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Is the long text purely for SEO or because a longer page gives more opportunities for ad impressions and higher engagement metrics?

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Recipes are not copyrightable so the only thing that sets each site apart is the surrounding story and nonsense described above - otherwise every recipe is flagged as duplicate content.

I think forcing a user to scroll past 20 ads is a huge part of it. Usually by the time I get halfway down the page I give up on the idea of cooking.

I sometimes wonder how much of the costs associated with running a website are to pay for all the bandwidth for ads, SEO experts, etc… when a simple site with HTML and a dash of CSS could likely host recipes very cheaply.

I also frequently wonder what the excess cost (monetary, environmental, etc.) is for the modern web’s habits. Optimized schema? Nah, just chuck everything into a huge JSON blob. Need one function that you could honestly write yourself? Import this huge package instead.

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