Table of Contents
How Jack Herrick Of WikiHow Built A How-To Empire : Success Story
Jack Herrick is the founder and CEO of WikiHow, World’s largest How-to portal. Prior to building How-to model, he tried as an Entrepreneur. To name his ventures Luminescent Technologies and BigTray were few of them. Jack Herrick lives in Palo Alto, California. He launched his site on January 15th 2005, exactly on Wikipedia’s 4th birthday. Initially there were only 8 editors and Jack Herrick was one of them. In the first month of its launch they could attract only 2000 visitors daily. As of 2016 WikiHow attracts more than 50 million unique monthly visitors. The beauty is that the users write and edit the how-to manuals.
History of WikiHow
The word ‘Wiki’ was first used by Wikipedia and the concept is to deliver content by giving full rights to contributors. They can simply write and edit articles using rich-text editor. But, Wikipedia is a wiki-encyclopedia. However you don’t find how-to guides there. eHow was the prominent how-to manual site at that time. It attracted huge number of users worldwide. But, due to some wrong strategies the site’s traffic drastically dropped. The search engine giant Google has penalized this site too. Jack Herrick entered the scene and bought it. He made changes and eventually the traffic boosted up to millions of visitors per day. Those days Google Adsense was the only option to monetize sites. So, he implemented ads on eHow and the revenue started flowing.
But, things didn’t work for Jack Herrick. So, finally he sold eHow to Demand Media. eHow is still considered as a link farm. Many Internet Entrepreneurs like Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo openly criticized eHow’s content strategy. Even Jack Herrick was against to their content policies. The very idea of Jack Herrick is to help people practically and he figured out unlocking privacy would be the best solution. Any user can write, share and edit articles. He used MediaWiki software to build WikiHow. The content on this site comes under Creative Commons license. The users, editors and contributors can use all the content for free.
The major difference between Wikipedia and WikiHow is that Wikipedia is a non-profitable organization while the later made to make profits.
How Jack Herrick monetized WikiHow?
As I said earlier WikiHow is pretty interested in making profits. Jack Herrick has chosen Google Adsense as the main revenue model. According to some sources, Jack Herrick is making nearly $3,50,000 per month from Adsense alone. This is huge and he got featured in many blogs as one of the highest Adsense earner in the world. The major part of the ad revenue used for paying bills, fund community meetups and donate to WikiMedia foundation.
He is successful because of his vision and passion. Looking at his Adsense income, you don’t need to build a site with similar niche. It takes a lot of time and pain in doing it. The how-to niche was ruling long ago. However there are endless opportunities on Internet.
If any user doesn’t want to see ads, he/she can disable them by registering on WikiHow. The registration is absolutely free. Jack Herrick is reluctant to accept donations from people. These things prove that he doesn’t run behind money. So what does it mean? If you follow your passion and work with enthusiasm, money will run after you.
Contact
Address : wikiHow, 530 Lytton Avenue, 2nd Floor, Palo Alto, CA 94301
E-mail : wiki@wikihow.com
Twitter : @JackH
Telephone : 650-492-8008
This is a short story of Jack Herrick, Founder of WikiHow. If you like this article the please do share with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other channels.
Comments