WatchMojo.com blogs - Tickle Pulled a Bolt.com, Now to Bolt Out of Existence

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category: business

07 Jun 2008

Tickle Pulled a Bolt.com, Now to Bolt Out of Existence

by: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

A few years back, Bolt ran a seemingly successful content company targeting teens, a lucrative market.

Driven by either greed, envy, or both (hmm… both, including stupidity), Bolt totally did a 180 and dived into the UGC video market. It got crushed by the weight of its own stupidity, then got sued by Universal. GoFish put it out of misery by acquiring it… but then GoFish itself went out of business as a me-too video file sharing site. GoFish is now a totally different thing, essentially an ad network for kids. Hey, better than a me-too clone going nowhere, I presume.

But now I learn that Tickle - one of the more successful dating sites - is going out of business. Tickle was known as eMode until Monster bought it. It was one half dating site, one half personal development site. Now it’s one full portion of Fail… and the reason is really pretty dumb: driven by greed and envy Monster positioned the company head on against MySpace and Facebook…

You can imagine the end result. Best sign that some people don’t deserve to get near a computer:

We will be shutting down Tickle as of June 30th 2008. You will no longer be able to access your saved test results after that date. If you would like to keep your test results, please print them out before that date. Many thanks for your understanding! … There is no action required from your side, you don’t have to delete your user account or cancel your subscription; Tickle will do this for you.

Way to go. Why don’t you just mail people the news that you’re going out of business.

Lesson #1 - not everything needs to be a social network.

Lesson #2 - if you have an existing, successful business and then change it into a faux, wanna-be, me-too anything, it shall fail.

Lesson #3 - don’t be driven by envy and greed.

In 2006, people would call me and offer to turn WatchMojo into a user-gen site by adding content from the annals of the Web; or by morphing into a social network. I told them I’d rather be #1 or #2 in video content than a non-player in those spaces. If only Bolt or Tickle would have bought into that philosophy.