Curiosity.com

» see curiosity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Curiosity launched in January 2014 as an in-house project at Discovery Communications, built by Gabe Vehovsky, who was the company's chief of digital strategy. The idea was an aggregator for learning. Pull courses and videos from more than three hundred providers into one index, then let people filter it by subject or by whether the thing cost money. It was supposed to be where you landed when you wanted to understand a topic and had no idea where to start.

In November 2014 it was spun out of Discovery as its own company with Vehovsky as chief executive, funded by a six million dollar Series A from Chicago investors including Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Origin Ventures. Discovery stayed on as a content partner, which is a polite way of saying the spin-out kept the pipe to its former parent's archive.

The app did better than the site. A petition mounted by users when the shutdown was announced cited more than five million downloads on Google Play at a 4.6 rating, which is a real audience by any measure, and most of those people had arrived for short science and history explainers rather than for a directory of MOOCs. The product had quietly become a publisher.

That is the distance for me. I was already in the habit of going to Wikipedia and then straight to the primary source, which is what anyone with a search box eventually does. An aggregator is a product for the moment when finding things was the hard part, and by 2014 that moment had passed. The English-only index made it further away: a Turkish reader in 2014 looking for an explanation of something got a better result from YouTube directly than from a curated list of American education publishers.

~ the case file ~

~ the spin-out ~

Spinning a media company's side project into a startup was a standard move in 2014 and it usually worked the same way. The project gets a valuation it could never have had on an internal budget line while the parent keeps a stake and a content deal. What the new company then owes its investors is a business the parent was never going to build.

Curiosity never found it. An aggregator has no supply that is uniquely its own, and the providers it indexed were all simultaneously building their own apps. Whatever the six million was meant to buy, what it produced was a popular reading app with no obvious way to charge for anything.

~ where the articles went ~

Discovery bought it back and moved the articles onto Discovery.com, and curiosity.com became a redirect. The Internet Archive shows the domain still serving its own pages, around 28 KB of them, as late as April 2020, and answering with a redirect by the start of that June. Wikipedia's editors noted that by September 2020 even the redirect had stopped working and old Curiosity links went nowhere at all.

Today the domain resolves and sends you to discoveryplus.com, a streaming subscription. The product that was supposed to organize other people's educational material for free now points at a paywall run by the company that thought of it in the first place.

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