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Cucumbertown 2.0 — Start a food blog for free.
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I'm a part-time food blogger, in my less-than-copious, spare time and moved to Cucumber Town last year from a hosted wordpress blog. CT was a huge huge upgrade for me, and the intense focus on food blog vertical has allowed them to create features specifically suited for recipes. @cherianthomas + team: Great job!
Hello ProductHunt community,
Since the last time we were hunted here, we’ve evolved into a food blogging platform serving millions per month and thousands of dollars in revenue per blogger every month. Cucumbertown’s focus is on creating the best tools and ecosystem to let the food blogger focus on building content and nurturing the audience and leave the rest to the platform.
Here are some of them:
http://norecipes.com/
http://www.saffrontrail.com/
http://www.tastychao.com/
mine: http://www.alittlebitofspice.com/
etc.
We are building the whole spectrum of toolkit from a RecipeWriter, analytics system, affiliate management, social media, connectors to theme customizers.
Cucumbertown’s mission is to make this into a livelihood for the food blogger. We work a bit like the YouTube model, sharing revenue. Revenue comes via – ads, affiliates and premium services.
We’ve taken a very fragmented market and focused on high friction aspect and made it zen level simple.
At the core we have a very simple publishing tool similar to the Medium editor. What would otherwise be hours of frustrating work for a blogger, we make the whole experience a bit https://twitter.com/saffrontrail... :-)
The inbuilt analytics system helps you to get a bird’s eye view of how well your content is doing, with breakdowns of traffic, referral sources and follower counts.
An automated Recipe Index collates all the rich data from your recipes into a structured format. So readers can browse recipes based on course, cuisine, time taken and even ingredients, without you putting in any additional effort.
There’s a whole lot more, articulated in the homepage.
I mentioned it earlier but Cucumbertown’s focus is to make this into a livelihood. With ads, affiliates, sponsored content and other brand engagement we operate by economics-of-scale. This usually leads to 100-1000% more in revenue than running a food blog of your own.
Would love to answer queries.
And finally, our twitter wall of love: https://twitter.com/cucumbertown...
@cherianthomas Do you share revenue with you your users? Or they use their own adsense or ad accounts?
How do you earn out of the same?
We share revenue with the users like the YouTube way.
We partner with over 15 ad networks across domains including food space and serve ads via Google DFP ad server which is closely integrated with Adx (Adsense’s big brother)
In addition to this we do realtime bidding and ensure 100% fill rates and a lot more. This is a lot more complicated and 100-1000% more yielding than an amateur doing Adsense.
Besides this we have affiliates to promotes product you recommend
http://d.pr/i/10t9F
We integrate with multiple vendors from Amazon, Safeway and others. The bloggers are largely oblivious to this and get a pretty interface to abstracting the nuances
This is also substantially rewarding. More details here: https://magazine.cucumbertown.co...
Brands also reach out to us to do sponsored content with bloggers.
Then to premium services – And ad free subscription for your audience that gives them nutritional info, priority support etc.
In all of these we share nearly all the revenue with the blogger. The sum of all these monetization channel is extremely powerful and rewarding for the bloggers.
@cherianthomas So do you have adsense host api approval?
As I was planning something on like revenue sharing but Adsense policy says you cant do unless you have approval for host api.
And I see you are using adsense. So do you have approval for host API?
How much % of earning do you share with your users?
I work in the food industry, and I would be interested to learn what sets you apart from other blogging platforms. What makes your CMS specific to food bloggers? Also, you're making some pretty impressive statements re income - I take it that these numbers (thousands of dollars per blogger every month) are the top outliers, rather than for the average, correct?
Also, given the collapse of prices and efficacy in online display advertising, as well as the rise of the ad blocker, what other ways do you have to generate income?
@andreasduess Cucumbertown is designed from ground-up for food blogging. Right from the editor interface which is optimised for solving the typical needs of a serious food blogger (structured recipes, affiliate marketing, Pinterest friendly posts) to the final rendering of the recipes on the blogs itself (sharing widgets, convenience features built over recipe data), Cucumbertown can be thought of like a launch platform to for serious food blogging. Think about someone who has the passion to cook/create, but lacks the technical know-how to tune their blog into a lively hood. They are the primary targets we are focussing. Here is a detailed summary of the features that we have now. home.cucumbertown.com/features/
To achieve each of these, a blogger will have to deploy tons of plugins and customizations over a standard WordPress installation. We have them covered right from the day they start a blog.
Yes, the display advertising scene is challenging and becoming less efficient. Though most of our blogs still rely heavily on display ads, we are continuously experimenting with other models of engagement such as Affiliate markets, Sponsored content, Premium subscriptions and similar author-audience engagement modals to balance.
You are right, the numbers are for the top outlers.
This is awesome! I already advised it to one of my friends who was looking for this product - they wanted to use it within their team to grow company culture by different team members doing posts on local restaurant reviews.
Mysuper.fan