EHow

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The correct title of this article is eHow. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

eHow is a website for How To Guides. eHows are structured with a summary, Steps, Tips and Warnings.

[edit] History

eHow was founded in March 1999. The company raised close to $30 million from venture capitalists including Hummer Winblad, Media Technology Ventures, General Electric and Fingerhut. An editing team, led by Bill Marken (former Editor in Chief for Sunset Magazine) and Sharon Beaulaurier, hired 200 professional writers, and the company employed a 25 person engineering team. By 2001, eHow had created hundreds of thousands of accurate and helpful instructions. The professional writing, combined with a TV and radio advertising campaign, briefly made eHow one of the Internet's top ten news and information sites. Despite the popularity, eHow was not profitable and was forced to declare bankruptcy when funding ran out.

In 2001, a company named IdeaExchange.com bought eHow out of bankruptcy with the hope of charging eHow's large base of loyal readers money to access how-to instructions. eHow remained unprofitable and in early 2004, IdeaExchange sold eHow to Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah.

To keep costs low, Jack and Josh maintained eHow themselves with the assistance of just one part-time software engineer. They located content that had been lost during the bankruptcy and put it back on the site. In addition, they added improvements which made the site easier to use. In 2005 they started a wiki based companion site, wikiHow which allowed both anonymous and registered users to create new how-to articles. Between March 2004 and April 2006, eHow traffic increased from 250,000 visitors per month to over 4 million visitors per month.

In May 2006 eHow was acquired by Demand Media, Inc of Los Angeles, CA.^[1]. Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah retained control of wikiHow.

In the fall of 2006, eHow launched a new companion site; weHow.com, which allows registered users to create new how-to articles.