Comment by hellisothers
4 days ago
Or a recipe at the end because SEO. Really long articles are a negative signal for me unless I know the author to be good.
4 days ago
Or a recipe at the end because SEO. Really long articles are a negative signal for me unless I know the author to be good.
OT, but my understanding is that recipe sites have long-winded blog posts in front of them because recipes alone are not copyrightable.
I've seen this argument before but I don't think I understand it.
Suppose I want to post a bunch of recipes. I could just post the recipes with absolutely no further commentary. In that case someone else could copy what I write wholesale and that might be depressing, or stop me getting famous, or reduce my income from advertising. So far, so good.
I could preface each recipe with a short relevant paragraph or two saying a bit about why I like the dish, where I got the recipe from, maybe some things I tried that didn't work out. In that case someone just scraping my site would be guilty of copyright violation, yay. Maybe I could force them to take it down. Or they could just copy the recipes, which doesn't seem like it would be super-difficult technically, and then I'd be in the same state as before.
Or I could preface each recipe with six pages of rambling about how much I love my dog and how sweet my now-deceased grandmother was. And that would get me ... so far as I can tell, exactly the same protection from plundering as a couple of relevant paragraphs would. (And would be exactly as vulnerable to a slightly smarter plagiarist stealing just the recipes.)
It's not clear to me that copying just the recipes is hard enough to make any of this worth while, but even if it is I don't see how you get any extra copy-protection from the long rambling anecdotes, compared with a small amount of actually relevant information.
So I think that the rambling-blog-post phenomenon has to have some other explanation. Maybe you can embed more ads in a longer post, or maybe recipe-bloggers just often tend to enjoy telling anecdotes, or maybe they think the anecdotes are what will actually draw readers in.