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Who hasn’t heard of Buzzfeed? They help revolutionize the online quiz maker space when they launched in 2006 – for a few years, you couldn’t open your Facebook feed without seeing a Buzzfeed quiz being shared by your friends.
Buzzfeed has made a strategic decision to pivot to being a digital media company (like Vox Media). You’ve probably seen their stories under the Buzzfeed News brand.
(After a whopping $500M in funding, we suspect Buzzfeed had to change direction to keep all their venture capitalists happy.)
But the net result is that Buzzfeed is no longer focused on building and developing new quiz maker tools for businesses.
Nope, now they’re an ad-supported quiz site – Buzzfeed even runs frequent contests like the one below to get their community to create highly clickable quizzes.
Neat business model, but illustrates why we don’t recommend Buzzfeed for any business marketing use cases.
However, they do offer a suite of free (if very basic) quiz creator formats – so we wanted to give Buzzfeed an in-depth review to see how they stack up in today’s quiz builder marketplace.
Quiz Maker Review’s rating for Buzzfeed:
- Range of quiz formats: ★★★☆☆☆
- Customization options: ★☆☆☆☆
- Lead generation: ☆☆☆☆☆ (No lead generation options)
- Data privacy: ★☆☆☆☆
- Pricing: N/A
- Overall: ★☆☆☆☆
The TL;DR summary?
Buzzfeed quizzes are great for consumers and casual users. The best Buzzfeed quizzes engage, captivate, and amuse an audience.
However, with no lead generation, white-labeling, and only limited customization options, we can’t recommend Buzzfeed for any sort of quiz marketing.
Buzzfeed quizzes are fast and easy to create – but you are given the bare minimum of customization options.
- Heck, and in this age of online GIFs, videos, and image libraries, Buzzfeed users are still limited to manually uploading images from their computer.
- They also feature zero lead generation – so you will not be able to use Buzzfeed quizzes to collect names, emails, and other data from potential customers.
- And the final nails in the coffin? Buzzfeed does not feature any embedding or white labelling options.
- Any quiz maker worth its salt will let you create a quiz, then embed it in your site, plus hide their branding so it looks and feels like part of your brand.
- Finally – we noticed that once you publish, you couldn’t edit your Buzzfeed quiz. That’s just crazy – the best online quizzes constantly evolve, as you see what’s working (and what’s not).
All these weaknesses mean that Buzzfeed quizzes are not suitable for any sort of quiz marketing or engagement by businesses.
Take a look at our other quiz maker reviews – the difference is stark.
You’ll see companies like Riddle, Outgrow, LeadQuizzes, and Involve.me – they all offer robust, highly flexible quiz builders, designed around the needs of marketers.
Media options: image, video, audio, GIF support?
Buzzfeed launched back in 2006 – that’s a relative eternity in ‘internet time’. And combined with their company’s shift towards news, this means Buzzfeed quizzes do not support the wider range of in-quiz media options.
Now let’s compare that with the other quiz makers we’ve reviewed so far.
Most tools like TryInteract and Qzzr link to image libraries like Pixabay or Pexels. And some, like Riddle, do that plus make a point of going further – leveraging video (YouTube or MP4 upload), audio (MP3 upload), and GIFs via Giphy to make quizzes rich, multimedia experiences.
This takes us back to our assessment – Buzzfeed is great as a lightweight tool for consumer use. But for serious marketing, we recommend you choose a quiz maker with more advanced and extensive media options.
Buzzfeed: range of formats
These days, ‘quiz’ is often used as a catch-all term, to cover any sort of interactive content – from online polls to surveys, personality tests to quizzes with right/wrong answers.
Let’s dive in and explore what type of quizzes Buzzfeed supports.
One thing that jumped out was that Buzzfeed has a nice array of simple, easy to create quiz formats.
Buzzfeed quizzes include:
- Personality test
- Trivia quiz
- Checklist
- Poll
- Scale quiz
- Tap on image
- List (listicle)
Buzzfeed has one of the better range of options among the quiz makers we reviewed with seven formats. Only Outgrow (8) and Riddle (15) provide more flexiblity and creative freedom for businesses turning to quiz marketing for engaging their audiences.
