The move by Scripps to enter the online recipe space is a smart one to me. The genre has been exploding and is one of the more popular categories visited overall on the Web.
As we've talked about before, "Recipe searches are one of the most searched categories by women online."
Scripps has acquired the popular online recipe site Recipezaar.com, an online community and user-generated recipe site. The Web site attracts 2.5 million unique monthly visitors, which will add to FoodNetwork.com's 8 million, also owned by Scripps.
The company says the addition of Recipezaar.com will increase their reach to 19 percent of the online food category.
“We wanted to expand our portfolio of options,” said Deanna Brown, president of Scripps Networks Interactive. “We wanted to look at what are the opportunities to cross-pollinate, cross-promote and think horizontally about the opportunities between Food Network and to bring new brands into the fold.”
Wisely, Scripps will keep the name of the Web site as it is, and won't attempt to rebrand it. It also has no plans to overly tinker with it by changing its look. This is smart because not everyone will want to interact with the Foodnetwork branded site.
This deal is good for Scripps because it complements its existing professional content. The Recipezaar.com especially targets user-generated recipes and has a vibrant online community.
Scripps will sell ads across their new property and their existing Foodnetwork.com.
These types of Web sites are the type I really like. While everyone is aware of them, they aren't in the public eye as much because they aren't considered "sexy" enough to talk about.
For savvy online marketers though, this is another example of building a powerful, niche community site that overall flies under the radar, while being extremely successful. Just the type of business we should look to build.
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