People Inc. builds recipes business
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People Inc., the parent company of brands like Food & Wine, Real Simple, Allrecipes, Martha Stewart and more, has racked up 2 million users across its new MyRecipes website, executives told Axios.
Why it matters: In a world where online recipes are increasingly either moved behind a paywall or replicated without expertise using artificial intelligence, MyRecipes aims to deliver quality, human content for free.
By the numbers: People Inc. launched MyRecipes in April as a way for its users to save any of the 100,000 recipes published by any of its brands in one place. (The company sees roughly 80 million unique visitors monthly on average across its food and lifestyle brands.)
- It's since racked up more than 2.1 million registered users, per Alysia Borsa, People Inc.'s chief business officer and president for lifestyle, health and finance content.
- "We expect to more than triple that next year," she said.
- To-date, users have saved 15 million recipes to their profiles. More recently, users have collectively started to save roughly 1 million recipes per week, she noted.
Zoom out: For People Inc., the business opportunity in creating a recipes platform ties back to its massive digital advertising business.
- "What we're doing is this is driving those registered users back to our site more often, and they are staying longer," Borsa said.
- "The concept of saving a recipe has a lot of value," said Rich Maggiotto, general manager of MyRecipes.
- "It gives us a signal as to what a user likes, what their dietary preferences are, cuisine types, whether they have any dietary restrictions, the frequency they cook, how many people to cook," he said. "These signals start to become incredibly valuable for us to match them to meal plans and other recipes."
What's next: Looking ahead, People Inc. is looking at ways to integrate commerce opportunities into its recipes platform, such as exporting shopping lists to be purchased in real-life.
- It's also building a recipe clipping function that will allow users to save a recipe from anywhere on the web to their MyRecipes profile.
