As you might expect, Thanksgiving is a huge event for Allrecipes.com, the web’s leading community cooking portal. In the 24 hours before Turkey Day commenced, cooks visited its site 7.9 million times searching for sweet potato casserole recipes and watching instructional videos on how to brine large fowl. But what’s most interesting is how many of them were accessing them from mobile devices: 41 percent.
In fact, the week before Thanksgiving Allrecipes recorded 12 million sessions from a mobile browser or app, up 97 percent from the same week the previous year. Home cooks aren’t just using the internet as a valuable culinary tool, they’re using their smartphones and tablets to bring that tool directly into kitchen. They aren’t just searching for recipes either. They’re often looking for instructions on cooking techniques. That week 1.6 million visitors watched instructional videos on the Allrecipes sites, an increase of 200 percent over last year.
Allrecipes wasn’t the only online cooking resource to have a big Thanksgiving. Crowdsourced recipe portal Food52 saw inquiries to its Hotline mobile and web cooking questions app jump 147 percent the week of Thanksgiving as compared to its usual traffic levels. Its recipe page views increased 82 percent for the same period.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979
 |
 |