Yes, You can Make Money In The Recipe Niche
By Anna Johnson on June 23rd, 2009Selling recipes online is renown for being difficult. After all, there are soooo many free recipes around. Even providing recipes for free and selling ad space is challenging, given the competition. One Japanese company, however, seems to have cracked the code and is doing so well that it’s planning an initial public offering (IPO) of its stock on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Cookpad, Japan’s biggest site for sharing recipes, was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 17, 2009. The company, which targets Japanese women in their 20s and 30s, expects to make $18.5 million in revenues and $3.6 million net profit in the current fiscal year (that ends April 2010).
Cookpad offers free, basic memberships, with premium memberships offering greater functionality for $3 per month. Apart from membership fees, Cookpad makes money via display advertising sales.
Cookpad began in 1997. Now the site now offers nearly 560,000 different recipes (submitted by users) and, based on May figures, has 6.8 million monthly unique visitors and a massive 351 million page views.
Source: Serkan Toto, “A Recipe Site Goes IPO, In Japan (Cookpad),” TechCrunch, June 12, 2009
June 24th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Living in Japan, I’ve been a Cookpad visitor for many years. What they did was provide totally free access for many years. Then, about 5-6 years ago, they went to charging for memberships. They had built up a massive presence by then. Smart positioning.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Thanks Kevin. Yes, the good old ‘get people hooked on your site and then charge them a moderate fee’ certainly seems to have worked for Cookpad.