Recently The Daily Meal listed the 25 Top Food Blogs of 2012, based on their own formula.
I started thinking about the relationship between food magazines and food blogs, how food magazines are doing, and where readers are going in this new online world. Let’s take a look:
A. National Food Magazines. Here are the annual paid circulations of US top national food magazines:
- 3.20 million Taste of Home
- 1.78 million Cooking Light
- 1.74 million Every Day with Rachael Ray
- 1.52 million Bon Appetit
- 1.47 million Food Network
- 1.33 million Weight Watchers
- 1.07 million Food & Family (produced by Kraft)
- 1.05 million Everyday Food (Martha Stewart)
- 954,000 Food & Wine
- 750,000 Cooks Illustrated
- 549,300 EatingWell
Total: About 15.4 million annual readers.
Now, let’s compare to…
B. Top Food Blogs. Here are the numbers as measured by The Daily Meal:
- 2.5 million* Simply Recipes
- 671,602 Pioneer Woman
- 366, 346 Skinnytaste
- 74,343 Cake Wrecks
Total: Over 3.6 million annual readers.
Here’s what we can conclude:
1. Simply Recipes has a stunning reach. She has larger readership than 10 of the top 11 national magazines.
2. A food blog, operated by one person, can reach more people than a corporate food magazine with a big staff.
3. Gourmet magazines are failing. People want easy, homey recipes. The top magazine in the US features reader-submitted recipes, tested in a professional kitchen. They’re like the recipes you might find on…a food blog.
3. Americans want to lose weight by cooking at home, thus the success of top magazines Cooking Light and Weight Watchers, and the blog Skinnytaste.
4. Top television food shows influence what Americans read. Every Day with Rachael Ray, Food Network, and Everyday Food have a combined circulation of 4.26 million.
5. The Kraft company can beat out several well-regarded food magazines by making its own about its own products, and charging $14 a year for a subscription. Amazing.
What do you make of my analysis, and what are your observations?
* * *
Notes: Blog numbers used by The Daily Meal include measurements from Compete.com. *Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes says she prefers Quantcast numbers, which list her at 4.4 million monthly uniques, double the number listed here. Magazine circulation numbers are mostly from 2011, unless linked. Photo courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Interesting comparison… just as a heads up, compete.com definitely way underestimates unique visitors. In my case it lists about a quarter of the unique visitors that my analytics and wordpress stats reflect.
Large food blogs like Pioneer Women, smitten kitchen, and simply recipes get a LOT of views… On Deb’s NPR interview this week, they said that smitten kitchen averages around 8mil/month as a ball park. Of course, nobody is directly paying for those views so it’s hard to compare numbers.
Yes, I’ve heard that from a number of people. The Daily Meal used its own methodology to come up with numbers, which you can read about in the link.
Yes, I agree with Nick. Those look more like monthly numbers than annual for the food bloggers. According to those, I’d be kicking butt in traffic over Pioneer Woman and reaching Simply Recipe status soon – there is definitely no way!!
Like Nick said, compete.com significantly underestimates traffic in many (most?) cases. Precise numbers aside, I think it’s definitely safe to say that food blogs (both individually and collectively) have very significant influence in what people are eating and reading right now, as are food websites like AllRecipes.com, Epicurious.com and others with larger reach than the national print mags.
Oh good point, Kathy. I didn’t even think about comparing the big recipe databases.
As I food blogger, I support other bloggers, but love my glossy cooking magazines too, especially those that offer nutritional breakdowns for every recipe in every issue.
Oh sure, I enjoy them too. It’s just that pre-Internet, they only competed with the food section of magazines. There is a new recipe plug-in for WordPress, by the way, that calculates the nutritional analysis of a dish.
Wonderful comparison piece, Dianne! This is so interesting.
The other metric, though, that I would be interested in is advertising (and subscription) dollars pulled in by each publication. That’s the catch with food blogs and internet media in general: it is difficult for ad sales teams to monetize websites to match the value placed on one glossy full-page ad in a premium food magazine. Eyeballs don’t always equal revenue on the web. There are a lot of complex factors that go into whether a site can be as profitable as a magazine.
I know that your post is here is more about audience than $$, but I also don’t want people to assume that blogs’ revenue is necessarily rising along with their audience.
At The Kitchn, for instance, we have over 5 million unique visitors a month (and over double that many pageviews) but do we have the revenue, operating budget, and complement of full-time staff as at Cooking Light? Even though our audience is far larger, advertisers do not treat our viewers as they would paying subscribers of a food magazine (and rightly so, I think – the quality of impression is very different).
