Tout

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

~ the goodbye ~

tout was the kind of thing us sports-and-entertainment talent agencies pushed onto their clients. i was not in that demographic. my window into it was that shaquille o'neal had used some video-tweet service to announce his retirement from the nba in june 2011, and the name of the service registered with me as a category rather than a product i was about to sign up to. there was no turkish reach, no localization, no partnership with anyone whose feed i was already following. the cohort that mattered was us sports-radio hosts and wwe wrestlers in roughly equal share.

michael downing started building the underlying tech at sri international before spinning out as tout in april 2010. the product was a video-only social network where every post had a 15-second cap. you opened the app, you held a button, you said your thing, you posted. no editing or filters, no captions stitched on after. the wager was that 15 seconds was the right unit for the kind of off-the-cuff video commentary that text twitter had made into its own format.

the shaq retirement post on 1 june 2011 was the first time most people outside the early adopter cohort heard about tout. it was a one-take, no-edit phone video of o'neal saying he was leaving the nba after nineteen seasons, and it traveled across the sports press the next morning as the announcement of record. by early 2012 the platform claimed 12 million visitors and 75 million videos posted across its history.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the wwe years ~

wwe put $5 million into tout in july 2012 as part of a $13.4 million series b. the deal was a two-year strategic partnership with wwe pushing tout integration into its tv programming, encouraging wrestlers to post to tout from backstage and during shows, and giving stephanie mcmahon a board seat at the startup. for a window the wwe twitter feed was nudging fans toward tout posts after every monday night raw. that window was short.

by early 2013 wwe was visibly pulling back on the tout push. the integration in the tv graphics package faded out and most of the wrestler accounts drifted back to posting on twitter and instagram instead. the two-year deal expired in 2014 without a renewal, and the brand never recovered from losing its single biggest content-pipeline partner.

~ the long fade ~

the vine launch in january 2013 and the rise of instagram video that june had also reframed the category. short-form mobile video stopped being a niche where a standalone app with a 15-second cap could carve out its own audience. tout's product was now competing with the camera roll integration of every major social network, and it did not have the social graph to defend its corner. by mid-2014 the platform had pivoted toward selling its video tech as a white-label embed for media partners, with the consumer app left to coast on its own.

the consumer service drifted into 2018 with vanishingly small public footprint. there was no flashy shutdown announcement. by 2019 tout had been dissolved as a company. the wikipedia entry pins the dissolution to that year, and the domain stopped resolving as a working consumer service shortly after.

~ what remains ~

the 15-second cap was downstream copy of twitter's 140-character cap, and the wager that the same constraint would generate the same creative discipline on video. vine vindicated the constraint with a 6-second limit; instagram vindicated it again with the 15-second video format that landed on the camera roll of every iphone in 2013. tout had been there first with the format but did not have the distribution to keep it. that was the lesson, when the same constraint launches in three places, the one with the social graph attached to it wins.

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