Who Moved My Business Model?

Let’s take a look at two content-driven websites and see what we associations might be able to learn from them.

Since I like to eat, and dabble in the kitchen, let’s make them both about food.

The first is AllRecipes. AllRecipes is the very definition of a community website (long pre-dating Web 2.0, by the way — and it’s owned by Reader’s Digest, which is the very definition of old, as in really old, media). Community members submit recipes (which must be approved by some editorial process), and other community members rank those recipes and submit their reviews, many of which go on to offer suggestions and variations to make the recipes better.

That’s it — though yes, they have apparently added some other community features, like blogs, the basic product offered by AllRecipes is, well, recipes — and, more importantly, the collective knowledge of thousands and thousands of members who have actually TRIED these recipes.

Personally, I like AllRecipes, and the reason I like it is that I find the rating and review system very helpful. Much like Amazon reviews, if a recipe has gotten a LOT of reviews, then I feel more comfortable with the rating, and when I’ve used recipes from the site, I have almost always used tweaks from the reviews ranked as most helpful.

AllRecipes is free to join and derives its revenues primarily from advertising — though they have started pushing a “supporting” membership subscription. I find the paid offerings kind of silly (pay to get a blog?) and I get the feeling that the only reason they are offering it is because the market on which they primarily depend is so soft right now.

The second website is Cook’s Illustrated (I’ve talked about them before in a post about successful paid online content). Actually, it’s a network of websites — this privately-owned company publishes two magazines, Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country, and also produces two PBS television shows, America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country. And they publish a huge number of books featuring essentially re-purposed content.

Each magazine and each television show has its own website, each of which has its own subscription fee to access its content (separate and apart from magazine subscription fees). Neither the magazines nor the websites accept advertising.

The value proposal of the Cook’s Illustrated family is that there is an actual test kitchen — with professional staff — who test different recipes dozens or even hundreds of times until they come up with the one “best” recipe complete with “foolproof” step-by-step instructions. They also run taste tests of supermarket products, and equipment tests of kitchen hardware.

Personally, I subscribe to one of their magazines, two of their websites, and have purchased several of their books either directly from them or via Amazon. I like the pragmatic, step-by-step nature of their recipes and the genial goofiness of their television shows.

So here are two completely different kinds of websites, with two completely different business models, offering basically the same exact thing — recipes and related kitchen expertise. The difference is that AllRecipes is selling eyeballs to advertisers while Cook’s Illustrated is selling, well, recipes and related kitchen expertise.

With AllRecipes, you have the power of community — hundreds of thousands of members adding their own valuable experience to each recipe in the database. With Cook’s Illustrated, you have the power of professionalism — experts paid to do one thing, do it well, and then share it with their subscribers.

Each is useful for its own reasons, each has its own place.

But right now, if you had to choose between the two, which one would you rather be?

Besides selling recipes, the other thing these two companies have in common is that they each HAVE an online business model.

What’s yours?