Food, The New Phenomenon

I just wrote about CNet’s acquisition of Chowhound.

(Jim Leff is visiting later this week, and we’re to try Guatemalan food in San Francisco on Friday night.)

Lo and behold, now we have Reader’s Digest acquiring AllRecipes.

Some traffic details:

From a recent press release: “Ringing in the New Year, Allrecipes.com, the world’s leading community recipe site for home cooks, will remember December 2005 as the month the company logged an all-time high of 9.1 million unique visitors to the Web site, according to their internal log files. Nielsen//NetRatings backs up this growth reporting a 25 percent increase in unique visitors to the site and 42 percent growth in page views over 2004.

With this unprecedented traffic, Allrecipes.com became the second most popular Web site in its category, behind only Foodnetwork.com. Nielsen//NetRatings also confirmed that Allrecipes.com’s traffic surpassed that of other popular consumer sites including ABC.com, iVillage.com, CondeNet.com, BetterHomesandGardens.com and Oprah.com. This capped off a history-making year for the company.”

See why Reader’s Digest paid up the $66 Million? More than 15 Million annual visitors, more than 1 Million registered users … not a bad base for RD to start building their online story!