So, all that to say – yes, the audiences of food blogs are massive, and print has been struggling, but advertisers still seem to want the impact of print ads. And as long as food writing and journalism is primarily ad-supported, advertising dollars will continue to be an important metric of viability.
Oh, and just to be super clear, since I didn’t make it explicit above: No, we don’t have remotely the “revenue, operating budget, and complement of full-time staff as at Cooking Light.” Even at “big” food blogs with a larger staff, it’s a constant, creative, challenging endeavor to try to make good content, pay people as well as possible, and try to make a positive, excellent business around food writing on the web.
Right. I assume that was what you meant.
Interesting point, Faith. I was waiting for someone to bring up that magazine circulation is not exactly the same as blog circulation. For one thing, the magazines I mentioned above have subscriptions, and blogs are free.
I know that the top blogs pull in more than $1 million per year in ad revenue, but I have no idea whether their income is going up or down and I’m sure no one is going to tell me. Likewise, I don’t think magazines release the amount of revenue they generate either.
Internet advertising has always paid poorly compared to print. I remember Ruthl Reichl saying once that a full-page ad in Gourmet cost $40,000. Compare that to what we make from affiliate ads. No comparison!
One thing that jumped out at me as I read this was the units of measure. Is it accurate to compare one page view to one copy of a magazine? As an example, Food Network magazine averages about 200 pages per issue so assuming the reader looks at every page in the issue, wouldn’t that be the equivalent of 200 page views?
I also noticed that the values for the magazines represent paid circulations. I’m curious what percentage of total sales that represents. I wonder what the average split is for magazines – subscriptions vs retail sales (grocery store check-outs, etc). I haven’t got a clue.
Regardless of how you do the math, its pretty clear that food blogs are a force to be reckoned with.
Hi Laura, the way circulation in magazines is measured is by each subscription. While the reader might look at 200 pages of content, the magazine is delivered only to her, so she is only one person. And she can look at 200 pages on a blog, if she chooses.
Regarding the total revenue of magazines, typically the larger portion comes from advertising, not circulation.
Good point Laura on the paid circulation numbers. It might be a more fair comparison to look at advertising impressions, the sort of number a media buyer would have. As I recall, you add up paid circulation plus newsstand, and then multiply by some factor (2 or 3?) because magazines tend to get passed around a bit. This pass around is taken into account when calculating impressions. Anyone know a media buyer who can confirm?
As for Compete, QuantCast, and Google Analytics, from what I can tell Compete grossly underestimates everyone’s stats. I guess if they apply the same logic to everyone’s sites, then the resulting ranking is more or less accurate. I assume that’s the idea. Compete put Simply Recipes at 2.5 M. Quantcast, which is verified through code on my site, puts the global number at 6.4 M uniques. This compares to Google Analytics which put me last month at 9.9 million uniques, a number which is also verified by code on my site.
One important difference between the readers of magazines and the readers of food blogs, or at least my food blog, is that if you read a magazine, you are well aware of the magazine you are reading’97its name, its style. If you come to a recipe on a blog via search, you may never even know that you are on a blog. I’m guessing at least half the people that come to my site don’t realize it’s just a blog, created out of a simple kitchen. So I think we are more challenged as food bloggers to nurture distinctive, memorable brands.
Hi Elise, what you are referring to is called the pass-along rate. Magazine executives like to estimate that a magazine is read by three people rather than one. However, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) does not accept pass-along rates as official, and bases the numbers strictly on circulation.
Regarding competing blog numbers, I’ve been thinking about how there are competing sites that estimates numbers (and I don’t understand how different numbers can all be “verified”) for blogs, but for magazines, there is only the non-profit ABC. What magazines track, in addition to whether circulation and newsstand sales are up or down, is the percentage of people who re-subscribe.
You make an interesting point regarding blog loyalty. I would say this is particularly true when people search for a recipe for, say, zucchini bread, and just print out what appears when they click on the top links from Google. Indeed, they may not care whether the recipe came from Simply Recipes — an individual’s recipe database; or Allrecipes — a corporate recipe database. Just as magazines create brand loyalties, bloggers must do the same.
Elise I must complement you on some very impressive REAL numbers!
I’ve heard some pretty outlandish claims of unique visitors by bloggers lately that are factors of 10 more than what Quantcast is estimating. It is interesting that they don’t install the Quantcast tracking code so it can’t be proven. A few have even had the tracking code for awhile and taken it off for some reason. I wonder if it is because they want to be able to say that Quantcast’s estimate is wrong, so can make up their own numbers.
