A very virtual Thanksgiving: Allrecipes has biggest traffic day ever

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Many traditional cookbooks apparently collected dust this Thanksgiving, as lots of people logged on to the web to find holiday recipes for the United States holiday.

Allrecipes.com said it had its biggest traffic day ever on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The website saw more than 6.8 million visits from people who viewed more than 32.5 million pages of content. According to Allrecipes, that represents a 32 percent increase from the day before Thanksgiving 2010. For larger reference, typically the site sees some 24 million unique visitors over the course of one month.

And more people are looking for food-based content while they’re away from the desktop. Visits to Allrecipes.com from a mobile device during the three weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were up 218 percent year-over-year, the company says.

Of course, this news could come in handy given Allrecipes’ current strategic situation. Last month, Allrecipes’ parent company Readers Digest announced plans to put the cooking site up for sale.

But regardless of the fact that Allrecipes is in play, there is definitely a larger trend at work here. For example, a new tablet-based cookbook produced by iPad textbook startup Inkling is selling like hotcakes: Earlier this month it became the third highest grossing iPad app worldwide. Meanwhile, new startups such as Foodily are solely aimed at making it super easy to find and share recipes with online contacts. With so many people looking to the web for recipes and cooking tips, there are certainly more food-focused technologies on the horizon.