A simple quiz

Here’s a simple quiz: what’s the most popular format on the web right now? And the obvious answer is quizzes and by a long way.

Take a look at the this list (lists used to be the top dog) of Buzzfeed’s big hitters in January 2014.

It seems the reach of quizzes sneaked up on BuzzFeed.  Last year they kept hitting the spot.   Summer Anne Burton, Buzzfeed’s  managing editorial director, said. ‘I had a data team pull numbers for the end of 2013, and there was a quiz that our entertainment editor had done months previous — Which Grease Pink Lady are you? — that hadn’t really been on my radar before,’ she says. ‘Somehow, over the course of the year, it had accumulated the most digital shares of any post of the year.’

And Buzzfeed and lots of others are now churning out quizzes at a staggering rate. Lots are daft way to waste a few seconds, other can be strangely revealing, but most are highly compelling. It’s far from a new idea – they were the staple diet of teen magazines in the 70s. The immediacy of the web and the ability to share and boast makes this format  particularly potent in the digital age.