Quick Overview
Founded in 2005, Rouxbe provides classic culinary school training through online videos. Not just another recipe or cooking tips site, the team of trained chefs and film industry veterans creates high-quality videos, quizzes, and instructor feedback to teach subscribers the fundamentals of cooking. CEO Paul Bloom tells Insider how they create those videos, and how limiting free content on the site has opened up new content partnership deals with third-party sites — their best-converting tactic for subscriber acquisition that has helped triple subscription revenue in the past year.
Target Market
Consumers who want to improve their cooking skills. Subscribers tend to come from large metropolitan areas in the US and Canada, and are split about evenly between men and women. Most subscribers are either younger adults (newlyweds, first-time homebuyers) or older Boomers or retirees.
“If you’ve got young kids you might not have the time to engage in this kind of learning,” says Bloom.
K-12 schools and other culinary schools seeking training for their kitchen staff represent a secondary market.
Content Model
The site provides an online, video version of the classic culinary training program: Teach people fundamental cooking skills and techniques (e.g., pan frying, how to make roux), then show them how to apply those skills in a range of different recipes.
There are more than 1,000 videos on the site organized into 65 specific, multi-video training courses. In addition, each video course features lesson goals, quizzes, related recipes, and post-lesson online discussion with a Rouxbe chef and other members.
Company founders Dawn Thomas and Joe Girard lead the content development team: Both are professional chefs who previously founded a catering company to serve the TV and film production industry in Vancouver. They collaborate with The Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver to plan and develop all cooking courses, typically adding a new lesson series once a month.
They create videos with a combination of in-house and contract film production professionals, sourced from their connections in the Vancouver film industry.
Cooking courses run from 10-20 minutes, but are broken into separate videos of 30 seconds to 2 minutes each. The entire process is filmed from above, with a focus on the training chef’s hands, counter, stove and pans. They record the audio track separately, after filming, so the videos can be localized for other languages and edited more easily for shorter formats.
Most of those videos are available only to subscribers. But the team allows visitors to view a 30-second overview video for each lesson and recipe. They also produce free videos to share with other sites and bloggers (more on that tactic, below).
Revenue Streams
Individual subscriptions provide the majority of site revenue. Membership packages are priced at $15 a month or $99 a year.
Visitors who come directly to the site are offered a 7-day free trial (with credit card). Visitors who come from a partner site are offered a 14-day free trial with a credit card. The team felt it was important to provide partners something more than the site offered directly.
Looking at prices for in-person cooking classes helped the team establish their subscription rates. Typical cooking classes cost between $75 and $150, says Bloom, so the team wanted to provide an option in the middle of that range — choosing $99 to avoid the $100 price-point.
Besides subscriptions, the site has two much smaller revenue streams:
– Ecommerce
The site hosts a cooking supplies store page that lets members buy some of the products featured in the videos. That store is powered by the online cooking supply retailer MetroKitchen.com, which processes and fulfills the orders, giving Rouxbe a percentage of the transaction.
– Online advertising from video hosting partnerships
Although the site itself does not accept advertising, free videos they create and share with other sites provide a small advertising revenue stream. For example, the team provides free cooking lesson videos to AllRecipes.tv, which in turn sells pre-roll advertising against the content. Rouxbe and AllRecipies.tv share those proceeds.
Marketing Tactics
Sharing video content with relevant sites
The team provides shorter versions of cooking lesson videos to share with third-party cooking lesson, recipe, and kitchen ecommerce sites. The final frame of these videos includes a link back to the site and an offer to take a free trial, which Bloom says is the “best converting tactic of anything we’ve done.”
“Once we can get someone to watch a video, the quality of our content is so high from a production standpoint and from an educational standpoint that they tend to get hooked.”
Sharing content also generates links with a big SEO benefit. The site is the number one Google result for phrases such as “online cooking school” and “video cooking lessons.”
Limiting the amount of free content on the site
The site previously provided about 250 free recipe and cooking tips videos to visitors. But the free content wasn’t substantially different from the premium offering, and the team felt that offering such a large quantity of it was distracting visitors from the subscription offer.
Instead, they placed nearly all cooking videos behind the paywall and created new site tour videos and 30-60 second previews for each cooking lessons. That way, visitors can see what they would get with their subscription — without getting enough free content to leave without paying.
The site’s growth rate and conversion rate has held steady since making the change. But as an added bonus, limiting the amount of free content has attracted more attention from educational and institutional clients interested in group memberships.
“B2B customers are willing and able to pay for quality content and learning systems,” says Bloom. “When they see that you’re giving a bunch of that content away to consumers, it makes it much harder to say why they should pay.”
Email welcome series for trial members
Members in the free trial receive an email welcome series focused on demonstrating the value of their subscription. The series begins with functional messaging, explaining how to use the site and its video lessons. The messages then showcase the depth of the content, highlighting specific lessons or seasonal content. Only toward the end of the trial period do the messages become more overtly promotional — reminding users that their trial is ending and encouraging them to upgrade their membership.
Technology and Vendors Used
Amazon Web Services: The site’s cloud hosting environment
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Authorize.net: Payment gateway
http://www.authorize.net
ExactTarget: Email service provider
http://www.exacttarget.com
Google Analytics: Web analytics platform
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Limelight Networks: Content delivery network
http://www.limelightnetworks.com
About Paul Bloom
Bloom came to Rouxbe with a background in both consumer subscription sites and online learning technology. He previously worked at Apex Learning, one of the first online learning sites for K-12 education, and headed new product development and marketing at Classmates.com.
He believes the subscription business model offers two significant advantages: It allows a company to focus all its attention on its members, rather than trying to balance the interests of members and advertisers. And it also provides a more direct, immediate feedback mechanism. “If subscribers like what we’re doing, they’ll pay and continue paying. And if they don’t like what we’re doing, they’ll stop paying.”
Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis
Rouxbe smartly differentiates itself from related free resources on the Web. The team’s high-quality, step-by-step video lessons, quizzes and instructor feedback make it clear to prospects that it’s not another recipe site or place for quick video tips. Now, that educational focus is attracting content partnerships with many of those recipe sites — a much better place to provide free, lead-generation content than on their own site. And running an email welcome series for trial subscribers is something every site should do.
Although we like the site’s standard “Join the Cooking School” call-to-action on the homepage and premium content barrier pages, we think they should test new treatments for the subscription offer page. The current practice of providing links to site tours and testimonials on that page draws clicks away from the membership form. Better integrating those elements directly onto the offer page itself can answer questions without sending prospects away from the form. We’d also recommend testing other displays for the two membership offers — e.g., a vertical rather than a horizontal list, with the preferred annual membership on top and pre-selected.
