Hungarian goulash recipe - click
The dangers of search engine optimisation
If you’re Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver, hopefully not. But what if the sheer volume of freely available recipes on line could see the end of the trusty, flour-encrusted hardback?
Figures from across the pond report that the number of men buying cook books has increased by nearly 600,000 in the last decade, but sales to women have dropped by over 1 million. In the UK it’s a gloomier picture - particularly for the high-profile gastronomic tomes penned by celebs like Delia Smith. The BBC was left with a stockpile of over 190,000 unsold copies of Delia’s “How to Cook, Book Three” going back to 2004.
Sales of Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks have also fallen on hard times, with more recent editions unable to reach a benchmark 150,000 copies sold. Even Jamie Oliver, everyone’s favourite ‘mockney’ TV chef has been failing to reach previous heights. Books launched to coincide with several of his recent TV series’, acclaimed by both critics and public alike, sold at less than half the rate of his earlier offerings such as “Happy Days with the Naked Chef” which sold over 450,000 copies back in 2001.
Recent figures from the publishing industry on the whole suggest it is not just these celebrity chefs whose stock is reducing. The overall value of cookbook sales in the UK was declining at an estimated rate of 8% per annum in 2004. Several more years of that kind of performance and cookbook publishers will have to seriously rethink their publishing strategies.
Effective and cheap alternative
So, it’s clear that sales have been declining sharply, but can that be attributed to the web and the exponential growth of recipes available free on line? Or is it that celebrity cookbooks reached their peak in popularity a year or two after the millennium and are simply no longer flavour of the month?
The dates tie in rather nicely with the growth of the internet as an information-gathering tool, but that in itself doesn’t provide a definitive answer. Look deeper into the behaviour of the public though, and we begin to uncover some home truths about our way of life and the impact media and technology has had on it.
Interestingly, it is reported that more people are now cooking at home than ever before. Perhaps this is due to the fact that possession of a culinary skill set nowadays helps to raise one’s social status, or it could simply be the case that in this economic downturn, people see home cooking as a money-saving device.
The likes of M&S are publishing marked increases in cooking ingredient sales as opposed to their famed (and more expensive) prepared fare, which certainly supports this theory.
So, what we are looking at is MORE people cooking at home but LESS cookbooks being sold! Where then, are the budding chefs getting their inspiration and guidance from? Surely it can be from only one place.
Easy-peasey
Finding a recipe online couldn’t be easier. Key in the name of the recipe on Google, bad spelling included, and you will be rewarded with a list of variations for the dish in question from around the globe. Much of the content originates from highly reputable sources such as the BBC, or, ironically, the celebrity chefs whose book sales have suffered so heavily.
The benefits are endless. You get umpteen options to choose from, yet save or print ONLY the recipes you want and none that you don’t. I know that for every cook book I own I’ve probably only cooked a handful of recipes.
The web is interactive too. Recipes often come with ratings, to which you can contribute. Why not send your favourite to a friend? It has been suggested that some individuals, “early adopters”, go a step further and avoid paper wastage by employing the likes of the iPhone or other mobile media in the kitchen. However, even the gadget geek can recognise that water, flour and an iPhone don’t mix very well. The same goes for the high-tech Sony Reader. Fun and trendy it is, but, dough and marinade friendly it isn’t.
And how flexible is this? Key in the ingredients you’ve got and hey presto, there’s a multitude of options for what you’ve currently got in the larder. Whether people are opting for the web or not, the reasons for doing so are quite compelling, which surely must have cookbooks on the ropes.
Proof is in the pudding
We at Alphaquad can add our own ‘two penneth’ to the argument, with a bit of indisputable evidence supporting the argument that people now use the web as a primary source of cooking recipes.
In order to market a client, we utilised the strong link between their product and the world of BBQing. We built a web site (www.bbq.co.uk) and put our thinking caps on with regards to the search engine marketing. I bet you can’t guess what came up as the most lucrative search term attracting thousands of unique visitors to that site – bbq recipes!
That last sentence might have been a wonderful way to have left this article – somewhat inconclusive, yet leaving you full of warm, ponderable information.
However, as we have no intention of pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes, now is the time to put a spanner in the works. It seems there has been a resurgence.
Last Christmas, Nigella Lawson’s ”Feast” sold nearly 700,000 copies. The latest Nielsen Bookscan figures for Christmas 2008 support this too - reporting bumper crops for Jamie, Nigella and even Heston Blumenthal.
Incredibly, Hesten Blumenthal’s silver-edged creation “Big Fat Duck Cookbook” is expected to perform well on general sale despite a price tag of £100. That’s only £29 less than an Xbox 360 and a zillion times more expensive than the library of recipes with a £0 price point found on www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes (available at most good PCs).
What do you think?
Can Web and Whittingstall live happily side by side? Or will one overturn the other?
Email us your views if you have any evidence to support or disprove the hypothesis!
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