Howcast executives are also quickly signing deals with the likes of Google, Facebook and Hulu to spread their videos across the Internet.
“Being a media company today means you can’t exist inside a walled garden, just driving traffic to your own site,” says Jason Liebman, 33, Howcast’s chief executive. “You have to produce the content, distribute it all over the Web, develop the technology — all of which is hard to do. But you need to do everything in order to be successful today.”
Sitting in a stifling office loft in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, with a couple of air-conditioners chugging away in vain, Jeffrey Kaufman runs through the topics that are particularly popular on search engines these days. The list includes werewolves. And manboobs.
Kaufman is the head of programming at Howcast, and is supposed to have his fingertips on the nation’s pulse through proprietary data-mining tools and information gathered from search engines.
Kaufman chalks up the werewolf craze to the coming movie New Moon, the second installment of the popular Twilight vampire series, based on the books by Stephenie Meyer.
Why manboobs? Everyone in the small room shrugs.
Then they have to figure out a how-to video spin on the topics (How to make a werewolf costume? How to get rid of manboobs?). The final consideration is whether the subject will attract advertisers or, better yet, a corporation would pay to have its product or service appear in the video.
The how-to category is big and growing, but extremely fragmented. And while Howcast, whose Web site is just 17 months old, is watching its traffic soar, it lags far behind eHow and About.com (owned by The New York Times Co), according to Hitwise, a research firm.
Howcast says its videos were played more than 20 million times last month across all of its distribution network, including YouTube and Apple’s iPhone. What may give Howcast a leg up on its competitors is the fact that the company is creating a library of high-quality content that could command higher ad rates, says Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner, the tech research firm.
To help viewers navigate through the 100,000 videos on its site, Howcast divides them into 25 broad categories — such as technology, travel and food and drink — and then slices and dices those into smaller segments.
Viewers can rate the videos (a video teaching how to pick a lock rates disturbingly high). Videos on sex and relationships are among the most watched at the Howcast site. No.1 is How to Have Sex in a Car, followed by How to Use Twitter and How to Kiss Like Angelina Jolie. (Jolie is not in the video; it features two women in their underwear kissing on a bed.)
Liebman, the executive overseeing this start-up, seems somewhat embarrassed about this playlist. He prefers to talk about the Howcast videos that are the most popular across all the sites that distribute the company’s content, including How to Quit Smoking and How to Do the Moonwalk.
RSS