This is a story about how a bunch of recipe bloggers hate me now. Well, maybe hate is too strong of a word. More like, they are displeased by my use of a recipe app that I find amazing.

After wasting way too much time trying to find a recipe post where I could actually find the recipe, I was super excited to find an app that cuts out the clutter and just displays the relevant info.

So excited that I posted about it on Facebook. I wasn’t expecting to get bashed by a bunch of angry recipe bloggers as a result.

Just Give Me the Recipe

A while back I wrote a post about why recipe blog posts are so long. The two main reasons are that longer posts rank better because there are more keywords, and longer posts make you scroll and display more ads.

The second reason is what has the recipe bloggers so angry about the app I shared. They insisted that I was doing other bloggers wrong by sharing that app, because it cuts down on the time people spend hunting through their page trying to find the recipe, which cuts down on ads displayed, which takes away their income.

They were literally all caps shouting at me that this was their fulltime job, shame on me for sharing and I was taking away their paycheck. I was removed from a blogging group where many of them were from, as they all ganged up to post their anger over this great time-saving app.

They were not happy when I pointed out that they did this to themselves, and there wouldn’t be a need for such an app if they’d just plainly display the recipe, and then go on with their elaborate stories farther down the page.

For example, I have a Strawberry Yogurt Mini Muffin recipe. If you check it out, you can easily find the ingredients and instructions. That’s how I want to see recipe posts done.

Their honest response was that they believed their audience really enjoyed their stories. And yes, maybe THEIR audience does. But the majority of people Googling how to make dinner that night don’t want a story, they just want a darn recipe.

My Time is Valuable

I don’t have hours to spend searching for a recipe when I need one, and I was wasting way too much time scanning blogs, closing out pop-ups and trying in vain just to find the instructions. So, when I found this app, it saved me tons of time by finding the recipe instructions for me.

You just put the url into the app, and it displays the recipe and ingredients in a clean and easy to read manner, and you can even print it out.

The angry recipe bloggers cried foul over lost ad revenue, however, I pointed out that I still had to go to their website and scan through it to see if I wanted the recipe. The ads still loaded, and thus they still got their ad views.

Maybe not as many as if I’d had to stay on the page and searched for 10 minutes, but I was at the point where if I couldn’t find the recipe in the first few minutes, I wouldn’t stick around anyway.

I was so fed up with recipe sites that I wasn’t even bothering with them anymore, and using this app has made me way more likely to even look at a recipe blog post now. So, it’s actually bringing me to their site when I wouldn’t have given it a chance before!

And when you save a recipe, it has the url on it with the domain so I know where I can go back to if I want more good recipes. The app took something frustrating and made it much easier to use.

So, I still stand by my argument that it’s a useful app and it’s not going to ruin any recipe blogger’s livelihood. I have a few recipes on this blog, and I’m not offended if someone wants to just save the recipe part.

The app I’ve been talking about is called Just the Recipe. You can click here read about it on my other blog, where I posted about it, and nobody complained. I found out there are actually other apps that do this as well, but that is the one I’ve been using.