Gav's Kitchen

Gavin, Founder

West Ireland

Photograph of Gav in his kitchen with arms crossed.

Photograph of Gav taking photos of his recipes and creations with a professional camera and lighting setup.

2023

Gav’s Kitchen rustles up the right recipes with ad revenue

Gav’s Kitchen is a food blog providing easy international recipes the entire family can enjoy.

Photo of one of Gav's recipes for a mushroom dish in a red bowl.

Creating a resource for quick and easy family recipes

Cooking was always a hobby for Gav, but it wasn’t until his wife, who also blogs, bought him the URL RecipesForMen.com, that he started documenting and sharing his recipes online.

The idea was to create a digital resource for men who liked to cook to get easy and quick recipes to feed their families. From slow cooked lamb shanks in gravy to Brazilian hotdogs, Gav knew many of them by heart, having cooked for his three children while they were growing up.

“It was basically to persuade people to stop buying takeaways and get into the kitchen and just cook a meal for your family,” he says. “It doesn’t need to be difficult.”

Cooking up a publishing business

Gav spent two years writing, photographing and understanding the SEO process during the pandemic, building up the site to more than 300 recipes. During this period Gav’s Kitchen was born.

He soon learned about Google Certified Publishing Partner Mediavine and set about monetizing his recipe site.

“They’ve been incredible,” he says of Mediavine. “Very good technical support because the tech behind putting a site together is not that straightforward.”

In December, Gav had around 167,000 visitors to his site and says ads are the biggest revenue source from the various sites he and his wife run, which include Family Off Duty, Powerhouse Planners, and others.

While most of his audience are women (about 63 percent), his male audience is steadily growing. “I’m getting more men on my site slowly but surely, that’s a positive for me,” Gav says. “We need to get men into the kitchen more.”

Photo of one of Gav's recipes of shrimp and avocado on crustini bread.

Professional ad partners bring value to the table

Gav appreciates having ads managed by professional partners like Mediavine who work closely with Google to foresee future regulatory changes, he says. He also continues to see the value ads provide. Just before Christmas, he updated about 50 percent of his posts, which led to a 42 percent increase in sessions and grew revenue.

“An ads-based model is important as it provides a healthy part of our diversified income model, the rest coming from affiliate and product sales,” he explains. “The ad income is also pretty much passive income, whereas product sales, may require some customer interaction.”

“An ads-based model is important as it provides a healthy part of our diversified income model.”

Cooking his way to flexibility with family

Gav, who is a retired engineer, would be traveling three weeks a month and was rarely home. After living in the UK and Holland, he moved with his family to Ireland to run a bed and breakfast, which gave him the time needed to experiment with his love for cooking. Now, ad revenue from Gav’s Kitchen has transformed his lifestyle.

“I had very long days, zero time, and didn’t see my family,” he says. “This gives us time to plan our life as we want to live it.”

The ad revenue from the site has enabled Gav and his family not only the freedom to spend more time with each other, but to travel - from Switzerland to Portugal, to Holland and Brazil, with more trips planned in the near future.

In addition to developing more recipes for Gav’s Kitchen, he’s working on other sites, including one dedicated to travel in Ireland. “We like to travel, and the travel to foreign shores gives us inspiration for dishes to cook at home,” he says. “We have just been to Porto for 10 days and you can expect some Portuguese inspired recipes on my site soon.”

About the Publisher

Gav is a father of three, husband, retired engineer, accomplished traveler and home cook. He has dual British and Dutch citizenship and lives on the West Coast of Ireland. He studied in the UK, NL and the US. He is the author of Gav’s Kitchen, a food blog aimed at providing easy international family recipes.