Curious, the video-enabled tutoring and teaching service for anyone who thinks that curiosity may be bad for cats but great for people, is launching some new features, a new crafting app, and a wholly redesigned website.
The company’s site now is organized into categories and courses for the massive number of tutorials on any topic ranging from how to replace a carburetor to how to play the piano to how to properly Julienne your vegetables.
“When you start a marketplace, you’re just hoping that people show up,” says Curious chief executive, Justin Kitch. Well, people have showed up to Curious in droves, with more than 3 million lessons viewed and 10,000 available lessons on the company’s learning platform, according to Kitch.
To organize all that content, Curious now has organized the site into eight categories including: Crafting; Brainy, which is an academically focused section; Tech & Biz (which is self-explanatory); Music & Arts, for fine arts, dance, and music lessons; DIY, for makers and home improvement or general repairs; Lifehacking; Languages; Food; and Healthy & Fit.
Curious also has a new, crafting-focused app launched for app stores, which reflects the tremendous amount of interest Kitch sees for the category — especially now that every hipster basically knits their own clothes these days. Traffic for the company’s tutorials is still predominantly coming from the web, but Kitch says that mobile delivery of tutorials and now courses is growing.
The courses are another new offering for Curious. They’re in every category and are a new way for the Curious content providers to monetize their training videos, while providing more tools and instructional materials for users. Several of Curious’ content providers are actually working on multiple media outlets — including YouTube.
Curious, Kitch says, provides them a way to monetize their YouTube following. “They tend to use YouTube as a free teaser,” says Kitch. “They will say go to Curious as a way to take this lesson.”
The problem with YouTube for these providers of hair tips, makeup tips, car repair tips and everything else, is that the interactions on YouTube are far more superficial than they can be on Curious, which provides more tools to deliver what amount to course materials and study packets. “There are a lot of frustrated people who have tried to monetize through channels, or other places where they have built and engaged audiences — those places are symbiotic with curious.”
Kitch points to Etsy as another example of a site where makers have built up followings who can then port over to Curious. “We have partnerships with places where we’re trying to get more teaching content,” Kitch says.