Who owns howcast

Part of the trick to winning on the Web is having a distinct personality. Some industry executives give Howcast credit for finding a way to stand out. One of the biggest challenges for a site like Howcast, though, is the same one that has vexed old-school media giants and survivors of the dot-com boom: How can content creators turn a profit on the Web? Blurring the lines between editorial and advertising is a tricky endeavor, of course.

Companies that try to be too stealthy or clever risk seeing their brand roasted on Facebook, Twitter and beyond. They are even forging relationships with the State Department as it looks for ways to use social networks and other media to communicate directly with people around the world. Howcast executives are also quickly signing deals with the likes of Google, Facebook and Hulu to spread their videos across the Internet. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

After graduating from Duke with a degree in political science, Mr. Liebman migrated to Wall Street, where he spent some time as an investment banker in leveraged finance.

Watching the dot-com run-up on the West Coast, however, he wanted to join the party. A couple of months later, he landed at a software start-up called Applied Semantics. There, he worked in sales and capital-raising while also overseeing a team of engineers that developed AdSense, software that matched advertisements to related content or text on a Web page. Much of his time at Google, particularly after the acquisition of YouTube, was spent persuading sometimes stubborn media companies to post clips of their shows or movies on its site.

Other members of the Google video team included Daniel Blackman, a sales and business development executive with a broad background in digital media, and Sanjay Raman, an M. Over time, the group noticed a surge in search traffic for instructional videos at Google and YouTube. The growing interest in how-to videos parallels what happened in the early days of video, says Mr.

Weiner, the Gartner analyst. Other sites were building business models around simple instructional homemade videos, but Mr. Blackman and his team saw flaws in their strategy. The quality of footage and content was uneven. And advertisers sometimes balk at homemade videos, citing concerns about who owns the rights to the content, Mr. Blackman says. The three friends left the comfortable confines of Google in May and set off on their own. Most large venture capital firms are loath to back start-ups without seeing some content or a mockup of the site.

For that, Mr. Liebman invited his twin sister, Darlene Liebman, to come on board as another co-founder. Liebman said. Howcast reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace any of the Terms of Use at any time, by posting the modified Terms of Use or other policies or guidelines on the Sites, and if permitted to do so, sending you an e-mail notifying you of the nature of the modifications and a link to the modified document on the Sites so that you may review it.

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