Learn How to Find Content Online

Vince: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony. I am Vince Thompson. There seems to be so much How To content on the internet but why doesn’t someone tell us how to find it all. Stephen Chao, co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo.com takes his experience as a seasoned TV executive and his passion for finding the most exciting content and it translates that for us online, helps us navigate. WonderHowTo.com what are we going to find if we get there? Stephen: Probably in the first page, the easiest thing to do is you could look and see what the community is looking at in terms of hot and that has its own character. On clip of the day, I tend to choose those videos so I like to find things that I would not normally know of. We do not care where the How To comes from as long as it has its own integrity and has a great tutorial. You find all these sub cultures in there in addition to things that you might be interested, football whatever and that’s kind of what I get a big kick out of. Vince: YouTube is an amazing repository for video, what is the problem in finding a How To video on YouTube? Stephen: Because of the navigation in YouTube, it is very hard to find interesting things unless you know exactly the phrase you want. So, there is no categorization, I mean we are broken down into 437 sub-categories so you can, if Lacrosse is your thing you can roll around in Lacrosse. If something else like pottery is your thing, you can roll around in pottery and explore as much as you want. Vince: Do you see a day when we do not do anything without checking out the How To video version first or the best practices? Stephen: The curious mind will always wonder how to do something because we cannot know 427 categories of life. We cannot know how to prank your roommate. We cannot know how to make a soufflé necessarily so there is always a curiosity you do not know and if we have that answer I think that is really thrilling. Vince: A super accomplished television executive, you were the president of Fox television, you worked for Rupert Murdoch, you have ran big television divisions for Barry Diller, how does that translate this knowledge as a killer TV executive into this little internet world and internet video? Stephen: To me, the satisfaction is really I just like looking at videos so if the video takes me into worlds and windows that I would never otherwise see then I say Halleluiah. 20 years ago some not friend of mine came in with this piece of footage that was alive, he said this is something I shot in the Bahamas, it was a live drug bust in the Bahamas on a crack house. I go, “Wow, that is kind of interesting, can you do it every week?” And that of course became COPS but the point is you do not know what is going on until you start watching a video and the weird stuff that is out there might be mainstream stuff, it might be goofy cultish stuff but it is kind of the window into all this worlds. Vince: You have run several businesses. Stephen: Right. Vince: This is the first internet company that you have run. Stephen: Yeah. Vince: What is different? Stephen: I just love it because it is an entirely different process from television which I have done for 20 some years and the idea of advertising and traffic in SEO are entirely new languages to me and I kind of get a big a kick out of it because I have kind of done a lot of television and I like television but I just love the way the internet works, its just kind of just frictionless and efficient compared to television. You do something wrong in television the SCC might get on your case and take your license away so you are playing a weird walking on eggshells game and the internet is just very honest I like it. Vince: Your departure from Fox came after you hired a male stripper for a company event, got a lot of press, I am sure a lot of people talked about it. Stephen: Right. Vince: Was a little perspective back on this; is there something you can share in a career perspective? Stephen: I think I was kind of oblivious to the risks that I was taking. I was not really doing it in order to take a risk or to get fired. Contextually it made sense, on its own. It’s like why is this guy hiring a guy to strip at a company event? That is a pretty weird question but in context it is a little less weird. As it turns out I ended up quite friendly with Rupert directly after he fired me. Ad for the subsequent years, it is part of a long string of things and if you really enjoy your job you really should have conviction and if you are going to do something stupid that you believe in then you should do something stupid that you believe in and that is it has turned out fine, it has not really harm me so I think that kind of the nice thing. Vince: Stephen Chao, CEO Stephen: Thank you very much. Vince: Founder of WonderHowTo.com. Stephen: Thank you Vince. Vince: Yeah, thank you it is great having you here. As always, if you have questions, ideas if you like to suggest a guest, we would love to hear from you. Send us an Email at info@dogandpony.com. I am Vince Thompson, thanks for watching.