Epicurious installs a paywall
February 2, 2022 by DarcieWe have just learned that the Epicurious website (a Condé Nast venture), which hosts recipe archives from the late Gourmet Magazine as well as Bon Appétit Magazine, has put up a paywall for all of the site’s recipes. Epicurious is offering access to recipes for an introductory rate of $30 USD per year, with the rate going to $40/year thereafter. It is also offering a monthly rate of $4.99 USD.
The search bar of the main Epicurious landing page says it contains over 330,000 recipes, but we are not able to verify if that is accurate (and it seems unlikely since their own subscription page says 50,000 recipes). In the EYB Library, we have linked 10,365 recipes from Bon Appétit, 6,097 recipes from Gourmet, and 3,924 Member-added links directly from Epicurious. (Don’t forget that even when you take away recipes from these and other paywall sites, the EYB library still contains links to over 300,000 online recipes that are free to access.) While Epicurious is allegedly offering three free recipes per month, I was unable to access any recipes without subscribing – I even tried logging in with my existing Condé Nast account (I subscribe to a non-food CN magazine) to see if that offered any access, but alas it did not.
If you have recipes saved on Epicurious, it looks as though you will now have to subscribe to access them. According to Ad Age (subscription required, I took the following quote from the free teaser), this new subscription-only strategy is “being led by Dwayne Sheppard, Condé’s senior VP of consumer revenue.” So now you know where to lodge your complaint if you have one.
Rumors of a paywall going up at Bon Appétit have been circulating for at least a year, and the move – even if not announced in advance – is hardly a huge surprise given industry trends. Advertising revenue is not especially lucrative, and as print subscriptions continue to decline new revenue sources are required to keep these publications afloat. Will you be subscribing to Epicurious to get access to their recipe library?
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