It’s been a rough couple months for BuzzFeed (and media in general), but the company is still releasing fun new features.
Today’s addition offers a new, more social take on the quizzes that the site is known for. Instead of taking a quiz on your own and then sharing the results on social media (or simply thinking to yourself, “That’s right, I am a total Samantha” and moving on with your life), you can now take that quiz with friends.
With BuzzFeed Quiz Party, when you start a quiz, you’ll be given a link that you can share with anyone you want. Once everyone’s signed on, the actual quiz-taking isn’t dramatically different, but you’re all answering questions in parallel (little icons indicate how much progress everyone has made) and you receive your results together.
BuzzFeed CTO Peter Wang (who joined the company earlier this year) told me that the pandemic and related stay-at-home orders seem to be increasing interest in quizzes; traffic was already up — doubling year-over-year in January — before tripling YOY in March, and then continuing to grow since then.
Wang also suggested that Quiz Party ties into a broader theme of building more social experiences on BuzzFeed and “driving real-world actions beyond consumption … and give the world something fun and joyful.”
For this initial set of quizzes, Wang said BuzzFeed took popular solo quizzes and redid them for groups, but it will continue to expand the Quiz Party library. In the future, the company could also introduce sponsorships and enliven the social experience by adding things like music and chat, he said.