So now that traffic numbers are being spoken of openly I have to ask why don’t all of the bigger blogs have the Quantcast tracking code like Elise has? When they don’t have it and still talk about their numbers you really have to wonder.
I’ve never even thought twice about putting any code but Google Analytics on my site. Is it important for some reason to have Quantcast in addition to GA?
Google Analytics tracking is only for your (and Google’s) consumption. The results are not displayed publicly. Quantcast also tracks in the same way as Google Analytics but the results are available publicly. This allows the public to review your traffic and is accurate to the single visit and page view. To answer your question Dianne, this is how sites can be tracked. A third service, Comscore is typically used by advertisers when assessing which site to advertise on. I recommend their code as well so all 3 have accurate numbers.
As Elise mentioned Quantcast’s unique visitors number is usually significantly less than Google Analytics because they take into account the fact that many people clear their cookies on their browsers. Google Analytics does not take this into account so it could count a single person that has visited the site more than once in a month as multiple unique visits. Quantcast has an algorithm that is supposed to remove this error. Visits and page views however should be exactly the same on both.
The bottom line is, if you want the world to know your REAL numbers you should have Quantcast tracking code and probably Comscore as well.
If you are running ads on your site other than Adsense, you will likely have Comscore tracking code in the ad code, because this is how the ad networks can accurately report back to their advertisers on how many impressions you really have. Whichever is your premium ad network would have the Comscore data. So you should be able to ask your ad network what your Comscore data is. Otherwise, to see Comscore data across an industry, you have to pay for it.
Okay, good to know! Thanks to you & Elise for sharing how that works. I’ll implement the Quantcast code today! It’s always good to have more accurate numbers.
DJ,
This is one of the most fascinating, significant posts you’ve ever written. I look forward to seeing the comments flood in on this–especially from the professionals in the field of media buying, analytics, and such. Wish I had something relevant to add to the discussion, but I’ll just be a very interested observer on this one.
Oh Martha, you are too much! Seems like so far the comments are about how magazines can charge a lot more for their ads despite these trends.
Special reader request: add a tweet button to your emailed teaser for the post and then use a shortened URL (via burly or whatever) for the generated tweet from both the email teaser and the twitter button on the actual post.
Will look into that. The long address works fine if you put it at the end. But maybe you’re got a lot to say!
I found this post & your observations fascinating … Love that food blogs are getting their come moving up int heir value (or perceived value) 🙂
Thanks CJ. People are saying that there is still little perceived value in terms of advertising dollars. A really good point.
Historically people don’t like to have to pay for things on the internet and unless that changes I think that blogs are always going to be regarded as the cheap cousin of food magazines. That’s my tuppence worth anyway!
Completely agree, Caitriona. That’s my 2 cents (American version. :-))
What a great topic, Dianne! And I thoroughly enjoyed everyone’s take on these issues. It looks like it boils down to traditional media, which is expensive vs. the new media, i.e. blogging, social networks, and internet-based communication, which are all still ‘free’. It would be interesting to monitor where all these will bring us in the next few years. Even better, what is the take-away for our readers here? Do they prefer to get recipes for free or pore over glossy magazine pages and pay subscriptions? Thanks for featuring this topic. Hope you don’t mind if I share this on the free social media networks?
Very interesting article. I loved it, and I am very impressed at some of the numbers. While I still love me some printed material, the truth is that I haven’t bought a magazine in ages. Not when I am almost overwhelmed by the number of the great blogs out there.
I wonder if the future is somewhere between blog and magazine, now that tablets and smart phones are becoming so abundant.
FASCINATING!
Really, this is absolutely amazing, fascinating information.
I wonder if grocery stores are aware of these statistics.
I don’t think every single food blog has its own comscore, and sometimes they are rolled together in a particular advertising network. Your advertising agency may provide your comscore rank to you. I stopped Quancast because those beacons took a long time to load.
Fascinating numbers, and not totally unexpected given the fact that a reader can Google a recipe and immediately be presented with millions of results is winning out on having to flick through a magazine to find a particular recipe. It would be interesting to find out of those magazines listed how many of the subscriptions are digital ones, as it’s quite difficult to pass a digital subscription onto another person to read and I think more and more people are subscribing digitally than purchasing print copies. I know I’m one of those people.
