There's no denying that we love taking BuzzFeed quizzes. Whether it's to find out what phone case matches your astrological sign, decide your dream vacation spot, or determine which Game of Thrones character embodies you most, they're addicting, fun, and harmless. Except not really that last one.
BuzzFeed started churning out a new type of quiz several months ago, which is brainless on the outside but mischievous through and through:
This style of quiz asks an extremely open-ended question and gives absolutely no hints. There is no common sense knowledge to determine your answer. All you have are nine buttons to choose from randomly.
Naturally, the pattern would be that we get the first five or six wrong, refresh the page and take the quiz until we get it right, and move on. Seems harmless enough, right? After all, we feel validated and it didn't waste too much time.
But what we might not know is that this is helping BuzzFeed become a more popular platform than it already is. Like every major website, BuzzFeed relies a large amount on it's high SEO (search engine optimization) ranking to draw in new readers and sponsors. SEO is made up of several factors, like the article's tags and keywords, brief (search engine description), word count and external links.
Once the article is published, however, the amount of user interaction also will help provide a sizable boost. This is measured through the amount of clicks from outside sources, page views, refreshes, and the per-user average time spent on the page.
What's sneaky on BuzzFeed's part is that each time you get the wrong answer, they don't provide a button to refresh just the quiz, meaning you are forced to refresh the entire page to take the quiz again. As we take the quiz again and again, we spend longer on the page mentally eliminating the wrong answers we used before. Without providing any background information to you, this is bound to happen several times. Because of this and our innate human desire to be justified and correct, we are only giving in to what BuzzFeed really wants: to raise their SEO for the page, and in turn, the entire site.
Can we blame BuzzFeed for wanting this? Of course not. They want to be taken seriously as a millennial-focused news source for pop culture. If TMZ or People are the first page to show up on Google to report on the newest drama with Kanye, we'll visit them over a lower-placing BuzzFeed, meaning a ton of lost web traffic potential. As they build up their SEO with these little dead-end quizzes, they'll gain a foothold towards the top of Google's results listing when they do report major news.
The problem I do have with this sort of quiz is the transparency of the intended goal. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about SEO knows what BuzzFeed is getting into with this. It would be one thing is it was a difficult quiz with clues and hints to tip off the answer. But without giving clues, BuzzFeed is just setting us up for higher page counts. It's legal, but definitely dirty and unfair.
