eHow is an online how-to guide with more than 1 million articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions. eHow articles and videos are created by freelancers and cover a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories. Any eHow user can leave comments or responses, but only contracted writers can contribute changes to articles. The writers work on a freelance basis, being paid by article. eHow is frequently called a content mill.

eHow.com was founded in March 1999 by Courtney Rosen. The company raised $25 million from venture capitalists, including Hummer Winblad, Peter Gardner of Media Technology Ventures, now Allegis Capital, General Electric and Fingerhut. An editing team, led by Bill Marken (former editor in chief for Sunset Magazine) and Sharon Beaulaurier, hired 200 professional writers, and the company employed a 50-person engineering team. By 2001, eHow had created ten thousand articles. eHow logged 4 million unique visitors per month. Despite the popularity, eHow was not profitable and ran out of funding in the Dot-com bubble of 2001.^{[citation needed]}