Many recipe apps engage in a practice called “scraping”. This is when they directly copy recipes into the app. This means that users are not directed to a creator’s actual blog, which decreases traffic to their page. Scraping might seem like a more convenient way to view and catalog recipes but actually has a dark side. In reality, scraping is very damaging to the livelihood of a blogger as it reduces the amounts of visitors to a blog, decreasing the amount of money a blogger earns from advertising. Apps that have featured scraping, such as Recipeasly, have faced intense backlash from the Blogger community due to the negative effects that ensue from this practice. Spillt has purposely engineered the functionality of Spillt with these harmful outcomes and the goals of bloggers in mind.
Bloggers know how important page views are. More users on a page lead to higher advertising revenue, which is the primary source of income for most blog content creators. Instead of directly “scraping” recipes from blogs as many other apps do, spillt simply acts as a network of links to recipes. This means that as soon as someone wants to access a recipe, Spillt will reroute the user directly to the blog from which it is sourced. This, in turn, will increase traffic to the blog, allowing for increased advertising revenue for bloggers. Spillt acts as a go-to spot for fans of bloggers to find and share recipes essentially through indexing a series of bookmarks leading to blogs. Spillt adds features such as the lack of automatic display shut-off and the ability to add ingredients to a shopping list directly from recipes in order to cook the recipes from these blogs with fewer obstacles.
The Spillt app essentially pulls out metadata from recipe blogs for easy access, which pushes users to engage with a blogger’s actual webpage. This improves the ability of recipe bloggers to monetize their content as more users and clicks lead to more advertising opportunities and revenue. Spillt operates with the best interest of bloggers in mind, acting as a space to share, compile and more easily make recipes concocted by food bloggers and content creators. Spillt will be easy to access as it will be free for all consumers and bloggers.
Spillt is also creating a word press plug-in that allows bloggers to sync their recipes in an organized fashion to the spillt application. Any new recipes published on a blog will appear simultaneously on their spillt profile where they will be more readily discoverable. The plug-in will also transfer reviews and ratings left on recipes from a blogger spillt profile to the corresponding blog. This allows for blogs to be found more often on google as star ratings are an important metric for creators in the food-blogging space.
