HowCast How-to Video Social Networking Site Launches
Niche video markets are getting more and more competitive, most notably one of the most popular video genres (attracting truly engaged viewers): how to videos. The new site is very professional and strategically thought over made by ex-Googlers and Tubers: it is Howcast, still in beta. Its unique selling points: good first impression due to the uncluttered design, you can jump from chapters to chapters, steps to steps, zoom in, get and edit transcripts, browse in the directory while watching videos, active users are awarded by points, etc.
Here’s a funny bit on How To Pretend You Are A Real New Yorker?
I assume that the featured categories are based on statistics (search volumes) plus on intuitive observation: food and drink, crafts, kids, sports and fitness, health and nutrition (very powerful area), parenting and family, personal care and style (lame name), house and garden, etc. So far Pets are on the view more page, but I guess stats will make the categories rotate over time. By the way, one of my favorite how-to sites is a fee paying site called lynda.com, which is a great software how-to collection for a very low price, so this is an area I would personally love to see growing (very scattered, dynamically changing and always on demand).
Read Erick Schonfeld’s post on the new howto site:
A New York City startup called is launching today that wants to be the YouTube of instructional videos. In fact, the three founders—Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman—are ex-Google employees who worked on Google Video and YouTube before they left eight months ago.
HowCast and Advertising
Howcast farms out the production to young film school students and graduates. They get $50 for each video plus a 50/50 rev-share from any advertising. The video ads are in the form of clickable overlays that pop up to take up the bottom part of the screen. “Pre-roll, non-skipable ads are bad, in our opinion,” says CEO Liebman …. Howcast is starting with a $20 CPM rate card. [like SuperBowl rates as someone pointed out]
HowCast competitors
Videojug, YouTube (Howto & Style), Expert Village, 5min, Instructables, eHow, Sclipo, WonderHowTo, MonkeySee, Video.About.com, Metacafe Howto, and many more niche and national specific howto sites, etc. Check out this mashable post on howto videos. And publishers are truly benefiting as they get paid for the same content multiple times in this increasing competition.
Tip for Howcast
Get the two ex-Googler team together (Howcast and Ooyala) and rock the hypervideo market - how-to videos, in all probability- are ideal for interactive videos (links to materials, tools, products, manufacturers, distributors, shopping comparison sites, workshops, camps, etc.). Or rather, with or without Ooyala, turn howto videos into really superb interactive videos.
Make embedding a lot easier! I may be a loser but I only found the Share this video (embed, not the silly email) when the video was over. It should be constantly available. Easily, for lame gals too. Thanks!
Great post and I agree wholeheartedly that how to videos are going to continue to grow rapidly. My favorite two sites are WonderHowTo.com (because of the wide variety of their content) and MonkeySee.com (because of the caliber of their experts). Interesting to see which one(s) become the dominant player, or if YouTube decides to finally clean up their quality and cleans up.