In this day in age, we live in a world where tutorials have fallen out of the complete irrelevancy yet most channels that do them still do it to this very day. Long before the internet, tutorials were very hard to come by and no one knew how to do things properly. As the internet started to take a rise, tutorials and how-to videos became a thing and considered to be one of the easiest in terms of making content. Nowadays, tutorials and how-to's are considered to be irrelevant in this day in age. This is exactly where Howcast fits the bill into this because while they still do them, they have fallen into such a sharp decline over the years and in reality, killed their reuptation.
Howcast started their account on October 4, 2007, but didn't upload their first video until two months later on December 19, 2007, when the first video titled "How Not to Get Mugged" was released. In March of the same year, they aquired the website but nothing was ever updated until the fall. As a matter of fact when the website came online, they uploaded so many videos on December 19 that actually came from their website or they had some preset videos they recorded prior though they established themselves as a company in 2008. Nevertheless, Howcast was considered to be at the time the place for How-To videos similar to that of ExpertVillage but much more fast pace compared to ExpertVillage. Tutorials include How to Avoid the Flu, How to Make Sushi, How to Make a Dirty Martini and so on. One of their most popular and yet most viewed video on their channel is titled (and I'm not joking on this) "How to Undo Her Bra with One Hand" which sits at over 248M views.
The Decline:
Losing Popularity:
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| Videos from the 'Popular' tab on their channel. |
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| Videos today. You can definitely see the sharp decline in views. |
Out of all the 22,000 videos they have related to tutorials and how-to's, Howcast is usually targeted towards adults. At the time when they were rising in popularity, not only they would make these tutorial type videos they would dive into the sexual desire category. Imagine back in the day where kids found Howcast and see these videos, the parents would scream. Anyways between the time that they started, viewership would fluctuate and as the time progressed viewership dropped severely.
Between 2010 and 2011, Howcast had reached it's peak around that timeframe. Nowadays, they resort to doing stuff related to health which a lot of people do. Considering the fact that they were the highest viewing channel for a while before others took over. So why did the company eventually trend downward sharply? Well, it all has to do with the founder for Howcast named Jason Liebman who was also a former employee with Google. In 2011, Microsoft struck a deal with Hulu to put the streaming service on the console. It was right around the time that Jason Liebman had left the company to pursue to the Daily Beast. Of course, we don't know for certain on what happened but If I have more information, I'll let you know.
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