Glam Media Cooks Up Newest Content Vertical With Foodie.com

Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is debuting its newest branded vertical—Foodie.com. As its name indicates, Glam’s newest vertical is aimed at covering all things food, and features a combination of content from food critics, bloggers, chefs, restaurateurs and other “food influentials.”

For background, Glam’s various publishing verticals have a reach of 200 million unique monthly visitors globally, and is particularly popular amongst female audiences. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness. Glam also announced the acquisition of Ning in September.

As Glam CEO Samir Arora explains, there’s a large opportunity in providing quality content on recipes, restaurant reviews and tends in one place. And food has been one of the fastest growing ad verticals on Glam’s network of sites (Betty Crocker is an advertiser on Foodie.com).

Foodie features content from 100 food authors such as Inspired Taste, Kitchen Confidante and The Bakery Spot and includes more than 1,000 recipes at launch. Foodie also offers a recipe finder app that allows consumers to find and follow top food editors and chefs, and includes vertical recipe search, along with social integrations with Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, Foodie aims to be a social network for food-lovers to post recipes, photos, review other recipes and more.

As a part of the launch, Foodie is also creating a panel of culinary experts, including acclaimed food critics and celebrity chefs to help drive an authoritative perspective on recipes, restaurants, ingredients and cooking techniques. Among the culinary experts who will be a part of the Foodie community include newest Iron Chef winner, top chef Geoffrey Zakarian and the former New York Times and International Herald Tribune food critic and leading food author, Patricia Wells.

Food seems like a logical next play for Glam considering its focus on lifestyle media and content. There are a plethora of food-focused recipe verticals, such as AllRecipes, Food52, Gojee and many others. Glam hopes to differentiate itself by becoming a one-stop-shop for recipes, reviews, quality content and more. Foodie actually resembles more of an online food magazine, but with more social and interactive features.