The network will focus on all things food-related, and was built in partnership with Burlington, Mass.-based Burst Network's food site, CDKitchen.com. The CDKitchen Cooking Network is made up of 30 food-focused Web sites drawing more than 4.3 million visitors and delivering more than 23.5 million page impressions monthly. In addition to CDKitchen.com, sites in the network include DianasKitchen.com, ActiveDiner.com, VegSource.com, Massrecipes.com, and RecipeCircus.com.

The CDKitchen Cooking Network gives brand advertisers a way to succinctly reach valuable audiences in a single online media buy that provides comprehensive campaign management and consolidated reporting, said Jarvis Coffin, CEO of Burst Media, a leading provider of advertising representation, services, and technology to independent Web publishers.

Furthermore, advertisers on the CDKitchen Cooking Network will have access to exclusive ad inventory as well as custom sponsorship opportunities and programs. Access to the CDKitchen Cooking Network is available only through Burst Network, Burst Media's brand advertising division. This exclusive offering provides the publishers in the CDKitchen Cooking Network with a sales team with deep advertiser relationships, Coffin said.

"Advertisers are trying to use the Internet to find the right people at the right time," Coffin said. "Here's a way to do that. It's a way of leverage the strengths of CDKitchen's relationship with its audience and help scale their business by building out a network."

Coffin said although the network already has enough critical mass to be competitive with other leading cooking and food Web sites, it will continue to grow. "We're going to make sure it's big enough to create the kind of reach that advertisers need, but not so big that it starts to undermine the quality and integrity of the content," he said.

Advertisers are looking for ways to move beyond the "likely suspect" portals in the placing of their ads, Coffin said. "What we are trying to do is meet them on their way with great content like CDKitchen," he said. "Ad networks have stood for so long for essentially direct response advertising. The formula here is to help advertisers see past all of that to the quality opportunity that's available to them in mid and long tail."

The CDKitchen site on its own has some impressive demographics: 66% are college-educated and 43% have incomes exceeding $50,000 per year. Almost 80% of the sites users are women, although interest from men is tracking upward, said Valerie Whitmore, founder and publisher of CDKitchen.com. Affiliating with a network and attracting higher-profile advertising will help elevate the status of the Web site even more, she said.

"Having advertising that's far more in line with what they're after is going to make them more interested in our site," Whitmore said of the network relationship. "It's just going to make it a better experience for them."

CDKitchen.com is one of the first and largest cooking/recipe Web ites in the world. Online since 1995, CDK offers tens of thousands of recipes in a user-friendly, attractive format--all of which are free for visitors.

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