A new recipe site, Recipeasly, shut down within hours of launching. It turned out that other writers don't want their work mercilessly scraped and republished by a competitor.
Recipeasly said it wanted to "fix online recipes" by removing "ads and life stories" when users imported external links. But content creators criticised the platform for breaching copyright and accused it of "stealing" revenue. The website was removed after a deluge of complaints on social media.
"We're sorry," a message on the homepage reads.
A no-BS recipe website? Cool. Mechanically scraping everyone else's recipe websites to generate content for it? Not cool. The Recipeasly announcement's smiley positivity about what it was up to got everyone extra-mad.
That said, the recipe writers, though rightly annoyed, are stuck pretending that the rambling yarns aren't there for the obvious reason: ads.
Online recipes (and other things besides, from table saw reviews to anal lube roundups) come with thousand-word shaggy dog stories because that creates the long, scrolling, sticky pages which ads like to be on.
Writers saying otherwise are… well, they're either in on it or they ain't.
And the truth is that most readers do not really want those stories. They want the recipes. This Recipeasly was a wake-up call to the fact that the recipes web is ripe, and that the next Recipeasly will eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
ENGLISH PEAS
Ingredients
2 cans English peas
1/4 cup butter