Elise’s point about blog loyalty is an interesting one. I think there are those readers who simply want a particular recipe, find it on your blog and print it out and that’s that. However I also think there are those who try the recipe from the blog, like it and think “this recipe was fantastic I wonder what other recipes this blog has that I might like”. I also think it’s a wonderful reminder to make sure the branding on our blogs is clear and recognisable. Also, the last thing we want is for someone to print a recipe and not to have any details for them on the print out about where the recipe came from.
All numbers listed are for the print editions, Jennifer. I do wonder about the page views on their websites. Good question.
You’ve given me a lot to think about Dianne. I just did a very quick research and my little food blog is pretty comparable to the big food magazines here in Australia. It sure helps the argument that we’re worth something.
I heard a PR once say ‘oh you don’t need to pay bloggers they’re desperate for things to write about.’ Arguing that I have a similar reach to a major magazine that they pay thousands too sure helps!
I hope you can use it for something, Claire! Good luck.
I was surprised to see Food & Wine magazine with such few subscriptions (under a million) but maybe that’s a decent number for a glossy? Perhaps it makes sense because in your article, you state that people want easy recipes. They don’t have to shop for exotic ingredients and spend a small fortune to make one dish and then never use those ingredients again. I still enjoy that magazine, but to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever cooked one of their recipes!
I’d be pleased to be the editor of a magazine with big circulation like that, but it’s kind of surprising where F&W ranks in popularity. It says a lot about where home cooks are right now. They are not that ambitious, apparently.
Thank you Dianne for completing the picture that you started to paint at EatDrinkBlog in Adelaide. We Australian food bloggers are watching the growth of blogging in the US with great interest. Your talk inspired many of us to keep on bloggin’ .
Oh good. Thanks Kerry. Perhaps, like Claire, you should review the circulation numbers for national food magazines in Australia and compare them to your own.
“People want easy, homey recipes” — interesting conclusion for #3, but it made me realize we’re still missing a huge element in this argument: Books! I’ve noticed that I buy food magazines for an interesting article about a chef or a restaurant, but almost never for a recipe, like you suggest. But I usually peruse food blogs for novelty recipes, interesting flavors and combinations I haven’t cooked before, not because they are homey or easy. Later, I’ll return to blogs while I’m cooking, because they’re so accessible, literally at the tips of my fingers. (And when I need to substitute an ingredient or convert a measurement, I just open a new internet tab!). But hasn’t the rise in food blogs created a rise in successful recipe books? I think we still like the idea of holding something solid and pretty in our hands when we’re thinking of food.
I don’t know if the rise of food blogs has led to a rise in cookbook sales. It’s a good question. Certainly lots of food bloggers have published cookbooks, but otherwise I’m not sure there’s a correlation.
Yes, I still do like the idea of holding something solid and pretty in my hands while I’m thinking of food: a cupcake!
Okay, that does sound good. I’d like a book in the other hand.
Dianne, this is a very incredible post, which articulates more clearly the feedback that we have been receiving from some of our blog readers – people want accessible recipes and are much more open to cooking from home. They do not want to be bowled over by the intensity of the fine dining approach – they would rather go out for that in a restaurant. Maybe what we are seeing is the steady decrease of what some people think of as “fancy, elite, gourmet” home cooking which some perceive as “pretentious” while others perceive more homely approaches as more “honest.” Note as well that even restaurants are trending with more “home-cooked” flavours that resonate more effectively with a large part of their clientele.
The cook-at-home market is diverse and global and in local markets like ours in Dubai and the rest of the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, dining out is much more popular it seems than home-cooking. Therefore restaurant reviews are typical in our blog market and the top ones gain popularity. Globally though, it is the home cook who rules and while people will buy magazines for the hard copy effect to curl up and read, many consult blogs for easy recipes.
Bottom line, people want inspiration to get into the kitchen tonight with ingredients they probably already have. People are also cooking more at home for health reasons and are looking for healthy options that suit their diet that do not taste like cardboard!
Good to have a perspective that’s outside the US. Dining out used to be a rarity, but now it’s not even considered unusual. Yes, it’s hard to curl up with a good blog vs. a good magazine. You may never make the recipes but it’s fun to escape for a while.
Thus the popularity of a magazine like Taste of Home which is comparable in type of recipe to a few of the most trafficked blogs.
Jennifer’s last point about blog loyalty and branding is a very good one – hence the importance of making sure any recipe print-out plugins have a facility for the recipe author’s identification.
Yes definitely. I don’t like printing out a page and then having to write on it as to where I got the recipe.
