frustration w/ online recipes

[Saviolo]

15. Sadly, it's how things have to be done.

As far as the paragraphs and paragraphs of anecdotes and explanation before the recipe goes, for some food bloggers and recipe sites, it's the only way they can keep the lights on. The longer you keep someone on a website, the more engagement you get with banner ads and that sort of thing, so you might get $.005 instead of $.003 for someone finding your recipe.

I agree with #2, which is why we always include the full recipe in the description of the videos we make. I like Food Wishes and Chef John, but it annoys me that for the full recipe, I have to go check out his blog (but again, see point #1).

In a cookbook, there's usually a big block of text at the beginning of, say, a chapter, and then after that, nothing but recipes. But for a cookbook, they've already got your money, they don't need to keep you engaged to serve you ads. The tech "disruptors" who built the modern web as is currently is, designed it so that the longer you keep eyes on your website, the more ads you can serve and the more (for instance) Google Adsense pennies you collect.

There are plugins that you can get that skip you right to the recipe, which further makes it impossible for content creators to make any money doing what they do, but will bypass all of that preamble that doesn't have anything to do with the recipe.