It seems that even in this downturn, there is still room for tech IPOs, at least in Japan. Cookpad [JP], the nation’s biggest site for sharing recipes, today announced it will be listed in the “Mothers” section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 17.
Cookpad was launched as early as 1997 by the Tokyo-based company of the same name. The Japanese-only site now offers nearly 560,000 different recipes (submitted by users) and saw a whopping 351 million page views last month, generated by 6.8 million unique visitors. By way of comparison, one of America’s leading recipe sites, Allrecipes.com, claims it has almost double that number, but Google Trends shows there isn’t too much of difference.
Targeting mostly Japanese women in their 20s and 30s, Cookpad makes a decent amount of money. The site expects $18.5 million in revenues and $3.6 million net profit for the current fiscal year (that ends April 2010). Basic membership is free, but users can opt-in for a premium version ($3 monthly) to get access to more functions. Additional money comes in via display ads.
More information (in English) about the site can be found here.
The “Mothers” section for high-growth startup companies is the same in which Japanese site GREE, a mobile-only social gaming service that went IPO in December last year, achieved a market cap of $1.3 billion on its first day. GREE and Cookpad going IPO is good news for the Japanese web industry, which targets the third biggest Internet population in the world.
The amazing part is that ‘only’ 6.8 million unique visitors per month generate 351 million page views in the same period. Wow. Wonder how much time each users spends on the site on a daily basis.
Such a large number of page views are no surprise for this field of interest. Users might have browsed all other pages related to the ones they are interested in.
Another great website built in Rails
@Robin Wauters:
Here you go:
Unique visitors (estimated cookies): 5.1 M,
Unique visitors (users): 5 M,
Reach: 0.4%,
Page views: 230 M,
Total visits: 18 M,
Avg visits per visitor: 3.5,
Avg time on site: 11:00.
Source Google
These are impressive numbers, even for a recipe site of this size.
Yes, but can they take on Cooking With Dog?
http://www.yout.../cookingwithdog
My wife uses this site all the time. That and Mixi…
My wife must account for at least 30 million of those monthly page views. Their site and recipes are fantastic.
Wow! Never thought cooking can take you that far !!
Same here. My wife learned to cook from cookpad, and we met on mixi. Perl got me married and Ruby keeps me fed
Nice one… Keep it up.