Blogging Website Cucumbertown Gets Chopped

Cucumbertown has shut shop, and this abrupt news has hit thousands of foodbloggers, from India and across the world, hard. Sources say that the parent company has pulled the plug on the popular service.

For those of you in the dark, Cucumbertown, co-founded by ex-Zynga employee Cherian Thomas in 2012, is a food blogging platform that allows users to post and browse recipes in its web based platform. It makes it easy to write recipes in a more structured way, a style opposed to the normal way to publishing recipes through blogging platforms like WordPress or tumblr in blob formats. It also allows users to write a variation on an existing recipe’s page. The website is now a library of mouth-watering recipes written by foodies from different parts of the world.

It’s hard to digest the fact that they’ve shut down, considering just a few years, Cucumbertown, a direct translation of the Malayalam phrase ‘vellarikka pattanam’ (which signifies a fabled utopia where anything is possible), managed to draw thousands of food bloggers away from established platforms like Blogger and WordPress. It first became popular among a few influential food bloggers from India, and its userbase widened as newbie bloggers followed in their footsteps.

THE FEATURES THAT SET CUCUMBERTOWN APART

There were a plethora of features Cucumbertown offered that attracted users. Firstly, it was a dedicated food blogging platform with several nifty customisations that made blogging and sharing recipes and images much easier. Secondly, the company was taking care of the migration of the blog from whichever platform the blogger was on, and offering unmatched technical support that platforms like WordPress and Blogger can’t even begin to offer because of their sheer numbers. It even advised users on copyright issues and in framing standard privacy disclaimers.

Cucumbertown’s designs were fresh and innovative, it had several well-designed templates to choose from, and also gave gave bloggers search engine optimization (SEO) and monetization support. “Basically, it told us you take care of the blogging and we’ll do everything else,” says Nandita Iyer who runs the popular and successful food blog Saffron Trail. 

And all of this, including the site-hosting costs, came without a hefty price tag. The company did not charge a flat rate, and instead worked out an ad revenue sharing arrangement. As several successful bloggers point out, ad revenues are minuscule, so it seemed like a very good deal indeed. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a little too good to last long.

WHY DID CUCUMBERTOWN SHUT DOWN SO ABRUPTLY?

Speculation is that it probably started with the company’s acquisition by a big Japanese recipe and food network, Cookpad, in mid-2015. Before that, Cherian had raised an angel round from investors such as Paul Singh of 500 Startups, and then an institutional round of funding from Ludlow Ventures. After the acquisition, Cucumbertown became an independent subsidiary of Cookpad, with offices in Bengaluru and San Francisco. It was consistently named among ‘top startups to look out for’ lists by various publications.

Bloggers are bewildered by the sudden decision to shut down the service altogether. In an email written to users on October 18 (and subsequently shared on a Medium post), the brand said: “We have a difficult announcement to make. It’s with heavy hearts that we let you know Cucumbertown as a platform will be discontinuing its services and will be fully retired by March 31, 2017. We worked hard to make food blogging a livelihood through our platform but the stakeholders could no longer see a sustainable business around it.”

It went on to say that backend and tech support would be provided to users till March 2017, helping them migrate their blogs to other services, while monetization support would end on December 31, 2016.

PROBLEMS FACED BY BLOGGERS NOW

Now, bloggers are trying to figure out ways to migrate their popular sites without losing out on revenues and users. This poses a challenge as it involves identifying a new design platform, buying a hosting plan if the blog is self-hosted and figuring out SEO, ad revenues, and other monetization efforts.
The lesson here for bloggers is, perhaps, to not hand over the controls to new platforms — no matter how efficient and helpful they seem, or how well they feed your dreams about anything being possible.