EHow

Last updated

eHow
EHow logo.svg
Screenshot
EHow Homepage.jpg
Type of site
 Content farm
Available in English
Owner Leaf Group
URLeHow.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationYes
LaunchedMarch 1999;25 years ago (1999-03)
Current statusActive

eHow is an online how-to guide with many articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions. eHow articles and videos are created by freelancers [1] and cover a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories. Any eHow user can leave comments or responses, but only contracted writers can contribute changes to articles. The writers work on a freelance basis, being paid by article. eHow is frequently called a content farm. [2] [3] [4]

Contents

History

Old logo, used until 2011 EHow logo.png
Old logo, used until 2011
Logo used 2011-2016 Ehow logo 2011.png
Logo used 2011-2016
Previous logo EHow Logo.png
Previous logo

eHow was founded by Courtney Rosen in 1999. On 8 February 2001 it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. At that time it had $1.16 million in assets and $7.2 million in debts and had used up $23.5 million in venture capital funding in a year and a half that came from companies including Hummer Winblad Venture Partners ($1.3 million) and Dominion Ventures ($982,035). eHow's major debts included $598,460 owed to Vignette Corp., $140,024 to Engage Media in San Francisco and $237,492 to LifeMinders. The Silicon Valley Bank seized $180,548 that was in EHow's accounts to pay off outstanding loans. eHow was acquired by Demand Media in 2006. Originally it was a source of written articles and step-by-step instructions. At the time of its acquisition it had 17,000 articles and 5.8 million visitors a month. A year after purchasing the website Demand Media introduced the video format. In 2008 the site won a Mashable Blogger's Choice award in the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards. [5] [6]

In 2009 the website introduced a mobile version for cell phone users and also was a CNET Webware 100 Winner in the category of Search & Reference. That same year Demand Media merged their acquisition of Expert Village into eHow and opened a branch operation in the United Kingdom. The moves gave eHow over one million articles and videos available on-line in 2009 and doubled that number by the following year. In 2010 they received a New Media Award. [5]

It was in 2009 that eHow was noted as having changed its method of identifying content to contract for creation. The company moved from human-identified lists of potential content to the use of a computer-based algorithm, a move that increased revenue by a factor of 4.9 times per article or video created. Getting rid of the human editors who formerly identified and approved content to be produced increased profits for the company by a factor of 20–25 times. The automated program combines search data, internet traffic patterns and the rates of keyword use and uses this information to determine what internet users want to know and also calculates how much money advertisers will pay to appear on the same page content created. Another algorithm, called the Knowledge Engine, then works out what exactly internet users want to know about the subjects identified and details exactly how to approach profitable subjects and what its potential subject longevity is. The machine-created subjects are then proofread by freelance proofreaders for 8 cents each, to ensure that they are clear enough for bidding on by freelance article and video producers. Content producers are then paid about US$15 per article or US$20 per video to produce the product. This change resulted in the Demand Media making an estimated US$200 million in revenue in 2009, including from Google's advertising income. [1]

In 2011 the site released an iPad application, providing a direct shortcut to the website. That same year the site received a reorganization and overhaul of its look, consolidating its now three million articles and videos into six categories: Home, Health, Food, Style, Money and Family. In 2011 the site was adding more than 5,000 articles and videos a day while employing 13,000 freelance writers, editors and producers. In 2012 a seventh category was added, entitled Mom, focusing on parenting and family issues. [4] [5]

Criticisms

Demand Media and eHow in particular have been criticized for large amounts of low-quality content and for operating as a content farm, paying contributors low rates for content intended to rank high in search results, rather than focus on quality information, [2] [3] [4] with poor quality articles intended mainly to drive up search results rather than inform.

In 2010 and 2011 Google implemented changes to their algorithms intending to reduce the ranking and impact of content farms. These changes led to a 40% drop in traffic to Demand Media sites. [2] [7] [8] [9] Demand Media responded to the algorithm changes, saying their business model remained solid. [10]

Jack Herrick, former owner of eHow, started up wikiHow after concluding that the wiki method of content creation would ultimately produce higher quality work. He described the difference between eHow and wikiHow as "eating a McDonald's burger vs. a wonderful, home cooked meal" [11]

Search engine DuckDuckGo's CEO Gabriel Weinberg has criticized eHow, along with other Demand Media websites, labeling the company a "content mill," because of the website's search engine driven content, low article quality and low writer salaries. DuckDuckGo filters out eHow content because of Weinberg's perception that Demand Media produces low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google Searches for the purposes of promoting advertising. [12]

Another search engine, Blekko also regarded eHow as spam, blacklisted the site and filtered eHow results out. [13]

Wired magazine has also criticized eHow and Demand Media, calling their content: "slapdash" and a "factory stamping out moneymaking content". [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Search</span> Search engine from Google

Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the Internet by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that visitors can edit

A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

A backlink is a link from some other website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, or web directory.

wikiHow Wiki-based how-to website

wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles and quizzes on a variety of topics. Founded in 2005 by Internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, its aim is to create an extensive database of instructional content, using the wiki model of open collaboration to allow users to add, create, and modify content. It is a hybrid organization, a for-profit company run for a social mission. wikiHow uses a forked version of the free and open-source MediaWiki software; these modifications made by wikiHow were freely available to the general public via a self-serve download site from 2010 to late 2020, when wikiHow chose to discontinue the self-serve portal, citing vague "DoS attacks", as well as noting that publishing the source code is "not part of our core mission". The site's text content is released under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Bing</span> Web search engine developed by Microsoft

Microsoft Bing, commonly referred to as Bing, is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.

A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of wikis</span> History of wiki collaborative platforms

The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website. Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leaf Group</span> American online brand company

Leaf Group, formerly Demand Media Inc., is an American content company that operates online brands, including eHow, livestrong.com, and marketplace brands Saatchi Art and Society6. The company provides social media platforms for large company websites and distributes content with social media tools to web outlets. It is commonly known for being a content farm. Demand Media was created in 2006 by a former private equity investor, Shawn Colo, and the former chairman of MySpace, Richard Rosenblatt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Examiner.com</span> Former news website

Examiner.com was an American news website based in Denver, Colorado, that operated using a network of "pro-am contributors"' for content. It had various local editions with contributors posting city-based items tailored to 238 markets throughout the United States and parts of Canada in two putative national editions, one for each country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DuckDuckGo</span> American software company and Web search engine

DuckDuckGo is an American software company that offers a number of products intended to help people protect their online privacy. The flagship product is a search engine that has been praised by privacy advocates. Subsequent products include extensions for all major web browsers and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser.

A content farm or content mill is a company that employs large numbers of freelance writers or uses automated tools to generate a large amount of textual web content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by search engines, known as SEO. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views, as first exposed in the context of social spam.

blekko Web search engine

Blekko, trademarked as blekko (lowercase), was a company that provided a web search engine with the stated goal of providing better search results than those offered by Google Search, with results gathered from a set of 3 billion trusted webpages and excluding such sites as content farms. The company's site, launched to the public on November 1, 2010, used slashtags to provide results for common searches. Blekko also offered a downloadable search bar. It was acquired by IBM in March 2015, and the service was discontinued.

Google's Google Panda is a major change to the company's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", in particular "content farms", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

Google Search, offered by Google, is the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web as of 2023, with over eight billion searches a day. This page covers key events in the history of Google's search service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timeline of web search engines</span>

This page provides a full timeline of web search engines, starting from the WHOis in 1982, the Archie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to the history of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.

KidzSearch.com is an American visual child-safe search engine and web portal powered by Google Programmable Search Engine with academic autocomplete that emphasizes safety for children. It uses Google's SafeSearch technology with additional search term filtering for added safety. Search results are customized by pushing age-appropriate content higher up in their search results. Large thumbnails are provided to make results more visual and easier to understand for children. It has many features, including an online encyclopedia with 200,000 articles powered by MediaWiki.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Roth, Daniel (October 2009). "The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model". Wired. Retrieved 27 July 2010.
  2. 1 2 3 Bercovici, Jeff. "Google Traffic to Demand Media Sites Down 40 Percent". Forbes. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  3. 1 2 "Rise of the Content Mills". Loyola University Center for Digital Ethics and Policy. Archived from the original on 11 February 2012. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  4. 1 2 3 "Demand Media's Planet of the Algorithms". Business Week. Archived from the original on 28 January 2011. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  5. 1 2 3 Demand Media (2012), About Us at www.ehow.com/about-us.html, Retrieved 28 November 2012
  6. ↑ "Mystery of EHow Solved — It's Kaput / Site filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Feb. 8". sfgate.com. 17 February 2001. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  7. ↑ "Google tweaks algorithm to push down low quality sites". New York Times. 25 February 2011. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  8. ↑ "Seeking to Weed Out Drivel, Google Adjusts Search Engine". New York Times. 25 February 2011. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  9. ↑ "googleblog "Finding More High Quality Sites in Search"" . Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  10. ↑ "A Statement About Search Engine Algorithm Changes". demandmedia.com. Archived from the original on 28 February 2012. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  11. ↑ "ReadWriteWeb: wikiHow vs. eHow: Is the Wiki Way Better Than Content Farms". Archived from the original on 13 February 2010. Retrieved 12 February 2010.
  12. ↑ Mims, Christopher (July 2010). "The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills'". Archived from the original on 16 October 2019. Retrieved 26 July 2010.
  13. ↑ "Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media's eHow From Its Search Results".
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