If you have seen my latest status regarding the state of this blog and the fact that Elon has temporary block users who don't have an account, well the content will be slightly different for the time being until things are resolved. In the meantime, let's talk about a website/company. Tutorials are pretty much everywhere, and they've been everywhere since the beginning of YouTube in 2005. Nowadays with how-to videos, they seem to be extremely dated especially for the way the content is produced. For this reason I give you ExpertVillage; a tutorial-based channel that makes how-to videos but has since disappeared off of the internet and came back in 2020. The surprising thing was that this was the last post I did when I used the Google Sites site before I was locked out of that account.
Brief History / Origin:
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| ExpertVillage site on December 11, 2005. |
Based on their page on Crunchbase, ExpertVillage was founded in 2006 but in the entries on the archives some of which persisted all the way back in late 2005. Regardless of how you look at it, it's somewhere in between. It was founded in Austin, Texas by Byron Reese and it can hold a capacity of 11-50 employees. It is a privately owned company, and it is for non-profit. ExpertVillage was short-lived only lasting a year and a half and ending in June of 2007. A company called Leaf Group (also known as Demand Media) decided to purchase ExpertVillage in the same month and they have acquired them. This method kept them running for a while and they were just called ExpertVillage but sometime in the later years, they renamed it to ExpertVillage Leaf Group and the website was switched over to subsidiary company known as eHow.
Style of Content:
ExpertVillage relies on several different things; Tutorials, Learning and maybe a little bit of Creativity. They created their channel in 2006 once their website was online that showed the variety of videos on there. Many of these videos are very simple and basic and it covers a lot of different topics like some videos teach you how to play an instrument. Other videos teach you the basics of any Sport related, Food related, and Pet related topics and the list goes on and on. One of the others is how to install hardware in your house and it continues from there. A lot of these videos received between positive to a mixed response throughout the years. Because these videos are old and dated, a lot of the acting in this case is very cheesy and its lower quality. It's almost as if you're trying to teach kids everything in the books. Any video that you want to learn about may appear on a different channel compared to what the people at ExpertVillage do. Some of the actors or experts aren't trained very well.
What Happened to Them:
Losing to Competitors / Disappearance in 2014 / Restart of Spam Videos:
Because of the severe drop in quality that ExpertVillage is known to do, they are considered to be losing from the competitors to something like Howcast when it comes to content and subscribers. Howcast has 9.12M subscribers and ExpertVillage has 3.6M so a big noticeable difference. After some final videos in 2014, the channel remained abandoned, and the profile picture remained a dead icon. In terms of their social media accounts go, the Twitter redirects them to the eHow Twitter page and Facebook to Health, Food, Welness and Beauty Tips which still remains active to this day. However about three years ago in December of 2020, they came back to upload videos again but the problem with this is that it's mostly outdated videos that they've uploaded before. Often times you'll find duplicate videos throughout the recent stuff. Other than that, the channel is pretty much dead and it sure as hell won't come back or try to redeem itself.
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