Facebook feeds have been awash lately with people posting their results from quizzes that almost entirely go by the format “What ____ are you?” or “What ____ should you ____?”
Taken one? Then you’ve probably taken three or four and then shared the results on Facebook.
“We find that when people take one quiz, they want to take more,” said Melissa Rosenthal, director of creative services at BuzzFeed. “People love to share things that kind of represent who they are and say something about who they are.”
This combination of addictive and shareable is powerful, propelling the most popular quizzes to millions of views. With that traffic comes the lucrative opportunity of pairing sponsors with a format that has proven friendly for pop culture, brands and nostalgia.
See also: The 40 Most Viral YouTube Videos of 2013
There are two quizzes generally credited with igniting the recent trend. BuzzFeed’s “What city should you actually live in?” on Jan. 16 and has accrued more than 20 million views, with around 75% generated from social networks.
The other is "How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk" from the New York Times, which became 2013's most popular story on NYTimes.com despite being posted on December 21.
"These quizzes live and die by sharing. That’s how they travel. The successful ones are successful because people share them," said Jonah Berger, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Contagious a book that examines word of mouth and engagement.
The social nature of quizzes has also caused a fair bit of snark:
I saw the best minds of my generation consumed by BuzzFeed quizzes, hysterical, tweeting, "Which Muppet are you?"
— Forrest Wickman (@ForrestW) February 2, 2014
The apps have gotten so popular that even celebrities taking them have made news. Shirley Manson did not get herself on the "Which '90s Alt-Rock Grrrl Are You?" quiz; Rupert Murdoch did get himself on "Which Billionaire Tycoon Are You?"
"People love knowing and talking about themselves. It’s social currency. And these quizzes are a great opportunity for people to compare themselves with others," Berger said.
While BuzzFeed's quizzes are the most ubiquitous, Zimbio claims to have enjoyed the biggest gains. The celebrity and entertainment news website has ridden the quiz wave to traffic numbers that nearly quadrupled in two weeks.
The site launched “Which Disney princess are you?” on Jan. 15, right about the time Quantcast shows Zimbio traffic spiking.
“That's where we knew we had stumbled on to something special,” said Josh Newlin, editor in chief of Livingly Media, which operates Zimbio.

Where there’s traffic, there’s money, especially for a format that lends itself to pop culture. BuzzFeed has begun to launch branded quizzes, which appear in a similar fashion to the site’s sponsored content.
BuzzFeed has begun working with clients to make the quizzes, which currently include "Which David Bowie Are You?" from Spotify. The “Which Barbie doll are you?” quiz from “featured partner” Mattel has around 152,000 Facebook shares since it launched on Feb. 21, a spokesperson for the site told Mashable.
“With branded quizzes, there are a tremendous amount of angles we can approach,” Rosenthal said.
Whether quizzes can continue to drive traffic remains to be seen. Rosenthal said that BuzzFeed continues to see elevated traffic for its quizzes. BuzzFeed also seems intent on flooding the market — six quizzes were posted on Monday. BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti recently listed quizzes alongside video, longform, short-form, breaking news and explainers as the company's main publishing formats in a memo to his staff.
Newlin said Zimbio quizzes have seen a dip from peak success, adding that it can be difficult to predict which quizzes will perform particularly well. Quantcast showed that the site's traffic had recently returned to about where it was before.
Zimbio was kind enough to highlight some of its strongest and weakest quizzes. Newlin said he was particularly surprised that The Simpsons quiz did not do better.
“It's really hard to guess which ones are going to do really well,” Newlin said. “We're just constantly surprised by what really takes off.”
A quick survey of BuzzFeed quizzes released recently finds some hits — "Which Famous Person Should You Get Drunk With" has 2.4 million views since Feb. 26. However other once-popular web crazes like gif-based listicles, not to mention infographics, have shown Internet popularity can by fickle and cyclical.
"What is new and exciting today soon becomes old hat," Berger said. "But there are always new versions of old things and culture is highly cyclical. What was popular 20 years ago will be soon be back disguised in slightly new clothes."
Newlin said that the traffic for quizzes was remarkable to the point of being unsustainable, indicating that the quiz peak may have already passed.
“I've always taken a pretty realistic view of this. We did almost six million visits in a day to these quizzes in late January. It's just unprecedented for any website really to just explode like that,” Newlin said. “There's no way that can keep up. I make no illusions that this can sustain itself at that rate.”
"Oh, look, online quizzes are back," her generation realized, over and over and over until they died
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) January 30, 2014
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