How Meathead Created the Biggest BBQ Site on the Internet

How Meathead Created the Biggest BBQ Site on the Web

In the barbecue world, few personalities and authors are better known than Meathead Goldwyn. As the founder of AmazingRibs.com and one of the best-selling barbecue books of all time, Meathead has been a pioneer in spreading barbecue to the masses and a recent inductee into the BBQ Hall of Fame.

For many who live and breathe barbecue, Meathead has been omnipresent. Whether he is chatting on the BBQ Central Show or releasing new grill reviews or chatting with people at barbecue events, his fingerprints are all over barbecue in the U.S. and around the world.

We recently interviewed Meathead about a number of topics, but one topic, in particular, stood out – how he started AmazingRibs.com. His site attracts more than a million visitors monthly and has a trove of recipes, grill and smoker reviews, and meat science articles. Among some other fun topics, we dove into how he created this behemoth and got into the digital BBQ world long before the invention of Facebook or Instagram

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Meathead Goldwyn (pictured with the The Smoke Sheet's Ryan Cooper and Sean Ludwig) founded AmazingRibs.com in 2005.

The Smoke Sheet: You were a pioneer in the culinary world even before AmazingRibs. Looking back, can you give us some highlights?
Meathead Goldwyn: I have never done a job that anybody has done before me. I was the wine buyer and consultant for a chain of liquor stores and did the work under the name ‘Madeline Sherry.’ I was a wine writer and critic for the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post. … When AOL came around, I hooked up with Steve Case, who founded AOL. There, I did a lot of stuff with food and wine. I brought Julia Child online for the first time. We had a lot of fun with those. … We also set up what was essentially the first blog with chef Rob Zimmerman from the Herbfarm in the state of Washington. His restaurant burned down, and I said, "I want you to come online and do a diary for us of what is going on in the rebuild, restoration, and resurrection of your restaurant."

TSS: But things changed quite a bit after the dot com bust in 2000, right?
MG: I didn’t lose any money on it but yes, the AOL “walled garden” model started to crumble because the web opened up and was free to all. So after that, I was freelancing, and scraping together a living building websites, taking photographs, and writing.

TSS: Then, in 2005, you launched AmazingRibs.com with all that web experience.
MG: At the time, we were a first mover. We were the first website, I think, devoted to barbecue. And the search engines found us, so we got traffic. In those days, Yahoo was the dominant search engine. Google was kind of the new kid on the block, and they found us and they gave us a lot of love. To this day, the vast amount of our traffic comes from Google searches. Today, AmazingRibs.com is by far the largest and most popular grilling website. We get over a million visitors a month, which ranks among the top culinary websites in the country.

TSS: Does anyone else come close to hitting those kinds of numbers in the digital BBQ space?
MG: The closest it probably gets is Malcom Reed on YouTube. His YouTube channel is huge and has more than a million followers.

AmazingRibs.com has grown into one of the largest barbecue-focused websites in the world.

TSS: What has helped the longevity of the site and kept it going strong for so long?
MG: When we first launched in 2005, a website like ours could make a living with advertising. And for a while, we had good cash flow from advertising. But that changed as the web grew bigger. Then we started using Amazon affiliate links for product recommendations to make money as well, but like advertising, the amount of money in that has declined as well. … Then it dawned on me that I watched PBS and listened to NPR, and I said, “There's a business model.” So I had this goofy idea of creating the “Pitmaster Club” in July 2014, charging $23.95 a year. We created a forum where people could share recipes and experiences with different grills and smokers. And we started adding benefits, such as getting five free ebooks and having access to forums. Today, we are at 17,900 members.

TSS: With so many people members of the Pitmaster Club, that clearly makes it a lot easier to make a living and to pay your staff.
MG: Yes, in order of dollar value, it’s memberships first, advertising second, and affiliates third. And there are book royalties as well from my books. And this past November, we launched three rubs and a sauce. These are the first products we've ever sold. We're selling pork, poultry, and red meat rubs and a barbecue sauce. And they're pretty good. I worked really hard on the recipes.

TSS: How many people do you have working for AmazingRibs today?
MG: It depends on how you count them, but it’s about 10 overall. Some are half-time, some are full-time, and some pitch in at various times. I’m actually more than full-time. This is the classic case of being an entrepreneur. Starting your own business can be a jail sentence. I watch Shark Tank and I want to reach out and grab those guys by the throat and say, “Stay at your nine to five job, get paid, get vacations, get health care!” I work seven days a week and have for 50 years and occasionally take, what's that word that starts with a V? I forget it. Vacation!

Meathead Goldwyn's eponymous book is one of the best-selling barbecue books of all-time.

TSS: One of the most interesting things about building this site is that you’ve been working from home well before the pandemic and that your team was distributed all over the world before work-from-home became the norm.
MG: It’s true. I’ve been working non-stop from home for 22 years. For the site, I have staff in New Zealand, Las Vegas, Mexico, South Carolina, Chicago, Memphis, and more. We’ve been getting together on Zoom once a week as long as it’s been around, and before that, it was conference calls. We're accustomed to this decentralized business. And it works. We have a big team meeting every week on Thursday for about two hours, which is an hour too long. And then every Friday, I meet with them one on one on the phone to go over anything that came up during the meeting.

TSS: On a final note, we noticed AmazingRibs potentially branching out into the events space with the Meat-Up in Memphis. We were sad to see it was canceled recently because of pandemic concerns. How are you feeling about it?
MG: There has never really been a conference for barbecue lovers. The NBBQA has a really good annual conference, and they're a small organization. I used to go as often as I could, and I love them. And I said, “Why don't we have something like this for barbecue lovers?” With the Pitmaster Club, I’ve got a built-in audience. We decided to create a “Meat Up” in Memphis. We planned to have barbecue tastings, history lessons, and all that. … It was originally scheduled for June 2020. Well, guess what? So then we rescheduled it for August 2021. And guess what? So in May of 2021, we looked around, said, “Okay, we're going to go 10 months out to March 22, 2022, and there won't be any COVID by then.” Well, guess what? … We're a website and a membership organization. Running a conference is outside of our skill set. We figured this one out, but it was expensive. I’d like to do it in the future, but I’m not sure. … We do have members who have done small events on their own, including a members’ visit to Snow’s BBQ in Texas, and we might look at that as an idea for future events.

–

Thank you to Meathead for the history lesson and sharing insights into how AmazingRibs.com became so popular. We greatly enjoyed this interview and at a later date, we will release part two of this conversation.

Sean Ludwig (NYC BBQ) and Ryan Cooper (BBQ Tourist)
Co-Founders, The Smoke Sheet

Thanks to our sponsor DennyMike's! Use the code BBQTOURIST10 to save 10% off your order on these great seasonings. Learn more about DennyMike's here.

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