Life’s Nagging Questions
Ever wonder how to fold a fancy napkin for a formal dinner? Or how to unplug a toilet, throw a knuckle ball, defog a diving mask, carve a turkey or sew a button back on your shirt?
Life is filled with a million little mysteries like these that can drive you crazy--and that’s not even counting the really tough problems, such as teaching your children about sex or asking your boss for a raise.
It was only a matter of time before the Internet revolution finally got around to informing the masses on these pressing questions of modern life--both big and small.
A rash of how-to Web sites have popped up in the last year trying to answer all those mundane questions of life, like how to repair a linoleum floor or clip a dog’s nails--and hoping to make money in the process.
At Dallas-based How2.com (https://www.how2.com), visitors can watch an animated clip that explains all those cryptic football referee signals.
At EHow.com (https://www.ehow.com), based in San Francisco, Web surfers can get tips on that site’s No. 1 question: How to ask for a raise.
At Seattle-based XpertSite.com (https://www.xpertsite.com), visitors can contact any of about 30,000 professionals in home repair, medicine, auto mechanics and a myriad of other specialties, and get an e-mail answer, typically in less than 24 hours.
“This is what consumers want,” said Courtney Rosen, the founder and chief executive of EHow.com. “ ‘Just tell me in six steps what to do, give me the shopping list and the means to purchase everything.’ ”
Martin Goslar, principal analyst for Organizational Research and Technology Services, a Phoenix e-commerce consulting firm, said the how-to Web sites propose an interesting combination of information and e-commerce.
The problem, as with most other Web sites, he said, is trying to figure how they are going to make money.
Advertising is losing its charm as a revenue maker, and the technology for e-commerce on the sites is still relatively simple, he said. Goslar added that the information on some of the sites can be so basic that even the most inept may yawn through.
But, he said, the idea of giving people advice and then providing them with a way to buy the tools and materials they need has the potential to be a winning combination.
“If you can put together a package that takes the load of answering questions off the suppliers and then create links to the suppliers, that’s not a bad idea,” he said. “If they can get their heads together, it’s kind of a dynamite concept.”
EHow.com reported raising $23.5 million in its first round of venture capital financing. The company has 75 employees in-house, as well as freelance writers.
XpertSite, which has 32 employees, has raised $2 million in seed money and is in the process of trying to raise $20 million more in venture capital.
In many ways, the how-to Web sites are like specialized search engines that are focused on the problems of everyday life.
Rosen of EHow.com said she came up with the idea after trying to find out how to rotate the wheels on her in-line skates. She searched the Web but found no simple step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
“I had been working in the industry for a couple of years,” said Rosen, a former e-commerce manager for Andersen Consulting. “If I couldn’t find it, it didn’t exist.”
EHow.com, which launched in August, has about 10,000 sets of instructions assembled by a group of 200 freelance experts and writers.
Nothing is considered too simple to tackle. There are even instructions for how to boil water for the truly clueless, along with more advanced advice on how to apply a smooth coat of drywall mud and use a caulking gun.
Allan Steinmetz, How2.com’s executive vice president for marketing and strategy, said simplicity is the key because the sites are largely meant to be gateways leading to companies that have services or products to sell.
“It’s designed to provide enough information so that if people want to, they can get more through books or tapes or whatever,” he said. “This is to get people intrigued enough so they will go to our e-commerce partners.”
For example, the response to “how to find a date” provides not only a few suggested opening lines (at a football game, try “Don’t you just hate it when we’re behind like this?”), but also links to buy airline tickets, books on dating and Cosmopolitan magazine. How2.com, which launched in September, gets a small share of any sale.
EHow’s Rosen said the maturing of e-commerce technology is what has made the how-to sites viable.
On EHow, instructions also come with a list of tools, materials and books--all of which can be purchased online.
The instructions on roasting a turkey, for example, include check boxes to buy a meat thermometer from Williams-Sonoma.com and olive oil for basting from Netgrocer.com.
“We’re capturing consumers right at the moment of their greatest interest,” Rosen said. “We have them before they even realize they have a product need.”
But the strategy of tying e-commerce and how-to in one piece has a long way to go to prove itself.
Stephen Gott, chief executive of the oldest and probably the most popular how-to site, Learn2.com, said that he was skeptical about the selling potential of the sites.
His site (https://www.learn2.com), which launched in 1996, gets more than 5 million hits a month, yet the amount of revenue from its online sales “is too small to even discuss,” he said.
“People aren’t willing to spend a lot of money based on the fact that they just read some tutorial on a Web site,” Gott said.
Learn2.com, which offers about 8,000 lessons on subjects from how to clean mini-blinds to how to keep deer out of your garden, uses its lessons as a way to enhance the brand of its core business, which is selling CD-ROMs and books for business and technology training.
“That model is working great for us,” said Gott, adding that the company should bring in close to $30 million in revenue this year.
But the other companies believe that the Web does have the potential to produce revenue while bringing quality information to the masses.
Udai Shekawat, vice president of marketing for XpertSite.com, said most Internet users are frustrated by searching for information using traditional search engines, which can return thousands of irrelevant results.
XpertSite.com, which launched in September, uses a novel method of using 2,000 in-house experts and 28,000 experts from other companies to provide e-mail answers to whatever questions are sent.
The company hopes to make money through advertising and charging for advice from a premium group of experts.
“The best method is not user to machine to Web page, but person to person,” Shekawat said. “The promise of the Net is being able to hook people up with other people.”
