Fathom.com

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

~ the last words ~

Columbia University started a dot-com. That is the whole story and everything else is detail. In 1999 the university set up a for-profit subsidiary, hired staff out of media rather than academia, and in november 2000 launched Fathom.com as an online learning portal where you would pay to take short courses and seminars written by real academics at real institutions.

The partner list was the product. The London School of Economics, the British Library, the New York Public Library, Cambridge University Press, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the University of Chicago, the RAND Corporation, the American Film Institute, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Woods Hole. Fourteen names in total, each one of them an institution people would trust without asking a follow-up question. The theory was that trust converts to credit card numbers.

It did not. Around sixty five thousand people registered accounts across the whole run, which for a venture with that much marketing behind it and those names attached is a bad number. Registration was free. The courses were not, and very few of the free registrants ever became paying customers. Columbia put around twenty five million dollars into it, with some accounts putting the total nearer thirty across four years, and never came close to a profit.

I started a computer engineering degree in Ankara around the time Fathom was closing, and the idea of paying dollars for a recorded seminar from an American university would not have occurred to anyone I knew. What we had was a fast enough connection and a search box. The distance here is not really geographic. Fathom was priced for a professional adult in New York or London with a corporate training budget, and that customer turned out not to exist in the numbers Columbia had modeled either.

~ the record ~

~ the money ~

Fathom was not an isolated bad idea. It was one of a cluster of university-run commercial e-learning ventures launched into the same window, and most of them were wound up within about two years of each other. NYU closed NYUonline in 2001, and Temple shut Virtual Temple the same year. Every one of them was built on the belief that a famous university name would sell online content the way it sells degrees, and every one of them discovered that the name is not the thing people are buying. The credential is the thing people are buying, and none of these ventures were allowed to grant one.

That was the structural error and it was visible from the start. Fathom sold knowledge without accreditation, into a market where free knowledge was already expanding faster than anyone could sell against. Columbia's own faculty were skeptical, partly on the intellectual property question of who owned a lecture once it was a product, and the university never fully resolved that argument before the money ran out.

~ the actual end ~

On 6 january 2003 Columbia announced it was closing Fathom as part of a reorganization of its digital media operations, with an effective date of 31 march. There was no acquisition and no rescue. The staff went, the subsidiary was wound down, and Columbia folded whatever it wanted to keep back into the university's own digital efforts.

The free material stayed online, which is the unexpected part. Fathom's archive of free seminars and features sat there for another nine years, hosted quietly at Columbia, before finally coming down around 2012. For most of the last decade of its existence Fathom was doing exactly what it had refused to do commercially: giving university lectures away to anyone who typed the address.

~ the next chapter ~

Nine years after Fathom closed, Coursera and edX launched with almost the same partner logic and a directly opposite business model. The content was free and the credential was the thing you paid for. Columbia joined Coursera in 2013, which means the university's material ended up online for a global audience anyway, on somebody else's platform, roughly a decade after it had spent thirty million dollars trying to do it alone.

The lesson every retrospective draws from Fathom is that it was too early. That is partly true and partly generous. Broadband was thin in 2001 and video was painful, but the deeper problem was the pricing model, and the MOOC wave that succeeded did so by giving away the exact thing Fathom insisted on charging for. Being early is a timing mistake. Charging at the wrong end of the product is a design one.

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