TVFoodMaps

Find the restaurants seen on TV.

TVFoodMaps was actually an offshoot of a more complex app that tried to provide personalized restaurant suggestions. A gimmick to draw some attention we realized that our list of restaurants featured on popular food TV shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives was really a hit, so we doubled down and created TVFoodMaps. This was way back in 2011 and the site has been going strong ever since.

Features

• Over 5000 Restaurants featured on TV from over 50 shows.
• Search by location or name
• Filter by shows, costs and other attributes
• Search via maps
• Track restaurants you want to go to and have tried

Some Stats

• Over 140,000,000 page views since its start.
• $500,000 in revenue generated (mostly Ads and app sales)

Tech Stack

• Running on AWS/ECS
• SpringBoot based Java services
• ElasticSearch for Search
• OpenAI for data cleanup
• MongoDB

Monetization

• Ad based monetization via Ezoic (previously Adsense)