I have a hard time analyzing all of this and I truly think it all depends on what we want, what we are talking about. Yes, numbers and traffic, but I like to think that the question is more complex than this. When I saw The Daily Meal’s Top 25 Food Blogs list I was a bit astonished… yes, top blogs in numbers but it was a real mishmash of types of blogs, like grouping oranges and apples together. Or maybe apples and potatoes. Or like comparing Time Magazine, People Magazine and Good Housekeeping, if you see what I mean. What draws readers to one blog is not the same as what draws a reader to another, nor are they necessarily the same demographic; different blogs serve different purposes and have different aims. The blogs that I have seen change content in order to go where the traffic is may end up drawing more traffic – if that is the goal – but doesn’t necessarily improve content. So old faithful readers may no longer visit at all. Just like people who buy Taste of Home don’t usually buy F & W and vice versa. And each magazine must make their editorial choices based on which audience they want to reach and attract and why. Is this confusing the issue? Or bringing up an aspect of the question that no one really cares about? In the world of blogging I personally think traffic, stats, numbers, SEO plays too big a role in the conversation, primarily because it doesn’t always reflect quality.
I also think that, as many say, it is unfair to compare buying and reading a magazine with visiting a blog and, if you will, purchasing a cookbook. Apples and oranges again, I think. Buying a magazine is a completely different experience, a different purpose and drive. Ditto the purchase of a cookbook. What would personally fascinate me is dividing different types of blogs that offer different types of content and see what draws readers to these sites and what keeps them. Ditto the different food magazines (I have conversations about this with the editor of ToH occasionally and it is interesting.)
Yes I agree, the Daily Meal list was quite a jumble, with food-based websites mixed with individual blogs. What the magazines and blogs have in common in my above list is that all are recipe-based. True, some are skewed one way or another but most are not.
I don’t think it’s unfair at all to compare magazines and blogs. They do compete with each other for readers, and magazines seem to be losing against the Internet, since online recipes are free. When I was an LA journalism student in the 1970s, for example, I wanted to work at the top circulation magazine in the city. Its international circulation was 7 million. Now we’ve got Newsweek ending its print edition at the end of this year and other magazines folding and shrinking.
I didn’t include books because they have a different format. They are not published regularly like blogs and magazines. Also their sales numbers are not public.
Perhaps the Saveur list of blogs is more appealing to you, Jamie, as it is not based strictly on numbers but is more of a popularity contest, since winners are based on number of votes.
Yes, I see what you mean. It is sad to see magazines – and newspapers – losing readers and even closing down, but then can we compare their online sites to the blogs? What do we get then? Sites like Saveur.com and gourmetlive…
I’m not sure what to really conclude from the comparison of data. Even as a (wannabe) food blogger and food blog reader, I am always searching out interesting print magazines or journals to read. In fact, I actually prefer print over web, but, it is hard to find good print magazines that offer the content I am look for (although they are beginning to become more popular as trendy print food magazines are seeing a resurgence). I read blogs and magazines for the stories–for the unique writing styles and perspectives of the authors, or tales about people doing interesting things in food. Magazines like Saveur, The Art of Eating, Lucky Peach, Gastronomica and Kinfolk are filling that niche for me and I’m always looking for me. Of course, these magazines have a far lesser reach than the ones you’ve posted above, but I wonder what those numbers would look like if we calculated enjoyment? I’m not sure the statistic of how many unique visits or purchases your website or magazine has indicates overall reader satisfaction or enjoyment to any significant degree. In many cases, it may just be someone googled a recipe and grabbed it from the a blog, not stopping to read, learn, and engage. And while the top magazines you’ve listed are not magazines that interest me, I do wonder about the “subscription” statistic vs. unique visits; a subscription suggests people are reading the magazine regularly (although they might just let the magazine sit on the shelf without ever cracking it open, which is what I do whenever I have a recipe-based magazine), whereas the blog stats only indicate one unique visit but not actual interaction with the site or the author.
What I really hope is that we stop looking at food blogs and print food magazines as being in competition with one another. I enjoy both and would like to see each thrive.
Personally I have not subscribed to any of the magazines in the list, as they don’t hold my interest either. I like your list better, but that does not mean we enjoy the publications we like any more than they enjoy theirs.
It’s true that subscribers have made much more of a commitment. The corollary for blogs may be RSS subscribers, even though no money changes hands. But the numbers I quoted are the only numbers available to the public, so those are my limitations.
