Last month for us was like a baby being on perpetual sugar high. So many exciting new things were happening in the Cucumbertown office, so I’m going to dive right in!
The RecipeWriter Release and Reaction
To say that our much awaited RecipeWriter V2.0 was met with a positive response, would be a complete understatement. It was an overwhelmingly positive reaction with people generally loving everything about the product.
Of course,there were a few things here and there which were sore points, but that’s all resolved now. Monika Manchanda’s much loved image gallery is back, and the not so well received status bar was scrapped. But all in all, it’s been a great success with the RecipeWriter.
Apps
After completing our pet project with the RecipeWriter, we have now started earnestly working on the first set of features which will be completely unique to Cucumbertown. We have started off by building apps for convenience features, such as unit conversions and nutritional labelling. The agenda with this is simple; to make the consumption of food blogging as seamless as we have made creating it. The unit conversion feature has already been launched, and we are still gauging the response to it. We should be able to get you updates on its performance and reception in next months updates. So stay tuned for that!
Ads Free Experience for No Recipes
It’s common knowledge that most of us are not the most excited when we see ads on our favourite blogs. But the reality is that these ads bring in significant revenue to the food blogs. So in order to balance the act, we decided to open up a paid ads free experience for Marc Matsumoto’s No Recipes. This comes with a free trail version of 30 days which can then be extended into the paid subscription. Once again the reports and performance analysis for this will be available in next month’s report. For now, the team is still experimenting with messaging, placement and workflows around this.
More Robust Migration Code
Okay, we’ll admit it, migrating to Cucumbertown was not the easiest process. There was quite a bit of waiting because of the manual overhead associated with the migration process. Now that has changed! We are migrating as many as two bloggers per week! This is a huuuuuuge improvement from the month long waits that were happening before. The verification is also easier now, thanks to the interface that was developed for it.
Sponsored Content
As a part of the monetization efforts at Cucumbertown, we have now started actively branching into sponsored content. Cucumbertown as a platform is an extremely compelling option for brands out there looking to work with food bloggers, because not only will our bloggers cover a lot of niches that brands are looking for, but we can also provide advanced reporting to the brands on how the content performed and so on. This kind of reporting is not something that bloggers can do on their own easily. It’s a lot of work and lacks clear structure in many cases. But with Cucumbertown, there will be a team that takes care of this for you, making you a more compelling option for the brand too.
We are currently in talks with brands and have already built a team with our Head of Monetization, Shriniwas at it’s core.
More Monetization News
In more monetization news, we have also started having direct ads from brands instead of working with networks. This of course, means more control over things like CPMs, ad placements and so on. And with the sponsored content team too working closely with brands, we foresee a lot of such associations in the future. We are also looking the best ways to transfer money to the bloggers and dealing with taxation issues on that front.
New Exciting Blogs on Cucumbertown
Last month we had quite a few bloggers moving to Cucumbertown. My Food Court, Spice Meets Cake, and Nithya’s Kitchen are a few of the names to mention here.
User Love Keeps Coming in!
What’s Coming Up Next?
We are currently working extensively on our premium feature range and hope to roll out the nutritional labelling feature soon. And now that the code is more robust for the migration, we hope to go through our pipeline of waiting bloggers faster.
So that’s April in a gist for you. From the way things are looking May is gonna be super exciting too. So stay tuned and don’t forget to Follow the Cucumbertown magazine for more updates!
