Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published by Darnell Clayton in 2010, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In November 2010, Automattic did something quietly interesting. The company behind WordPress has launched FoodPress — A curated portal featuring the best food content from WordPress.com bloggers in partnership with Federated Media publishing company. It wasn’t an algorithm. This was human editor Jane Maynard, hand-picking recipes, food stories and food experiences from the WordPress.com ecosystem.
At the time, it felt like a signal. A major platform claimed that discovery – not just hosting – was the next battleground for creators’ attention. But there was a catch: independent bloggers running WordPress.org on their own servers, independent WordPress users, were completely excluded. The portal was a walled garden open only to those within Automattic’s own ecosystem.
The question of whether Automattic will open up the site to self-hosted WordPress users has been more than curious. This signaled a tension that would shape the next decade and a half of digital publishing.
What FoodPress was actually trying to solve
In 2010, food blogging was exploding. Recipe content was among the most sought-after topics on the web, and blogs like Smitten Kitchen, 101 Cookbooks, and Pinch of Yum were building real audiences. WordPress.com has hosted thousands of them. The problem was not the content – it was possible to find.
FoodPress is Automattic’s answer to that: a destination site that showcases the best of what its platform produces. Instead of relying on Google to send traffic to individual blogs, the portal created a central hub where readers could browse, discover and click on original posts.
The model made sense on paper. Federated Media, a respected digital advertising company at the time, brought the monetization infrastructure and editorial credibility. Jane Maynard made the curatorial decision. And WordPress.com had a deep well of content to tap into.
What he didn’t consider was durability. Running an experienced portal requires consistent editorial investment. In the years that followed, FoodPress quietly faded away.
The era of human-driven content portals gave way to algorithmic publishing, social sharing, and eventually the dominance of Pinterest—which, ironically, became the primary discovery engine for food content that FoodPress strives to be.
The question it asks itself and what it reveals
The exclusion of WordPress.org users was no accident – it reflected a real strategic dilemma. Self-hosted bloggers represent the independent, decentralized spirit of WordPress. They control their own domain, their own data, their own monetization. Leaving them on the WordPress.com portal would reduce the platform’s own ecosystem incentives.
But that also meant missing out on some of the best food bloggers on the web. The most ambitious developers—those who pushed past the limitations of WordPress.com—were the ones who switched to self-built installations. By excluding them, FoodPress was curating from a fraction of the talent pool.
This is a pattern that continues today. Platform-native discovery tools consistently favor creators who remain within the platform’s walls. YouTube’s algorithm rewards YouTube uploads. Instagram’s Reels surface pushes the rest of the content on Instagram. The urge to keep creators in is structural, not accidental.
Here’s what it looks like from 2025
Since the launch of FoodPress, the creative economy has changed dramatically. The landscape of once independent blogs has shifted towards platforms – YouTube, Substack, TikTok, Instagram – that bundle hosting, distribution and monetization into a single product. The promise is comfort. Price is control.
The irony is that the question raised by FoodPress is how independent creators are discovered without succumbing to the platform’s constraints. – It is more relevant than in 2010. Research consistently finds organic search remains the main source of traffic for freelance bloggers, but SEO alone is increasingly not enough. AI generated content the results are overwhelming. Social referral traffic is down in most publishing categories.
The discovery problem that Automattic is trying to solve has not been solved. It has become more difficult.
Lessons worth taking forward
There’s something worth sitting on in the FoodPress story. Automattic identified a real gap – the gap between content creation and content discovery – and sought to fill it with editorial curation. Instinct was right. Execution was limited by walled garden logic.
Today, bloggers navigating the same discovery challenge have more tools than Maynard had in 2010: email newsletters that create direct reader connections, Discord or Circle communities that turn readers into participants, and social platforms that can still drive traffic when used intentionally. But none of these are frictionless and none are permanent.
The deeper lesson from FoodPress isn’t about the portal itself. It’s about what happens when a platform tries to solve a creator’s problem while simultaneously keeping the creator dependent on the platform. Incentives are always a little wrong.
Independent bloggers who have built sustainable audiences have generally taken discovery as their responsibility—not something the platform handles for them. This means investing in SEO, building email lists, and creating content that earns links and mentions over time. It’s slower. It is less interesting than a special slot in the selected portal. But it comes together in a way that native distribution of the platform rarely does.
FoodPress lasted for several years. Bloggers who treat their site as a center of gravity and not a portfolio for someone else’s portal are still publishing today.
A serene experience worth remembering
Most people in digital publishing have never heard of FoodPress. It was a small experiment by a company that at the time was still figuring out what platform it wanted to be. But small experiments often contain larger ideas in compressed form.
The idea that platforms should help creators get discovered – not just hosted – still holds true. The tension between open and closed ecosystems, independence and platform flexibility remains unresolved. The question of who controls their broadcast and under what conditions is still the most important question in digital publishing.
Food bloggers in 2010 were navigating less information and fewer options than creators today. The basics haven’t changed much though. Build something worth reading. Have a relationship with your readers. Be careful what garden you allow into.
