IT’S getting hot in the Internet’s kitchen.
Food and recipe sites have ratcheted up their competition in recent months, with publishers like Epicurious, Martha Stewart, Time Warner and others introducing new features and redoubling offline promotional efforts to attract visitors.
The reason, executives said, is simple: recipe searches are among the most popular online endeavors for women, and major advertisers want to be there to greet them.
“When people want to find a new recipe these days they go to the Internet, more so than cookbooks, magazines or anything else,” said Kenneth Cassar, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings. “The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people do that.”
Roughly 50 million people, or one-third of active Internet users in the United States, visited food sites in May, Mr. Cassar said, with sites like foodnetwork.com and kraft.com attracting more than seven million people. If recent and expected changes are any indication, these visitors are looking for friends as much as they are seeking recipes.
Condé Nast’s epicurious.com late last month introduced My Epi, a set of online tools perhaps best characterized as Facebook for foodies. Readers have long been able to compile their own recipe collections on the site. But now users on Epicurious, which was among the earliest recipe-sharing destinations on the Web, can search the virtual recipe boxes of other users, create profile pages for themselves and sift through profiles of other users with whom they may share similar interests.
People who are interested in cooking for children, say, or in recipes with chocolate, can easily find the personal pages of others who have expressed similar interests, and leaf through some of the nearly 50,000 Epicurious recipes those users have collected.
Tanya Wenman Steel, the editor in chief of Epicurious, said the site is also working on a service that would allow users to post their own blogs on the site, including photographs. “Nobody has anything out there like this,” Ms. Steel said.
Not at the moment, at least. Last month, Time Warner introduced myrecipes.com, a Web site that supplanted AOL.com’s food channel as the company’s primary food offering. Bruce Akin, president of SPC Digital, the Time Warner division that oversaw the creation of MyRecipes, said the site will also soon introduce more so-called community services to help its users connect.
Mr. Akin said the offline publications that most heavily fuel the site’s database of recipes, like Cooking Light and Southern Living, have long histories of connecting readers through contests, schools and reader-submitted recipes.
“The community aspect is not new to us,” Mr. Akin said. “It’s just time for us to take it to the Internet, and another level.”
In the coming months, marthastewart.com, the online division of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, will also allow users to collect, share, rate and review recipes with other users on the site. “And that’ll just be the beginning of our community and personalization initiative,” said Jody Jones, the editorial director of the Web site. “These are big growth areas for us.”
Like other major food sites created by offline media companies, marthastewart.com, whose newly redesigned site appeared in March and was the seventh most popular food site last month, works closely with its magazine and television units on content and advertising initiatives.
For instance, Ms. Jones said the Web site is converting videos from 10 years of company archives into two-to-three-minute online features. Marketers like General Electric are buying packages that feature similar promotions on air, in print and online. The fact that advertisers can link their campaigns in all three realms, versus one or two mediums, “is a big differentiator for us,” Ms. Jones said.
True, perhaps, but executives of other food sites say they are having little trouble attracting marketers. Christine DeMaio, the publisher of Epicurious, said the site is on pace to increase advertising revenues by more than 30 percent from last year. Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, Condé Nast’s online division, said the site has had annual increases in that range for the past four years.
That growth is partly fueled by household goods advertisers, like Kraft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Mr. Cassar of Nielsen said that as of late last year, online advertising among these so-called consumer packaged goods companies had jumped by 34 percent from the prior year — a rate equal to that of the overall online advertising market last year. In years past, these huge advertisers had generally lagged behind the market.
The online atmosphere is friendlier for marketers who want to blur the line between advertising and editorial, according to Jane Goldman, editor in chief of chow.com, a food site owned by CNet Networks. “For good or evil, there’s a lot more opportunity for marketers to get their message across,” Ms. Goldman said.
Christopher Parr, consumer marketing manager for Sub-Zero and Wolf, an appliance manufacturer based in Madison, Wis., agreed. Mr. Parr said his company has designed campaigns on large media sites, like The Wall Street Journal Online, The New York Times, Epicurious and others. Often those campaigns include past articles from the site that have mentioned the company’s products, surrounded by company advertisements and links to sections of the Sub-Zero and Wolf Web site for people to learn more.
The number of ads he has bought “isn’t in the millions,” Mr. Parr said. “But our leads are through the roof.”
Like many other sites in the food category, allrecipes.com, which last month ranked third among the most popular food sites, would not disclose its advertising revenues. But according to Esmee Williams, the company’s vice president of marketing, the Web site has spent nothing on its own advertising.
Because its links often populate the top search results of Google and Yahoo, Ms. Williams said, it has not had to purchase advertisements anywhere to attract visitors. Nor has it spent much to create content, since the site’s 40,000 recipes come from users. (Site editors review the recipes before posting them.)
Ms. Williams said allrecipes.com is creating new features, like one introduced earlier this month that allows users to search the site’s recipes from a mobile phone, and another planned service that will feature popular local recipes.
“It’s 55 degrees here in Seattle, so I probably won’t grill tonight,” Ms. Williams said. “But in Austin, they’ve been doing it since February.”
