Cucumbertown

» see cucumbertown.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i have never written a recipe down for anybody, not for a family member and not on a website. So the distance here is total, and it is not regional and not generational either. This was built for a kind of person i am not and was never going to be.

Cucumbertown started on 17 october 2012, founded by Cherian Thomas along with Arun Prabhakar and Chris Luscher and Dan Hauk, working out of India and Switzerland with an American leg on it. It raised $300,000 in angel money that year from a list that included Naval Ravikant and Sizhao Yang, who had co-created FarmVille, and took a second undisclosed round from Ludlow Ventures in 2014. The pitch was that a recipe is not a blog post and should not be typed into a box that thinks it is one.

That distinction is the whole product and it is a real one. A recipe has an ingredient list that wants to be structured and a method that wants to be numbered, and a serving count that wants to be a field rather than a sentence. Blogger and WordPress gave you a text area and left the rest to you. Cucumbertown gave you a form that already knew what a recipe was, then generated a site out of it that looked professional without anybody touching a template.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it gave the bloggers ~

Two things kept people there. The first was that it took the technical work away, and the bloggers who later talked to reporters said so plainly, that it gave them more than Blogger did without them having to figure out the machinery underneath. Search optimization was handled. The templates were made by somebody who could design.

The second was money. Cucumbertown charged its writers nothing and instead split the advertising revenue on their pages with them, somewhere between ten and thirty percent to the person who wrote the thing. Small numbers, but the direction was unusual and still is. Almost every platform that has ever hosted writing for free has done it by keeping all of the advertising, and the ones that share tend to be the ones running out of ways to keep people from leaving.

Readers came from sixty countries. After the United States the two largest audiences were Australia and the UAE, which is a strange pair until you think about how many South Asian and expatriate kitchens sit inside both of those numbers.

~ the mail ~

In june 2015 Cookpad bought the company. Cookpad is enormous in Japan, tens of millions of users, and the terms were never disclosed though the reporting at the time put it above a million dollars. Cucumbertown was kept as a subsidiary with its offices intact. From the outside this reads as the good ending, the one where the small careful product gets funded by somebody who already understands the category.

On the evening of 18 october 2016 a mass email went to everybody. One blogger, Nandita Iyer of Saffron Trail, told FactorDaily that she had recommended the platform to other people in good faith and had no idea it was shutting down until that mail hit the inbox. Monetization would end on 31 december 2016 and the platform would be fully retired on 31 march 2017. There was help offered for moving to WordPress, and five and a half months to do it.

The reason given, through Cookpad, was that the stakeholders could no longer see a sustainable business around it, after working hard to make food blogging a livelihood through the platform. The honest translation is that a revenue share of ten to thirty percent on food-blog ad inventory does not add up to a business at the scale a company the size of Cookpad needs it to, and that this was probably knowable in june 2015.

~ where the domain points now ~

cucumbertown.com still answers. It forwards to app.samsungfood.com, the Samsung Food app, and the forward carries tracking parameters on the end of it that name the source as cucumbertown and the campaign as domain.

Somebody set that up deliberately. Which means that nine years after the last recipe was published, enough people still type a dead food blogging address into a browser that it was worth wiring the traffic into an acquisition funnel and measuring it. The writers were told to leave in october 2016. The address they left behind is still earning, and none of what it earns goes to them.

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