(2019-04-25) Donohue Tappable Essays

Brian Donohue: on Tappable Essays (CardDeck). In April 2012, Robin Sloan launched Fish in the App Store. 2012-10-01-SloanHouseOfCards

Within six months of Fish’s debut, betaworks launched Tapestry to offer a platform for creating and reading tappable essays

Tapestry never found traction. It’s initial founding team left by 2014, and it was shutdown in 2015 after briefly exploring a pivot to an advertising format.

Since Tapestry shutdown I’ve seen a number of similar products launch including Hardbound, Medium Series, and AMP Stories, but none have gained meaningful traction since launching. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this is the case, and the only hypothesis I have is that the creation cost is greater than the essay value.

Reading through Hardbound’s sunset post, Nathan Baschez shines some light on the cost of creating a high quality tappable essay: 2017-06-28-ATerribleHorribleNoGoodVeryBadHardboundUpdate

By essay value I’m referring to its ability to monetize, and tappable essays do not monetize well due to a small natural audience size.

I believe the natural audience size is small because tappable essays are not the best or easiest way to build understanding. On each page only a small amount of information can be conveyed, and as a user you have to make a conscious effort to balance the tempo between your ability to absorb a page, understand the overarching ideas, and stay engaged. At every page you have to make some small decisions: go faster, slower, or leave altogether. It's a type of cognitive overhead you do not have to deal with when reading, watching, or listening.

Despite the past attempts, I continue to see people re-building platforms for tappable essay without addressing the fundamental issues that have arisen in previous attempts.

Maybe the primary tappable essay is the tweetstorm.