Featured Company: eHow
Posted: 6/4/07
By Greg Boudewijn, eHow General Manager
eHow is a rich content website where professional experts and people with expertise can come together and share their knowledge to create and contribute to a growing library of “how-to” 
information. Every month, more than 7 million people visit eHow to learn how to do just about everything. eHow has more than 50,000 articles and is growing by the thousands each month thanks to its easy-to-use publishing tools, which enable professional experts and members to express their knowledge through text, images and video. Video is becoming an increasingly important medium for how-to information and eHow continues to focus on building its user tools and video library.
The eHow website is more than just a reference library where users can find comprehensive and useful how-to information. eHow fosters a conversation between readers and experts through a robust set of social network tools that launched in April 2007. Readers can share their thoughts and expertise through ratings, comments, person-to-person messaging and community forums. They can also build a network of friends around their interests. Putting a face behind each piece of content lets eHow add depth to the readership experience. Finding useful how-to information is important, but connecting readers to experts and creating a dialogue is invaluable.
Beginning in June 2007, eHow breaks precedent with the rollout of its Writer Compensation Program. For the first time in eHow’s history, people who contribute to eHow, both professionals and non-professionals, will be compensated for their written articles. Membership in the eHow community is free, after which users can instantly enhance their profiles and begin contributing content. Members joining the Writer Compensation Program will start earning money from their enrollment date on any new articles as well as their existing articles. Compensation is based on a per-article basis and an article’s earning potential can be based on a combination of several elements, including the amount of times it has been viewed and its category. The more useful the articles are to the reader, the more money members can make. eHow’s Writer Compensation Program will eventually include video, but for the time being eHow is concentrating its new feature on written how-to articles.
eHow was originally founded in March 1999 with close to $30 million in funding. At that time, the company employed 200 professional writers and had a team of 25 engineers. By 2001, eHow’s library contained thousands of accurate and helpful articles. The combination of professional writing and major advertising across radio and television briefly made eHow one of the Internet's top ten news and information sites.
Despite the increased brand awareness and popularity of the site, eHow was not profitable and was forced to declare bankruptcy. In 2001, IdeaExchange.com bought eHow out of bankruptcy with the hope of charging eHow’s readers to access its how-to articles. Unfortunately, eHow remained unprofitable and was sold in 2004 to Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah. Approximately five years after the company was launched as a 200-person operation, Herrick and Hannah and one other person maintained the eHow library of thousands of articles themselves.
Between March 2004 and April 2006 eHow traffic increased from 250,000 to over 4 million visitors per month, which attracted the attention of the founders of the yet-to-be-formed Demand Media, Inc. Demand Media was subsequently founded through the acquisition of eHow and a handful of other companies. eHow is one of Demand Media’s top media web sites and leverages the company’s core proprietary platform, which fuels user-driven publishing and community development while dynamically optimizing properties to maximize advertising revenue. eHow’s vision and focus is directly aligned with its parent company’s core strategy of empowering the user, creating distribution channels and compensating them for content.
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