Instructables

History
Eric Wilhelm and Saul Griffith graduated from the MIT Media Lab and formed Squid Labs, which was an engineering and technology company. One of the projects of Squid Labs was the blog Zeroprestige, an open source experiment for kitesurfing. After realizing that they needed a documentation system to catalog the designs and experiments so that everyone had access to past research, the in-house platform Instructables was created. In 2006, the Instructables site was officially launched publicly, and now houses thousands of projects that are user-submitted. In 2011, Instructables was purchased by Autodesk with the hope of supporting the creative aspect of the members with their “scale and powerful design tools”[x] Autodesk then released an app for mobile devices in 2013, allowing the creation of instructables on the go with photos and video.

Audience
 The primary audience is any creative person 13 years or older.

Platform uses
This platform is primarily used to “share what you make” as explained by the site’s tagline. People upload and share DIY projects such as "how to make a zoom lens for iPad," and "Make your own smart watch."

Number of users/other statistics
There are typically 20.3 million unique page views on the Instructables site per month.

In the news/interesting facts
The Instructables platform is regularly profiled by Make Magazine, Popular Scients, and National Public Radio (NPR), among others.

Similar platforms
Similar platforms include: How Stuff Works, eHow, wikiHow, and LifeHacker.