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January 04, 2012

Pinterest Set to Expand into the Recipe Sharing Market By Acquiring Punchfork

By Carlos Olivera, TMCnet Content Producer

Pinterest, a social networking site, has agreed to acquire Punchfork. Punchfork, a cooking social network which displays a similar set-up and look as Pinterest, was founded in May 2010 but didn’t officially launch until January 2011.

Punchfork also acts a lot like Pinterest in the sense that it gives its users new, exciting and creative ideas. Rather than having general posts, Punchfork focuses its thought on fun cooking recipes for individuals and families.



The innovative site uses conversations on other social media sites to provide its customers with quality recipes. It also combines recipes from other social networking sites like Simply Recipes, The Pioneer Woman, Leite’s Culinaria, Bon Appetit, 101 Cookbooks and Picky Palate, and brings it to its users.

Although the company is relatively new, Punchfork has built itself a decent audience. Its Facebook (News - Alert) currently has over 81,000 likes, and according to Compete.com, it averages around 100,000 unique visitors each month. Pinterest hopes to grow the cooking and recipes ideas onto its 27 million unique visitors each month.

“We believe that a unified destination benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork team will focus on contributing to Pinterest as the premier platform for discovering and sharing new recipes and other interests on the Web,” said Jim Miller, CEO of Punchfork.

Punchfork uses the social data it collects like tweets and records which recipes garner the most attention. It uses a rating system where users can score the recipe anywhere from 0-100. Punchfork then takes its most popular recipes and puts them into a visually appealing layout. Users are even provided with real-time posts from different food blogs and recipe sites.

For the time being, Punchfork will continue to work as its own entity and provide support but eventually it will be retiring its website, mobile apps and API in hopes of successfully integrating its audience with that of Pinterest.




Edited by Jamie Epstein
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