A recent explosion of silly online personality quizzes, most of them created by the young social media mavens at Buzzfeed.com, has everybody talking about which state they really ought to be living in and which Harry Potter character they really are, according to the Associated Press.
Buzzfeed says the quizzes are smashing traffic records and generating more Facebook comment threads than any viral posts in the site's history, the AP reported.
In the most recent quiz taken by myself: Which Magic Mike Stripper Is Your Soulmate? I found out Dallas (not Channing Tatum) was my soulmate.
Experts say the phenomenon isn't surprising given the age-old fascination with that central question: "Who AM I?" and a desire to compare ourselves with others in a social media-obsessed society, according to the AP.
On a recent snowy day, 37-year-old Chrissy Noh, who lives in New York City, admitted that she and several friends spent the afternoon taking quizzes and texting each other screenshots of the results, the AP reported.
"It turned into an all-day group text message fest, where it was just picture after picture of, oh, what rapper are you?" Noh toldthe AP. "What career should you actually have? Which sandwich are you? Which member of One Direction should you marry?"
The recent wave of quiz popularity can be traced directly to Buzzfeed's New York City headquarters, where a team of about 100 content creators have been producing one to five quizzes every single day for the past two months, according to the AP.
The most popular quiz - "Which State Do You Actually Belong In?" - has generated about 41 million page views, the AP reported.
"For our most viral quizzes, the results have to be meaningful in some way," says Summer Burton, BuzzFeed's managing editorial director, according to the AP. "It's not that they are scientific. It's just that what they say means something to people as far as their own identity."
Personality quizzes have been around for decades, gracing the covers of women's and teen magazines with questions designed to lure us in, the AP reported. The quizzes are not new to the Internet either, where online quizzes can be found aplenty on sites like Zimbio.com, among others.
