We're dreaming about building an invitation-only ad network made up of food bloggers, writers, and culinary professionals. We want to sell ads without tracking visitors, without compromising site performance, and without turning your templates into an eyesore.

We think this is a timely idea. The gradual phase-out of third-party cookies and ad tracking over the coming years by major players like Apple and Google will create a need for alternative, non-invasive ad solutions like the one we have in mind.

This sort of thing has been done before, but not — as far as we can tell — in the food space. Evidence shows that pairing the right audience with the right promotional content can have a powerful effect, and our ads will feature products and services your community wants to know about, and would be likely to use themselves.

Our first goal will be to provide compelling ads in a meaningful way. We'll only run ads for products and companies we think will resonate with your audience. Our ads will be designed to complement your content instead of distracting from it. They'll do it by following a strict format: one image with a sentence or two of supporting text.

Our second goal will be to offer a monetization option to sites who haven't yet garnered the traffic levels required by the traditional ad networks. It's our hope that building a network of high-quality content will help each member site do more with its traffic than they could on their own.

As we rotate through paid ads (and as we ramp things up), we plan to reserve some of the slots to highlight food-related organizations and events, and to promote the bloggers within our community of sites.

Thanks for taking this survey; anything you're willing to share will be incredibly helpful in determining what our next steps are!