Tickle

Tickle Inc. was one of the first user-generated content companies and one of the first viral media companies, pioneering A/B testing and other growth techniques now followed by much of the industry. It provided quizzes, psychological tests developed by PhD's, social networking, matchmaking, photo sharing, and an ad network called Grapevine. Tickle registered over 150 million people before 2005. Tickle survived the dot-com bubble burst of 2000, raised just one round of $9M, became profitable in early 2002, was acquired by Monster Worldwide in May 2004 for $110M including earnout, and became part of the overall Monster network for 4 years before being shut down by Monster on December 31, 2008.