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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Room for More?: MyRecipes Turns 2Wednesday, May 6, 2009 How much food information and recipes can Internet users stand, anyway? With longtime fixtures like Food Network, Beard winner Epicurious, BHG and Reader’s Digest’s AllRecipes, aren’t we stuffed already with dinner ideas? In a hot category, there seems always to be room for more, and Time Inc.’s own MyRecipes.com is working hard to become a fixture on the menu. MyRecipes.com, which celebrates two years online this month, aggregates food-related content from the company’s magazines and sites into a repository of 33,000 recipes (40,000 planned by year’s end). Why is such a young site carrying such heft? “It is a lot of fun to participate in because of the size of the collection,” says Jim Sexton, SVP, editorial director, Time Inc. Lifestyle Digital Group. “We can package content and recipes in dozens of ways. A St. Patrick’s Day feature might have a trove of 100 favorite recipes. The site can package groups of recipes around timely news items or current trends and stories more easily. A deep database also allows the site to serve special dietary needs like diabetic regiments or gluten-free diets and vegetarian menus. Sexton is also having success with sponsored special features. The “5 to Try” series features five adventurous recipes in a category (slow cooker meals or brown bag alternatives) that T-Mobile wraps its brand around. There have also been cross-media opportunities with Cooking Light magazine. With Unilever, the magazine and site devised a multi-platform execution in its “Dinner Tonight” feature that includes Ragu, Knorr, Hellman’s and other brands. In two years the site has found a loyal audience of 1.5 million uniques (in March, according to Nielsen). Half of the traffic comes off of the magazine sites, where a recipe search on CookingLight.com, CountryLiving.com or other Time Inc. lifestyle sites will click through to MyRecipes. Without the benefit of a specific print magazine or cable TV channel to push traffic, the site is increasing its focus on search. Natural search results at the major engines drove 5.1 million referrals to MyRecipes.com in the first quarter of this year, more than 100% stronger than the same quarter in 2008. Like most food sites, the demographics skew hard to the female—between 80% and 90%—but Sexton says he is working to bring the age demo down from the typical upper 40s range into the younger moms. Video is becoming a good driver of traffic and engagement, Sexton says. There are 700 videos in the library now, including the “5 to Try” franchise. As MyRecipes.com moves into its third year, Sexton is looking forward to a pending redesign as well as a mobile iteration. Another sponsored content feature, “Kraft’s Kitchen Timer,” will let users enter the amount of time they have to prepare a meal and offer recipes that are just in time and just on time. While some Web-only food sites may have greater traffic, Sexton believes both users and advertisers are attracted to the quality of the editorial and the recipes. All of the items are kitchen-tested and analyzed for nutritional information. As traditional packaged goods brands finally move more substantial parts of their budgets online, publishers like MyRecipes hope they will stay close to familiar brands, as will those frantic moms with “nothing for dinner.” If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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