People Inc has gone from zero to two million registered users for its new brand MyRecipes in just over six months.
The successful launch has come about without paid marketing activity and in a US publishing market that has been hard hit by declining referral traffic from Google search and competition from AI-generated answers.
MyRecipes aggregates more than 100,000 published recipes onto one platform taken from existing People Inc titles such as Food&Wine, Allrecipes, Serious Eats and Southern Living.
The site has a 15-strong team and is purely ad-funded.
General manager of MyRecipes Rich Maggiotto and People Inc president of lifestyle Alysia Borsa answered Press Gazette’s questions about the launch.
How have you grown the user base so quickly and why is there not an app?
Alysia Borsa: “If you go to any of our sites which have recipes and click ‘save’, it will bring you into MyRecipes which is the hub where you can save and collect and search for over 100,000 recipes. You can do that both within the sites themselves or on MyRecipes as well.
“We wanted to make it easy, free and accessible to everyone, and the easiest way to do that out of the gate was really web-based, so we don’t require anyone to download an app yet, but that will be coming.
“We’re using on-site marketing messages. We’re using our emails. We have banners and push notifications on our sites.”
Can you explain the ad-funding model for MyRecipes?
Rich Maggiotto: “The action of saving a recipe, just in a simple form, is a very valuable intent signal. You learn about an individual’s dietary restrictions, cuisine preferences, the frequency that they cook, how many people they cook for.
“So all of this is being captured in the platform.
“The initial use of it right now, as we get started, is to really make sure that we’re dynamically serving up relevant content.
“Extending that to advertisers is this next step: understanding where they are on the journey of planning, making, buying ingredients and making sure that we serve up the right kind of brands and advertising at the right stage of that user’s experience.”
What is next for MyRecipes?
Borsa: “Eventually you should be able to purchase directly from the recipe and put things into your cart.
“We have an AI assistant coming that’s going to help you with meal planning, and we are adding the ability to save recipes from even outside of People Inc brands. So it becomes your universal saving platform for anything food related and recipe related.”
What does the success of MyRecipes tell us about AI disruption? Why aren’t people going straight to LLMs for this sort of information?
Borsa: “None of those services right now save all your recipes or keep all your recipes safe for you. And are they providing trusted recipes from brands that you know, has someone actually made the recipe that you’re looking at? We believe there’s absolutely long-term value in building out a service like this.”
Maggiotto: “The reality with cooking, with recipes, with sitting at a table with friends and family, is it’s a profoundly human experience.
“Working in the kitchen, the heat of the kitchen, the clutter of knives, it’s a very sensory experience. And so we definitely believe that the recipes that we are creating, testing, putting out there are real. They’re made by humans.
“We are called People Inc, after all, and we think there’s something to recipe content that is very much a human experience and can’t necessarily be replicated with AI.
“And I think you’ll do plenty of stories over the holidays and beyond talking about AI mistakes when it comes to recipe content…We are making sure that the recipes that we put out there, the meal plans that we put out there, make perfect sense from the human experience.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
