a time when Facebook executives pushed that video views were the way to grow in media, and used incorrect and misleading viewer data as a selling point.
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Eventually, they decided to try on ladies’ underwear for a video. Most of their colleagues wanted nothing to do with that public humiliation, except for two: the stoic Eugene Lee Yang and wife guy (who later had an extramarital affair with an employee) Ned Fulmer.
“We couldn’t find anyone willing to do it beyond the handful of guys in the video,” Kornfeld told Mashable in an interview about the group’s 10-year journey. “I remember thinking it was such an obvious viral hit that no one wanted to make it. It seemed too easy.”
The video was a smashing success (22.5 million views as of this publication), so the group decided to stick together. They thought it would last for maybe three videos, Kornfeld remembered, as they thought that would be all there was to “mine” from the group.
But a decade later, the Try Guys are still going strong (though they are down to two original members), evolving into their self-controlled YouTube channel with eight million subscribers. From live shows to their own short-lived Food Network series, the group has survived sharks, algorithmic shifts, and even a cancellation.
Buzzy beginnings for the Try Guys
The Try Guys almost didn’t survive their first few years, however. Their bosses at BuzzFeed were opposed to the idea of the quartet, since having four producers on one video would lower the amount of content they could produce. But the group felt they had obvious chemistry and knew that an audience could grow attached to a recurring cast of faces. So, while still making their necessary deliverables for the company, they worked on Try Guys videos on the side.
“As an employee, your value is directly related to how many viral videos you made and how well those viral videos did,” Habersberger said. “There was a culty vibe where you were celebrated if you had a super amazing video.”
A lot of those videos in the first few years of BuzzFeed featured blurred or blocked-out nudity (making it allowed on YouTube), from trying stripping to laser hair removal. Though most of the lewd content was blocked out in editing (except for a pissing competition where Kornfeld’s penis was accidentally shown without his consent — though he did manage to joke about it years later), it still helped garner a mostly female audience that remains to this day. The content they created “was an antidote to the male gaze, or at least the idea of toxic masculinity,” Kornfeld said. Their “vulnerability” without their clothes allowed them to share a new side of themselves that had rarely been seen by men in the media.
One of their most successful videos featured them showing off their bodies to recreate Kim Kardashian’s butt-filled 2014 Paper magazine cover, uploaded within 24 hours of the photo hitting the internet. Shooting the video after hours and editing it overnight, Habersberger said they were never “compensated for those extra hours” but they “did it because we knew it would do well.”
“We saw a whole bucket of storytelling that was under-tapped, under-explored, and that we could use our experience and our identity to be a cipher for the audience to explore this part of storytelling that was very primed to be viewed and to be shared,” Kornfeld explained.
As the videos started to perform better (and their bosses started to accept the format), branded opportunities started to roll in. Paid partnerships gave them bigger budgets to smash cars and pretend to be adrift at sea, raising the production value and teaching the members about the more traditional side of media (though they didn’t get paid any extra cash). “We went from $300 to $600 a video, to suddenly having $20,000 or more, which allowed us to make something really cool,” Habersberger said.
After four years of making a corporation money with their content, the Guys knew it was time to create something of their own. In 2018, the group negotiated a deal with BuzzFeed where they managed to keep their intellectual property and the name “Try Guys” while BuzzFeed kept getting clicks on their older videos. At the time, former BuzzFeed employees were sharing their negative experiences in “Why I Left BuzzFeed” videos, so having a positive mutual departure was best for everyone’s brand.
“We felt there were more ways that we could build this brand than BuzzFeed was allowing us to do,” Habersberger said. “We felt like we could do tours, we could have better merch, we could have other experiences, but that wasn’t the agenda of BuzzFeed at that time.”
Branching out and navigating controversy
When striking out on their own, they wanted to “have a variety of programming,” Kornfeld said, that “explored the different avenue[s] of ourselves” with a fairly limited budget. One of the first videos they filmed for the new channel was “Candid Competition,” a reality show where Kornfeld asked different grocery stores to make him a custom cake. Originally, Kornfeld felt certain “that it had failed and that it was a dud,” but after spending some time with an editor, it became one of his “favorite pieces of chaos.”
Now free from the shackles of creating boilerplate content where they just “try” things, they shared their struggles with fatherhood, medical issues, and creating their own company. Repeatable formats like Keith Eats the Menu, where Habersberger tries every dish at a restaurant, and Which Try Guy knows the other the best, allowed them to push out content cheaply and quickly.
In 2022, as the channel was on the rise with their Food Network show No-Recipe Road Trip set to premiere, a scandal shook the group to its core. Fans on Reddit discovered that Fulmer, whose main characteristic was talking about his wife in videos, was having an affair with a producer. Fulmer, who had a stake in the company, was bought out and removed. The three remaining members released a tense statement on their channel that went so viral Saturday Night Live spoofed it.
When asked about this era of the Try Guys, Habersberger and Kornfeld jokingly played a game of rock, paper, scissors, to see who would answer.
“Our first goal was to do right by our staff, by each other, and by the audience,” Kornfeld said. “We remain very proud of how we navigated a less-than-fortunate situation…Having a shakeup like that gave us the courage to take risks and to imagine a better future for us.”
“We spent a year trying to figure out what we should do,” Habersberger added. “It was an unfortunate thing that happened, that probably was a necessary change for this business to last as long as possible.”
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Out of this controversy came what they describe as the “fuck it” era, where the three remaining members created the content that they wanted to make. They had been “playing the algorithm game for 10 years” and wanted “to focus on the audience we’ve already built and try to make stuff for those people,” Habersberger said. That meant doing a livestreamed version of Romeo and Juliet and renting out a movie theater for Kornfeld to screen a short film. These weren’t the best “business decisions,” they both admit, but it was what they wanted to make. It showed them that the ad-based model of depending on YouTube revenue just wasn’t sustainable for them.
Today’s Try Guys
After two years of controversy and ill-advised business decisions behind them, the Try Guys knew they had to evolve to save their growing business and keep their team of editors, producers, and more employed. “Our audience was interested in a depth of connection,” Kornfeld said. “That just isn’t what YouTube is built for.”
That’s why in May 2024, the Try Guys announced that the channel would undergo a rebrand. 2nd Try is a subscription service that expands the group to other members and viewpoints. Viewers can spend $5 a month or $50 for the year to get early access to ad-free, uncensored videos to the troupe’s catalog. Some viewers found the move controversial, especially since weeks prior, fellow BuzzFeed alums Watcher announced their own streaming service which also ended in a couch apology. At the same time, Yang announced that he would be leaving the group.
Former BuzzFeed colleagues like Kwesi James and internet darlings like baker Jonny Manganello are part of a rotating roster of faces breathing new blood into the channel. The group is bounding into new territory, like creating their own comic book and trying drugs on camera.
Turning from post-grads forced to make six videos a week into cultural icons didn’t happen overnight. Their decade of work and experimentation is impressive, and it leaves the future wide open to possibility.
“I think we had to go through that valley to see what was broken in what we were doing, to then imagine a better future,” Kornfeld said.
