

How We Tested Our Food Blog’s Expected CPM with Premium Images - Cherian
https://magazine.cucumbertown.com/putting-your-plate-where-your-money-is-the-food-blog-monetization-experiment-part-1-54dde9e5e5a2

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danso
A little OT, but of all the Show HN's I remember, this one was not one I
expected to see still going forward 3 years later:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4669676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4669676)

It looks like the pitch of being "Github for food" didn't pan out (or is de-
emphasized), but I do like that besides being an attractive blogging platform,
the site uses the recipe schema in a non-obtrusive way and has its own
cooking-video-app. Great to see this still living on.

~~~
Cherian
Thanks so much. Means the world. I quite don’t fancy the “fail fast” Silicon
Valley model. Everything meaningful and beautiful takes time and sacrifice and
lots of course correction. We also got acquired by Cookpad along the way [1]

We moved on from the Github or food to a Food blogging platform. Our users
were using the platform to start writing and once they reach maturity we saw a
migration to wordpress and other platforms. We knew we could fix that problem.

Also, by that time we realized we could do a much better job monetizing these
blogs and making it into a livelihood by economics-of-scale.

[1] [http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-
biz/startups/japan...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-
biz/startups/japans-cookpad-acquires-cucumbertown-in-multi-million-dollar-
deal/articleshow/47685652.cms)

------
stephengillie
This is the story of how DLC is breaking into the blogosphere. As a gamer this
makes me want to run and cry.

But on the other side this is a more direct monetization scheme than
advertising, as it gets 'round the advertiser middle man. As an internet user
it gives me confidence.

I'm suddenly visualizing needing to pay $0.05 per image I want to
upvote/downvote on Imgur.

~~~
Cherian
Don’t take this literally. We don’t like the ad model much. Its very
unobtrusive and compromising to the user experience. The authors spend a lot
of time creating content. And they need to make a livelihood to sustain their
passion. For that, as a platform we need to help them build such mechanics.

Internally, we debated putting a “refund button” right next to the pay button.
We think that would create much more confidence. But hey, this is the first
iteration.

------
matheweis
Misleading title. They didn't double CPM, they ran an experiment that
suggested they might be able to double CPM.

From experience, the number of people who click the "buy" button (even given
the price up front) are not necessarily the same people who will actually
follow through with the purchase. (Further, some people who are turned off by
the "buy" word, are willing to follow through with a purchase when presented
with a different initial choice; e.g. "unlock now")

It'd be more interesting to see the experiment run to completion, actually
taking the money, and then see those numbers.

~~~
ankitjain_hn
It could better be written as "Effective CPM". Also, the completion % is an
assumption. If I take 10% completion rate, it is still higher than AdSense CPM
rates and at par with other food blogging ad networks. For providing an ad
free experience, it still seems worthwhile.

~~~
matheweis
> If I take 10% completion rate, it is still higher than AdSense CPM rates and
> at par with other food blogging ad networks. For providing an ad free
> experience, it still seems worthwhile.

This is the much more interesting bit. It would still be super interesting to
follow through and find out what the actual completion rate was.

------
Cherian
As a food blogging platform trying to monetize and build a livelihood using
author -> audience models, this is one of the first experiments that we are
running. There are quite a few challenges and probably we fail a lot but this
experiment seems like it could work.

Part of it was also inspired by Blendle’s experiment[1]

[1] [https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-
experiment-w...](https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-
with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc)

------
Mz
Let me suggest you run your experiment again. Use a different value amount,
something higher than 20 cents. Consider actually charging the money via
PayPal or Bitcoin or whatever. Yes, if you charge say $1 via PayPal you get
something like 60 cents of that. If you get enough volume, so? And you need
about a third as much buy-in to do just as well in theory as your 20 cents
amount, a lot less to do even better in reality since all of those figures are
phantom dollars that never actually got paid. If you are really committed to
keeping it a very small amount, charge 20 cents or 25 cents per recipe but get
your dollar upfront and give them credits for viewing other pics on other
recipes. This might also incentivize return visitors. Some people will come
back just because it is killing them to waste their remaining credits. Then
you might hook some of them.

I read this with interest because I have several blogs. Some have ads. Some
don't. Some have tip jars which used to be donate buttons. I have never made
much money but I have always done better with getting cash from readers than
with ads. I am starting the process of looking at Patreon as one possibility.

I am a woman and I started a food blog in June. So I really was excited to see
the title of the article.

But having read it, I think your problem is basically mental bias. Recipe
blogs are caught in an internet Pink Collar Ghetto. You are helping to keep
them there by trying to find a way to charge a pittance and lamenting the lack
of a small payment platform instead of putting together something actually
viable in the here and now.

I served as a moderator at one time for a forum that was the biggest thing in
its niche. The forum owner wanted it to make money but his mental models had a
stranglehold on the income stream. Nothing was really acceptable to him. I see
shades of that in the reasons you keep giving for why this, that or the other
won't work.

Repeat your experiment with whatever modifications are necessary to make this
real and not theoretical. Come up with a payment platform of some kind. Charge
actual money this time. Improve on the model from there.

Best of luck.

