Back after seeing e'Life-Style', I know a little about food portals - on the international front, one of the most popular food sites is "Epicurious". The top-level classifications include: Recipes, Features, Cooking, Drinking, Restaurants and Shop. Its Advanced Recipe Search feature allows a search based on ingredients. Recipes also have reviews and ratings by readers. Its seemingly endless array of culinary information includes interviews with star chefs, slide shows of favorite dishes, book excerpts and reviews, culinary travel guides, comprehensive coverage of beers and liquors, buyers' guides, newsletters, glossaries, discussion forums, an enormous shopping area, TV and magazine tie-ins, and around over 10,000 recipes. Bur, there are plenty of other excellent international food sites: AllRecipes, FoodNetwork, and Recipezaar are a few examples.
As I browsed through these sites, I was duly impressed. Their depth and breadth is great, but I could not help but think that these are, still built for the first generation of the Internet. The question I am thinking is: how would we redo these sites (or create new ones) keeping in mind the next Internet? Maybe these sites are more than good enough having created strong brands amongst their users. Or maybe, there is potential for a disruptive innovator. Anyway, I will keep my focus on the Asian food space, since I know it better and also am a direct consumer (as are probably most of us). So, put the thinking caps on: how do we build the Next Great Asian Food Portal?
So, plenty of ideas to build a new food portal ? leveraging existing expert and user-contributed content, with enhancements in the form of formatting for mobile phones, RSS feeds to provide alerts, videos of the cooking process, personalisation, and more. But what is the business model? How does a site like this make money? Here are a few ideas:
Subscriptions: A part of the site could be available only to subscribers. I think the video content should be made available for the equivalent of tens of rupees per download. So, users can get the recipe details for free, but if they want to actually see the entire cooking process on-demand, then it is available for a fee.
Mobiles: Given the growth of cellphones in Asia, they can be tapped as a source for revenue. Food-related information could be a useful "value-added service" for cellphone users.
Advertising: The food industry is quite big and growing. Many Asian foods companies are still not advertising online in a significant way. But the more interesting opportunity could come from neighbourhood restaurants, who can even provide deals if they have space to fill. Non-intrusive contextual text ads could be a useful source of revenue.
Commerce: Selling ingredients and cooking-related appliances could be a potential source of revenue. Making books out of the content that exists on the site is another possible financial source.
Food is a very important part of our lives. A new food site done well could be financially lucrative. The time is right for leveraging a mix of content and technology to create richer user experiences. More importantly, it would also create a platform to build other vertical sites along similar lines.
Next question: Any investors?
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