How does the Food Network website make money?
by Randall McCarley
November 13th, 2006
With the holiday’s coming my wife and I have been watching the Food Network a lot. Today she asked me how the Food Network’s website makes money when they sell cookbooks but give away free recipes.
FoodNetwork.com actually makes money several ways but I want to talk about their overall strategy for a moment: drive traffic from the website to the television. The Food Network makes most of its money by selling ad time during its TV programming. The website is just a compliment to the TV shows although it is clearly above average.
Maybe a better way to say it is the Food Network’s website is done right. It advertises to people who are online and supports people that come from the TV shows looking for more detailed information.
Foodnetwork.com is HTML compliant. It is also well-optimized for the search engines including use of the canonical fix. Almost every page has some form of bookmark-bait or link-bait.
Even though the site makes good use of technology, the Food Network’s website is built for people. The navigation is easy to use and obvious. The site is attractive. Information most people need is right upfront on the home page including the daily schedule, suggestions for shows to watch, the current holiday theme (Thanksgiving 101), highlights and useful links. The text even resizes well for people that increase the font size due to visual problems!
On the marketing end, foodnetwork.com owns and redirects food.com which helps build the brand. But on to the money.
While foodnetwork.com is built as an adjunct to their TV network the site itself is set up to make money several ways. There are ads on the home page including links to their own store. They also have affiliate ads for shopzilla and Stove Top stuffing, a Kraft Foods product.
When you look at the navigation the Store is the primary link encouraging click-throughs. TV comes second. On the TV page an annoying Flash-over ad for a survey site appeared for me (hopefully they ditch these ads as they are somewhat trashy in comparison with the level of class associated with the rest of the site). There are “sponsored by” links including Oscar Meyer.
On the Cooking page a searchable ad for Kraft Foods appears to help you find recipes. The ads color and style reflects the rest of the Food Network site making it blend in well and appear to be part of the content (there is a light gray “advertisement” marker above it that is easy to miss). This is a common way to boost click-throughs as the average web surfer probably won’t even realize they are being directed to a different site!
Note: The redirect on the ad took me to a page that “could not be found” - oops!
In fact every page has some type of off-site advertising from banner ads to “sponsored by” links - even Adsense ads appear on the deeper pages. Some ads are more blatant than others. Some are better targeted than others, especially when you are within the top 3 clicks of the home page. But almost every ad is food-related, even one from Wal-Mart that I spotted! Most pages have just one ad giving the advertiser a better value and ROI.
The Tasty Travel page changes the rules a bit implementing more ads and calls to the store. Interior pages also contain multiple ads. And some of the advertising is travel related (like the Hyatt resorts ad I saw) instead of food-related.
The Kitchen Design page is actually a link to HGTV’s Kitchen Design another Scripps Network property (Scripps owns the Food Network as well as DIY and Fine Living). Links to the other Scripps sites are also in the footer of each page (along with affiliate links to Shopzilla and Bizrate).
Finally, there is the Videos page which is Flash-driven and requires Windows Media Player. It streams videos on load starting with a commercial. In fact all the videos start with a commercial.
Food Network has done a great job serving their audience and monetizing their website without too many unnecessary interruptions (the major exception being the Flash-over on the TV page). They keep the site customer-focused and careful ad management has helped their advertisers get a valuable purchase. And all of this is done while pushing viewers to the TV shows, building the brand and reputations of the talent and encouraging viewers to shop at the store.
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November 13th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Great article, Rand! Very insightful…one wee typo which stood out for me, though:
“Foodnetwork.com is HTML complaint.” (4th paragraph.) I mean, I complain about HTML a lot, but I’m not sure this is what you meant! ;)
Interesting ideas about the goals of the site and how the design accomplishes them. Thanks for those thoughts.
November 14th, 2006 at 2:37 am
Yea, my wife asked me about that and wondered if that’s what I meant. Good catch!
I think the goals are easy to spot when you put yourself in their place. Think of the motivating factors involves accross several departments and what the results are they want to see. Corporate will have their demands. The designers will push for certain things, so will the accountants and lawyers. And the marketing team works with the designers to make it all work. There’s a lot of opportunities on the site that are missed by many “corporate” sites.
It is well done IMO.
November 16th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Hmm…I’ve never liked the Food Network site. I’ve been there many times, and the main reason I go is for recipes. The recipe pages are poorly formatted - the Google-sponsored ads appear only the right-hand side, yet you always have to scroll below them to get to the recipe. Everytime I look up a recipe, I wonder why in the world the Food Network needs to subsidize their site with ads. You’ve kind of answered that - they want to make money - but really, they need to make money from their website? Their TV ad revenue and product tie-ins aren’t enough? It always looks cheap to me.
November 16th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
You make an excellent point. I don’t think they have to but since they can, what accountant would let them pass it up?
November 17th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Yep, I guess the almighty dollar wins out every time. Once I clicked on a recipe at the FN, and there were so many ads that I didn’t even see the recipe. I didn’t realize I needed to scroll down half a page to find it - I thought they just didn’t post it.
I guess I’m sensitive to this now because eBay has started displaying Yahoo ads at the top of eBay pages when someone is searching for an item on eBay. You can’t advertise your off-eBay store on eBay in your listings, yet it’s possible that your off-eBay store could show up in a Yahoo ad at the top of a random eBay page (if you do Yahoo Search Marketing). How eBay justifies that, I just can’t figure out.
Sorry for the tangent - I guess the connection between Food Network and eBay is: sure, you can make money through ads, but how does that affect the end-user? If it’s a distraction, or drives people off the site, is it worth the money it generates?
By the way - I found your site because Miriam (of Solas Web Design) helped me with mine. I started reading her blog, then yours. I’ve learned a ton. Thanks!
November 17th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
*Most* of the Food Network’s ads are not distracting. They are tasteful and don’t have too mutch animation. And I don’t recall any ads animating multiple times (could be wrong on that) which is something that really bugs me. As I pointed out some of the ads blend which is a bit shady but at least it’s not distracting.
Honestly it took a while to discover the Adsense ads and they keep them off the first few main pages. I think Rand at SEOmoz is right - they make the site look cheap.
Having Adsense and other clutter on the give-away pages makes sense. Food Network is going to look for the best return on these “freebies” they can get.
When I looked at it the recipes were at the top-right with Adsense below them. They probably got some negative feedback and made the change. I’m sure they pay a lot of attention to things like that. And if viewers are abandoning free recipe pages without enough time to get the recipes that’s very telling that the mix is off!
Ideally, the viewer should get led into another foodnetwork.com page from the recipe pages… like maybe a cookbooks page in the store (get more recipes like this one…) or have a sign-up form right there for free recipes by email or something.
Personaly I don’t like eBay and stay away from it. Same with craigslist. Both sites have horrible designs that are not user-friendly and pretty damn ugly IMO. ;-)
Miriam is the bomb! I enjoy my conversations with her a great deal. She is tallented, bright and a total sweetheart. Anyone looking for online stores should take a look at Solas’ designs - they are brilliant and non-standard because they look good!
I’m glad I can help! Traffic is really starting to jump here so I guess I’m doing something right. :-)