WonderHowTo aggregates and curates a large database of instructional videos from all over the Internet. It employs a number of editors who search the web for good how-to videos and then categorize them into 36 vertical categories. Thanks to this editorial process, the quality of these how-to videos featured on WonderHowTo is surprisingly high and topics range from Spanish pronunciation to surviving nuclear blasts. One of the most interesting features of WonderHowTo is its recently launched ‘Related How-To Videos’ sidebar for Firefox.
Related How-To Videos in Your Sidebar
The sidebar will display how-to videos on WonderHowTo that relate to whatever you are currently looking at in the main browser window. While you are looking at buying a video console on Amazon, for example, the sidebar will offer you videos on how to set it up or how to configure parental controls. In our tests, the suggested videos generally turned out to be highly relevant, but, as is to be expected, sometimes the videos had very little relation to what were looking at.
One nice feature of the sidebar is that it also displays the ratings that users on the main site have given a video. You can also switch the view in the sidebar from the related videos to the most recent and most popular videos on the site, though unless you just want to entertain yourself by learning a random skill, this is not necessarily that useful.
How-To Videos are Easy to Love for Advertisers
Video how-to sites have steadily grown in popularity, with the likes of ExpertVillage, 5min.com, and Howcast all vying for potential viewers. The growth of this market has also given rise to a number of aggregators, including WonderHowTo itself and its direct competitor, FindHow.
Because users on these sites are clearly already highly engaged with a certain topic, advertisers are very interested in reaching these folks, which makes it relatively easy and profitable to monetize this kind of content. Somebody trying to learn how to find cheap flights on the Internet is, for example, quite likely to react to a JetBlue ad that pops up in the video player on Howcast.
As the competition among how-to video sites growths, all the different players are looking for different ways to differentiate themselves through better video players, widgets, or simply by having better content. For WonderHowTo, the sidebar is a great feature that will surely drive a lot of new users to the site.
