By Jake Reed
Although short-lived, the TapTap Live trivia app captured students’ screens—and their competitive spirits. But how did a platform that blended music, pop culture, and cash prizes lose its buzz so quickly?
TapTap Live was created in 2023 by USC students. The platform allows you to connect with other students and compete to answer questions in any of your favorite categories.
Gordon Sun, the founder and CEO, created the app to strengthen bonds among friends. “I realized that social media had become full of strangers and celebrities,” Sun told Dominique Rocha of The Daily Aztec. I thought to myself, why is social media not about your friends anymore?”
Now, it was about connecting with your friends. The campus craze took Trivia Crack’s turn-based system to a different level. TapTap has everything from geography to history to sports to business.
Even if the whole trivia idea is not for you, you will love the six additional categories testing your knowledge of music. Rap, Country, Rock— you name it, it’s there. The music categories work in a Kahoot-like fashion; the faster you can name the song playing, the more points you get.
“The Aux Battle,” a music-based minigame, uses AI to compare your song picks against your opponent’s, judging them with eerie accuracy. The explanation as to why an “aux suggestion” won was so elaborate that you would think it was coming from a music guru in your backseat.
TapTap takes all your wins in each category and places you on the leaderboards accordingly. Despite being created for college students, TapTap’s influence seeped into many Columbus students’ schedules. Their competitive nature and extensive trivial knowledge put many of my classmates on the top of leaderboards, making it much more personal and engaging.
The leaderboards of the past were also featured on the TapTap Instagram page’s “Player of the Week” post.
When placed on these leaderboards, you earn decorative banners; they complete the aesthetic of your profile page, which TapTap so intelligently designed to resemble that of a dating app with fun background music.
Junior Dylan Fulgeira adds to this, stating, “TapTap allowed for my friends and I to 1v1 each other to see who knew more in each category. We’d also compete for the best banners on the profile.”
Now, you might ask yourself, why would college students be getting together almost daily to play a turn-based trivia game? It’d get repetitive; there has to be something else.
TapTap Live was advertised with “Daily Cash Prizes.” As you’d imagine, students came flocking in. The daily event was hosted at 8 PM Eastern Time and attracted thousands of users to compete for a cash prize of $300 and a Sunday grand prize of $1000.
Each day, players had to answer current-events questions correctly to advance. As the game progressed toward the 12th and final question, the number of remaining participants thinned.
They all split the cash prize, which usually amounts to around 1-2 dollars. If the questions were hard enough, it could grow to as much as 6-7.
This split-prize system reminded many students of NBA 2K’s “X Trivia” or even Trivia HQ. The main difference was that it was less focused on subjects and more focused on current events for our generation.
Built by college students, TapTap Live understood that the users wanted to see more questions about TikTok trends, sporting events that happened the night before, and celebrity news.
College students were loving it— so much that it spread to their families and eventually high schools like Columbus. So what could have diminished the app’s popularity? In December 2024, it’s almost like TapTap was thrown on autopilot. Their Instagram went unupdated, and their live event board cleared out, leaving Sundays as the sole real-time event to play.
Without the daily component, users began forgetting about the app. They weren’t drawn into playing the regular leaderboard mode anymore and did not remember to check the app most Sundays.
Weirdly enough, their online presence is extremely limited, and they did not make any major announcements. They only advertise their new party app—Wasabi—on the home page. They continue to label themselves as “the daily cash prize trivia app” but are unable to follow through. No one knows why they made that decision. Speculations range from their attention shifting to other projects to their inability to supply their cash pools.
Since there aren’t any advertisements, the only known source of revenue is from their merchandise, which is estimated to be nowhere near enough to fulfill the cash prizes. It could be the reasoning behind their most recent change in March 2024, when the Sunday grand prizes were cut to just $500.
Ultimately, while TapTap retained some features we still know and love, students can no longer conspire on those daily 8 PM FaceTime calls in hopes of working toward that cash prize. It might not be the same anymore, but who knows- maybe there's a comeback in store.