The Reader’s Digest Association announced it has agreed to acquire Allrecipes.com, an online food and cooking Web site. The Digest will spend about $66 million for the Internet community site and expects the purchase to be completed by the end of the fiscal year on June 30, 2006.
The site will be the first major Internet purchase for Reader’s Digest and is expected to serve as a portal for its other food-oriented Web sites and magazines, such as Taste of Home and Every Day with Rachael Ray, a new magazine centered on the popular Food Network show host and cookbook author.
Seattle-based Allrecipes.com has a network of 1.8 million registered members and a database of 30,000 user-generated recipes. The site gets about 6 million viewers in an average month and as many as 9 million in the run-up to the holidays. It earns revenue from online ads and from licensing its tools.
“Our acquisition of Allrecipes.com will provide us with a valuable digital platform to further leverage our position as the country’s leading food and cooking publisher,” Reader’s Digest Association Eric Schrier said in a statement. “It will enable us to bring together online communities from the various RDA properties using the common platform of an industry-leading food and cooking affinity.”
