Letter from the Founder, Maxwell Ryan
Dear Readers,
This April we will be celebrating our fifteenth birthday. For me, personally, it will be a celebration of growing, doing better and better work over the years, and staying true to our mission. From 400,000 readers a month, we’ve grown to over 30 million, and each day we are still bringing you the best of the web and of the world to help you live better at home.
But this April will also be sweeter for correcting a few problems that have cropped up over the past two years — the biggest one being that our editors and I have grown too far apart from you, the readers. This year, it is time to reconnect and recommit ourselves to supporting the community of readers that have grown with us over the years as well working hard to produce our best writing, take our best photography and make our best videos for home and food on the web.
Being a digital publisher has been tough over the past few years! Social media exploded our audiences, kitten videos took over the web, we were attacked by bots and then Facebook and Google began to move levers that cut off many readers. Through it all, we’ve been scrambling to do our best work, while learning how to get it to you.
The web has been very much the Wild West.
While you will notice many changes this year, please look to big improvements in our comments, regular monthly letters from our editors (starting today), and the reintroduction of some of our old, classic post formats as a signal that we’ve not only been reading your comments and listening to you, but we’re also eager to take things even further.
At the end of the day and at our very core, we are a service organization.
We connect people with problems to people with solutions. We inspire, teach and connect, and a big part of how we do this is by staying close to our community, pulling ideas out of you, featuring your homes, and making sure that we are telling the story of a new generation building their homes, raising their kids and living the very best life they can live. I, and editors, Faith and Laura, welcome your comments this month and every month. Stay close.
Best, Maxwell Ryan
CEO and Founder
P.S. Read Faith’s February letter from the editor to hear more of what is new and happening at Kitchn in February.