------
soggypretzels
Honestly it is stuff like this that Bitcoin would do amazing for if it had
wider adoption. Scan the screen or click a button, send $0.10 your way, images
appear. No muss, no fuss, no CC processors. The biggest benefit for this is,
for someone who already is part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the barrier to pay
to see these images is smaller than using a credit card and maybe even smaller
than PayPal. This biggest problem with using Bitcoin is that not many people
(particularly those who would read a food blog) have it, and the barrier to
buy into the Bitcoin ecosystem for many people is very high.

~~~
matheweis
I'm not so sure. The real cost per transaction is astronomically high.

------
Carrok
I'm not sure how you 'estimated' the 30% Payment Completion numbers, but that
is way too high. That's 50% of your Payment Initiates. According to Wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonment_rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonment_rate)),
you should expect something more along the lines of 20%, not 50%. This puts
your effective CPM at $3.10 rather than the $8.05 you claim.

------
swalsh
I had never heard of cucumbertown before, so i did a 3 second lookover.

Quick question. It looks like you guys are trying to build a community of
bloggers, who will probably be building a database of recipes.

If you're not doing it already... can you PLEASE have your bloggers add
ingredients in a structured form. That would allow you to build an API later.

Imagine how much traffic you can drive to your customers sites if outside apps
had an easy way to search through recipes.

~~~
Cherian
We are not building a community of food bloggers. We are a food blogging
platform. Think of us like Tumblr, specific to food blogging.

Some of the blogs on the platform:
[http://indugetscooking.com/](http://indugetscooking.com/)
[http://sousvidelife.com/](http://sousvidelife.com/)
[http://richagupta.cucumbertown.com/](http://richagupta.cucumbertown.com/)
etc.

And all the recipes are in hrecipe format [1][2]. And yes, we have an API that
opens to cookbook companies.

[1] [https://magazine.cucumbertown.com/taming-google-rich-
snippet...](https://magazine.cucumbertown.com/taming-google-rich-
snippet-32f6d4dc691d#e73a)

[2] [https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-
tool?u...](https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-
tool?url=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.indugetscooking.com%252Fchicken-fried-rice-
recipe)

------
tracker1
Why not say that, by making a $2 payment, you will unlock all recipe images on
the site for 48 hours. With $2, you are still at a _very_ low price, where
it's disposable income for most... but offering a carrot that may bring them
back to interact with the site more.

You might also try a $24/year level, or something that seems relatively
inexpansive as a followup.

If you do this, you may want to combine with a social network login (google,
yahoo, ms, fb, etc) with a minimal access (real name and email only). So they
can access from other devices.

It would then be closer to a membership model, but the cost of entry would be
very low.

------
david-given
My first thought on seeing this headline was: you're running your blog on
CP/M???

Sigh. TLA namespace overload is the curse of our time.

(I would actually be interested in knowing if they make a go of this, because
despite what I said above, the true curse of our time is advertising; anything
to make it go away. I am concerned that their UI for encouraging people to pay
looks rather sleazy, and would be inclined to drive me off, despite the
trivial amount of money...)

------
ramatgan
I wonder how an incentive ad wall would perform. Users are much more likely to
watch a video ad/download a mobile app than take out their wallet.

~~~
ankitjain_hn
We are approaching the experiment with a philosophy of no ads. As the platform
evolves, we could test incentive ad wall kind of solution on some other bench
of recipes. Thanks for sharing the idea.

------
matthewrhoden1
It sounds like they're going to have to go to a credits model. You buy $10
worth of credits and use those to unlock images.

~~~
ankitjain_hn
We are trying to avoid "loading a wallet" concept. It adds whole lot of other
complexities. This microtransaction is clean. No future committments. Now only
if payment gateways made it viable.

~~~
dyladan
You could try the reverse and float visitors credit. Once they're 5$ in the
hole they can't view images anymore until they pay off the balance or
something similar. Of course you'd have to find a way to make it so users
can't just create a new account after they hit the 5$ limit (possibly by
requiring a credit card and deduplicating by that?). Digital Ocean uses a
similar model where they automatically bill your credit card once a month for
accrued charges.

~~~
ne0n
Are there any examples of that being used successfully? My guess would be that
people will just create new accounts. This might be the perfect place to test
that model, though. The content is already free, you don't have to worry about
losing royalties that people don't pay for if the test fails. There might need
to be a strong emphasis for having an account (being able to customize or save
recipes without losing data from creating a new account).

------
condescendence
For the micro payments, I don't take the initiative to suggest bitcoin that
often, but it could be a decent payment option if this were actually
implemented.

Another social experiment you could try is offering a year subscription for
something like $5, it might drive return readers aswell as solve the
micropayment issue.

------
napo
Great article. However... $('img').attr('style', '-webkit-filter: blur(0);')

~~~
anandgrafiti
Quick and dirty, you see! It's an experiment.

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sdab
If a user realized that the "cost" of viewing the image was free, wouldn't the
user disregard the cost on future instances of the experiment?

Did the experiment limit a user's participation to one time? Otherwise, the
results might be skewed and the benefits exaggerated.

~~~
ankitjain_hn
Yes, it limited the participation to one time. We don't show "locked" images,
after doing unlocking. Most visitors are expected to be one-time visitors,
finding the recipe via Google Search. Even if they re-visit, IMHO, it is
measured risk to take in order to get actionable data for taking further
decisions on shaping this feature.

------
akeck
I wonder if LevelUp could develop a service to facilitate these types of
micro-transactions. I use their barcode-based app for "semi-micro" food
purchases frequently.

------
joshdance
Very cool. Would it be too hard to just take the users cc info, and then not
charge them until their balance became a bigger amount?

~~~
ankitjain_hn
Yes Josh, we could do that. That's a cool suggestion. In my observation, it is
a low chance that a visitor will repeat the transaction on some other recipe.
Most visitors come via Google Search and may not return ever again.

------
gotrecruit
like many others, i too have never heard of cucumbertown, although i cook
frequently based on downloaded recipes. i google for random recipes often, and
not once have i come across this site. SEO and SEM might be something to think
about, if this is truly world's only food blogging platform.

