eHow

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eHow.com
URL	www.ehow.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Collaboration
Registration	Yes
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Demand Media, Inc.
Launched	March 1999
Current status	Active

eHow is an online knowledge resource with more than 140,000 articles and videos offering step-by-step instructions on "how to do just about everything". eHow content is created by both professional experts and amateur members and covers a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories.

Through a proprietary social networking platform and user-generated content tools, eHow maintains an online community of users who publish how-tos, images and video clips and receive a percentage of profits earned from traffic and advertising. eHow members can network and collaborate by building a personalized profile, creating friend lists, commenting on articles and interacting in an online forum.

[edit] History

eHow.com 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 thousands of articles. The professional writing, combined with a TV and radio advertising campaign, briefly made eHow one of the Internet's top 10 news and information sites.^{[citation needed]} Despite the popularity, eHow was not profitable and was forced to declare bankruptcy when funding ran out.

In 2001, IdeaExchange.com bought eHow out of bankruptcy with the hope of charging eHow's readers to access how-to instructions. eHow remained unprofitable and in early 2004, IdeaExchange sold eHow to Herrick and Hannah.

To keep costs low, Herrick and Hannah maintained eHow themselves with the assistance of one part-time software engineer. They restored content that had been lost during the bankruptcy and added improvements that 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 articles. Between March 2004 and April 2006, eHow traffic increased from 250,000 visitors per month to more than 4 million visitors per month.^{[citation needed]}

In May 2006, eHow was acquired by Demand Media^[1] while Herrick and Hannah retained control of wikiHow.

In September 2006, eHow launched weHow.com, which allowed registered users to create new how-to articles (eHow articles continued to be written exclusively by professionals). In March 2007, in concert with the introduction of social networking features such as messaging, friend lists and forums, weHow merged with eHow.

As of December 2007, eHow.com hosts more than 140,000 how-to articles and videos and has received more than 11 million unique visitors per month. By May 2008, the number of articles had increased to more than 337,000.^{[citation needed]}