In a recent post, Video Nuze looks at the growing number of video-based “how-to” websites. The Video Nuze post highlights the logical popularity of how-to videos, asking:

How many of us would rather watch a video of someone explaining how to do something vs. reading a lengthy and often poorly-written guide?

Such sites have multiplied recently as a rush of well-funded competitors clamber for entry into the space. These companies have varied strategies, business models and content approaches. For the ad-supported sites, some strictly show professional videos while others focus mainly on UGC.

Both types of sites are seeing a good deal of buzz around advertising. One of the main reasons there is a lot of activity on the ad-supported side is that how-to videos sites deliver the highly-targeted and engaged audiences that sponsors crave. Great revenue opportunities exist for those sites able to aggregate enough traffic in a given category to attract advertising sponsors.

But with so many competitor sites crowding the space, how can each site effectively draw-in and engage users? With all of this video being produced, how will the companies ensure that when users search—either through Google or directly on their site—the most relevant content is delivered? Video content is at a fundamental disadvantage to text content in that it is largely invisible to Google and Yahoo. To build its traffic, 5Min plans to pursue widgetization, 3rd party distribution and SEO; this will be a good start, but SEO for video is non-trivial. That said, this category of video content lends itself well to speech to text to enable it to “plug-in” to the Search Economy. To succeed, these how-to sites must enable superior search and discovery of their videos. Solid video SEO and positive user experience through straightforward, accurate site search will be defining factors of the sites that manage to pull ahead of the pack.