The newly re-designed wikiHow

How Jack Herrick Went From eHow to wikiHow

"When I ran eHow," Herrick told us via email, "we produced content in a manner somewhat similar to the way Demand Studios does today (although at a much, much smaller scale.)" However Herrick ultimately became frustrated with that model when he realized that "it would fill the web with a bunch of mediocre content."

At the time Herrick thought that the mediocre content production would hurt eHow's long term brand. Although he now concedes he may've been mistaken on that point, given Demand Media's success over the past couple of years.

When Herrick sold eHow in 2006, he began to work on wikiHow - a wiki how-to manual which now competes with eHow. wikiHow currently generates 19 million unique visitors per month, according to the company (it's about to hit 20 million monthly uniques). Demand Media's eHow is still the market leader in how-to content, however wikiHow is a small unfunded company with only 7 employees.

Herrick is convinced that the wiki model for producing content attracts "passionate volunteers." He thinks that the wiki way will "ultimately result in a higher quality product," compared to eHow.

The other prong of Herrick's argument is that eHow gets what it pays for in terms of content quality. "When you pay $15 for an article, you get a $15 product...and nothing more," he noted archly.

Wikis Aren't Perfect Either

Jack Herrick admits that "wiki content typically starts out as low quality," but claims that "once it matures and receives enough edits it can be amazing." And that is really the crux of this argument.

A quality wiki article, whether it's found on Wikipedia or wikiHow, will generally be one that has received a number of edits from people who know the topic well. wikiHow itself has done research which shows this. Herrick told us that in previous research, wikiHow found that "the more people who edit an article, the more readers it attracted and the higher quality the article became."

The problem is, there's no guarantee any given article will attract passionate volunteers to edit it. Wikipedia is a non-profit organization and so it's more likely to be attractive to volunteers - they're contributing to the world's knowledge base and no corporation is profiting from that. wikiHow, on the other hand, is a commercial enterprise. It calls itself a "hybrid organization," meaning a "for-profit company focused on creating a global public good." But it's a company nonetheless. While the content of wikiHow has a Creative Commons license, the company profits directly by it.

The company vs. non-profit issue may not be a big influence on many of wikiHow's current volunteers, but it may prevent wikiHow from scaling to Wikipedia's size.

Next page: We compare wikiHow to eHow and ask which is better...