10 Years Ago This Week: Did YouTube kill Helpouts?

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending April 18, 2015.

 Ten years ago this week, Google shut down Helpouts. 

Helpouts: A platform for experts to sell their expertise

Helpouts Home Page in 2013. Note both free and paid Help outs were available. 

Helpouts launched in 2013 with a simple premise: What if getting help for a computer glitch, a leaky pipe, or a homework problem was as easy as clicking a button? 

This was not Google's first platform for connecting people with questions and experts with answers. 

Google Answers launched in 2003 and shut down in 2006, apparently unable to compete with the similar Yahoo Answers (which shut down in 2021). There are similar platforms still running today, like Quora and Stack Overflow.

What set Helpouts apart was that it connected people over live video, using Hangouts for video calling with Google+ social features 

Experts could charge for their services, and could either offer scheduled sessions or connect on demand. Users could select providers by expertise, reviews, availability or price.

Google manually approved providers and offered a money back guarantee. 

(As an aside, it was only while writing this that I realized the Helpouts logo is a Rolodex card. How 20th century!)

Helpouts Shut Down

Helpouts Home Page announcing the April 20, 2015 shutdown

Google shut down Helpouts on April 20, 2015. They explained that the reason was not enough users.

The Helpouts community includes some engaged and loyal contributors, but unfortunately, it hasn't grown at the pace we had expected. Sadly, we've made the tough decision to shut down the product.

Why Helpouts didn't catch on is open to speculation. 

It was integrated with Google+, and Google+ didn't catch on, so that may have been part of the problem. 

And just a few months before this announcement, Google stopped offering paid Helpouts in Europe, due to changes in tax laws

But I suspect a significant factor was that YouTube offered so much information for free. 

Do you need to fix your shower? Or find the security settings on your computer? Or answer a math or history question? You could find that information on YouTube. 

Of course that doesn't include personal face-to-face interactions, but sometimes a quick tutorial is all you need. 

The view from 2025

Today people are still finding answers for free on YouTube and TikTok and Reddit, and using video calls much more frequently than in 2015.

Instruction over live video got a huge boost in 2020 due to COVID restrictions, with Google and Zoom and other platforms rising to meet the challenges of at-home work and classes. (A thought: What if Helpouts had been available in 2020?)

And while not as popular as in 2020, you can still attend webinars, join virtual yoga classes, talk to your doctor, or get tech support from companies over live video.  

From the creator side, if you are using the Google ecosystem, you can offer paid appointments using Google Calendar with a Google Workspace Individual subscription or Workspace business account. The appointments can be in person or use Google Meet for live video. 

Outside of Google, many creators use tools like Calendly, video calling or webinars with Zoom, offer courses through Skillshare, or live stream Q&A sessions on TikTok, Twitch, or YouTube.

But there isn't any platform I'm aware of that offers a directory of experts and creators offering live help sessions covering all sorts of topics. 

Discovery and marketing are the hardest part (in my opinion), and it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Google had connected Helpouts to YouTube. 

As a side note, YouTube did test a live meet-and-greet and virtual event platform for YouTube creators called Fundo in 2020, but that was available for less than a year.

I'm not sure there will ever be an actual replacement as long as the information people are looking for is free.

References

Google Blog, 4 November 2013: Introducing Helpouts: Help when you need it

Google Helpouts Home Page, 5 November 2013 (Internet Archive)

Google Helpouts Terms of Service, 3 December 2014 version (Internet Archive)

Google Helpouts Support, February 2015: Helpout is Shutting Down (Internet Archive)

Google Helpouts Home Page, 13 February 2015 (Internet Archive)