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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Group Recipes: social networking for the hungry

February 11, 2008

Since publishing our social networking report last month, people have been asking us to identify successful niche social networking / web 2.0 sites. Wel,l here’s one that saw a real jump in traffic last week: Group Recipes. The site operates in a similar way to social news sites such as Digg and del.icio.us, with a user submitting a recipe that is then rated by other users in the community. As you can see from the chart below, the site has grown rapidly over the past year, and last week it was the 36th highest ranked website in our Food and Beverage category.

UK Internet traffic to Group Recipes food soical networking website 2007 2008 chart.png

So why the sudden spike last week? In a word: pancakes.

With Shrove Tuesday last week, pancake related terms shot up the search rankings: ‘pancake mix’ was the fastest moving search term sending traffic to our Social Networking and Forums category; ‘pancake recipe’ was the fastest moving term for News and Media sites (placing it ahead of ‘ashes to ashes’); while all of the top ten fastest moving terms in our Food and Beverage category were pancake related. And Group Recipes was a notable beneficiary of these searches.

Although market leader BBC Food received almost half of all of the traffic from searches for ‘pancake’, Group Recipes received 45% of traffic from searches for ‘pancake mix’, the third most popular pancake related term. It’s clear the Group Recipe optimized its site around this key term. ‘pancake mix’ accounted for 24% of its UK search traffic last week - 28 times as much as the next most popular term (‘leek soup’). So should the BBC and others be worried?

With 0.49% market share of the Food and Beverage category last week, Group Recipe is still long way behind BBC Food’s 11.97% market share. As you would expect, the majority (61.63%) of the site’s traffic comes from Search Engines, but the second most important source of traffic is other Food and Beverage sites, which accounted for 19.74% of upstream traffic last week. However, 41.39% of the site’s downstream traffic also goes Food and Beverage sites, with the four top downstream sites last week being: Creative Homemaking, BBC Food, Cooks.com and the Food Network. As is often the case with social media websites, the picture is mixed. Yes, Group Recipe is ‘stealing’ traffic from competitor websites – the search data bears this out – but it also sending traffic their way, possibly because their database of recipes doesn’t yet satisfy customers’ demands.

Posted by Robin Goad at 04:50 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Food | Search | Social networks