Regarding competition, when I was a magazine editor I often befriended competing editors-in-chief and partied with them. But did I want my magazine to do better than theirs? You bet. And I’d be naive to think they didn’t have the same aspirations.
yesterday I heard someone say that the internet is making us have a mesh of information rather than a focal point – I think this is one of the problems for magazines no matter how many numbers individual bloggers have. However I found this interesting, especially how much the numbers of bloggers audiences tail off in the top 5 – and I can understand why simply recipes does so well.
Yes, many food magazines created huge websites with recipe databases to keep up with reader trends and competition online, but as you say, information is dispersed. They’re desperately trying to keep up! I think in some cases, their unique online views might be bigger than their print readership.
The numbers fall off after Simply Recipes! Elise has done an amazing job.
One thing about magazine subscriptions is that many magazines underprice their subscriptions because they can make money selling your name and address; companies pay big money for those lists, which are targeted, so they can send catalogues, offers, etc to a very specific audience. So a magazine can charge $12 for an annual subscription and not make money there, but gain a lot more by selling their lists over and over. And magazines can charge higher rates, the higher their subscriber numbers – so although I don’t know the precise economics of it, I’d venture to say there is some formula for having a certain number of subscribers and ad rates.
(Many bloggers do have mailing lists, but am not sure how many of us get hit up to sell ours. I don’t share mine & I suspect most food bloggers don’t simply because we don’t want our readers getting unsolicited ads.)
Food+Wine for example, is part of American Express, whose audience is perhaps a bit more well-heeled than Food Networks subscribers and it’s a higher-quality publication. So although the subscription numbers are different, F+W may be doing better than FN as they may have more higher-end advertisers who are interested in their subscribers.
Hi David! Very true that subscriptions prices are lower than the actual newsstand price. That’s true for every magazine, though, so I did not consider it a differentiating factor.
Probably all of them, except possibly Cook’s Illustrated, sell their subscriber lists. I suspect the revenue depends on how aggressive the pubs are about making sales. (CI has a different model. It takes no ads and the magazine charges for online access to its recipe database.)
Good point that bloggers have mailing lists too. I wonder if bloggers have figured out that they could sell them. I suspect not, simply because it would take a lot of work to figure out who would buy it. The magazine industry is very established in that way. However, some bloggers have inserted ads in newsletters.
Definitely the audience of F+W is more well heeled than that of Food Network. I get your point that perhaps circulation numbers do not tell the whole story. It is the only measure that is public, however, so there is no way to know how much income FN gets from selling its list vs. F+W.
You say that F+W is “higher quality” than Food Network. In what sense do you think so?
I have done a few things with F+W and each time, they had very good photographers, stylists, and editors working on my articles. They also attribute recipes on their website to the writers. I have had skirmishes with the other company mentioned as there are recipes from my site on their site, reprinted nearly word-for-word (in one, just the metric amounts are removed), and others I wasn’t attributed for.
There were also a few other incidents I won’t mention here (and I’m still waiting for a response from Food Network on a message I sent about yet another recipe of mine on their site, that a reader alerted me to…) but in my personal experience, Food+Wine it’s nice to see that F+W attributes recipes to their source without hesitation.
Aha. It sounds very civilized over at F+W. I do wonder, though, since so many big food magazines are in New York, whether the editors move around from one magazine to each other, and the freelancers work for whomever hires them. Even so, if there’s a philosophy at the top of hiring the best, treating them well, and treating freelancers well, that will attract the cream.
Re seeing your recipes appear for free and without attribution on a big magazine website, that is pathetic. I’m glad you’re taking them to task. Don’t let up!
Yes, they’ve had a number of my recipes on their site without attribution or permission to use them. They’ve only responded to one of my messages, which was not very encouraging (if I recall, it mentioned something about a powerful in-house legal team that I would have to engage with) – and really, it was pretty clear that they were my recipes and I was just asking for at least attribution or a link to my site, where the recipe originally appeared. I’m not quite sure why they do that since it seems to be standard to attribute, even if you “adapt.”
Food+Wine has always attributed recipes.
Impressive numbers indeed. I suspect that food bloggers will continue to improve their writing and photography and more and more people will switch to recipes from people they trust and show less loyalty to the glossy magazines.
Dianne, you mentioned in your presentation the difference between food writing on blogs and magazines is that food blogs have personality and opinion and that’s what our readers want.
If David Lebovitz recommends something, everyone’s going to buy it. That trend will continue to grow.
We’ll see, Maureen. I hope there’s room for both, but magazine numbers have been declining in general.
Yes, blogs are known for the personality of the individual, and readers come to know them like friends. I bet there’s a spike in sale if David does recommend a product, but that’s pretty rare.