Tickle.com (eMode)

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

~ the goodbye ~

emode.com launched in 1999 in san francisco. james currier built it as a quiz site that would email you the results, and the launch strategy was a single email to four hundred friends in the target demographic. those friends forwarded the link. a few weeks later the site was getting millions of visits. the headline product was a "classic iq test" that gave you a number, then offered to sell you a fuller report for twenty dollars. the second-most-popular item was an item literally called "the tickle test."

by 2002 the company had renamed itself tickle.com after the test that ran the company. the catalog grew into hundreds of free quizzes about personality types and dog-breed matches, with sidebar genres for dating compatibility and what-your-soul-color-actually-is. the format was the ancestor of every buzzfeed quiz you would scroll past on facebook ten years later. each result was sticky enough that you would email it to a friend. each email recruited more users. the site ran almost entirely on the strength of that loop.

monster.com bought tickle in may 2004. the bet was that bolting personality data onto a job search site would help users find better jobs. that integration mostly did not happen. tickle continued running as a side property until april 2008, when monster announced it was shutting tickle down to refocus on its core. the site was switched off on december 31, 2008. the database of quiz results was not preserved.

i did not use tickle. in 2003 to 2008 i was on msn messenger and icq with my actual friends, and the viral email loop tickle ran on never had a strong turkish equivalent. the closest thing here was forwarded mp3s and powerpoint chain mail, not personality tests. when buzzfeed eventually figured out the same loop with quizzes you could share through facebook timelines, tickle had already been off for half a decade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ killed by ~

strategic fit. monster bought tickle for the user base, expecting a personality-data layer that would improve job matching. the quiz audience and the job-seeker audience overlapped less than the deck assumed. once monster was under cost pressure, the side property that did not feed the core had to go.

~ what they invented ~

the share-to-take format. the quiz that emails you a result you want to forward to a friend. the friend takes the same quiz to compare. that loop is now the engine behind buzzfeed quizzes and the entire "which character are you" genre on social media. tickle did it first at scale and was the first to monetize it through paid full-result reports.

~ what came after ~

buzzfeed and 16personalities. buzzfeed cloned the loop with facebook as the share substrate instead of email, and rode it for years. 16personalities took the mbti angle of the same idea and turned it into a serious-looking product. neither paid tickle anything. the format had been free for the taking since 2008.

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