Personality test – 4/10
This format was what put Buzzfeed quizzes on the map – so we were really excited to take a look at their creation tools.
And first glance, Buzzfeed didn’t disappoint. It was easier to create a personality test with Buzzfeed than any other online quiz creator we’ve seen.
The downside?
Buzzfeed achieves this at the cost of customization, basic scoring, and no branching logic.
This lack of subtlety and nuance means it would be hard to use for career coaches (e.g. “What’s your ideal career?”), health assessments (“Do you suffer from anxiety?”), or any other professional use cases.
It is difficult and/or impossible to create a personality test or outcome quiz that can provide sophisticated assessments or product recommendations – some of the most common reasons marketers turn to quizzes.
You can see this demonstrated here in our example personality quiz.
- You can pick from seven colors
- Type in the question (Buzzfeed does not let you add images for a question)
- Add text or image answers
That’s sufficient for lightweight, fun, and fluffy personality quizzes such as “What Harry Potter character are you?”. That type of quiz taker is happy enough with unsophisticated scoring – as long as it’s fun to take, and they get an amusing personality test result.
But the scoring for Buzzfeed’s personality quiz is ‘all or nothing’. Each answer can only be applied to one result (see below).
In our example,
By comparison, most quiz builders know each answer can mean different things for each result. For example, in the question above (“Do you like the color black?”), any Star Wars nerd would tell you that Darth Vader should get an emphatic YES.
But Luke also has a bit of a weakness towards the dark side – that should also be reflected in the scoring.
And it’s precisely this lack of flexibility that limits Buzzfeed’s personality test’s usefulness for marketers and content teams.
Buzzfeed quiz – 5/10
Okay – just like most of their formats, Buzzfeed makes it easy to create an online quiz. Their quiz maker is simple to understand – and quick to build, but (again) at the cost of fewer options than some of the other quiz makers we’ve seen.
For example, you’re very limited creatively.
Questions and answers are limited to images that you manually upload only – no GIFs, videos, or audio clips.
Plus, all your quiz questions must be a simple single choice (“Where was the first rebel base in Star Wars?” Answer: Yavin.). You can’t have users pick multiple correct answers with questions like (“Pick all the rebel bases.” Answers: Yavin, Hoth.).
We did like how you can add a correct answer explanation – so quiz takers can learn about the right choice.
But one downside – you can’t display one answer to people who get it right (e.g. “Nice work, smarty-pants – Yavin was the site of the first base.”), then different ones for every wrong choice (e.g. For people who picked Tatooine, “Not quite – Obi-Wan lived on Tatooine but there wasn’t a base.”).
Let’s sum up Buzzfeed’s quiz module:
- Single choice: YES
- Free text answers: NO
- Multiple correct answers: NO
- Different scores for questions and answers: NO
- Add images: YES
- Add GIFs, videos, audio: NO
We were also a bit surprised to see a lack of ‘quiz wide’ options – most quiz makers (Involve, Outgrow, and Riddle in particular) will let you choose things like ‘shuffle question order’, add quiz timers, or change how and when you display the correct answers.
You might want to try out a TryInteract quiz as well for more options.
This last one is especially important if you want to use quizzes for lead generation – you can collect more emails from quiz takers if you gate off showing the correct answers until after the lead form. (So far, Riddle and Qzzr seem to be the only quiz makers with this feature.)
Checklist quiz – 7/10
We loved this checklist quiz format from Buzzfeed – it’s highly original and very effective. The concept is simple – but also addicting and very social. You ask your audience a question like, “How many cities have you visited?”.
Your quiz takers will get different results based on how many they selected. In our example, people who ticked less than half the cities would get a ‘You need to travel more!’, while everyone else would get ‘Wow – you’re a globetrotter!’.
So there aren’t right or wrong answers in the checklist quiz – but people love to find how they stack up with things lists like ‘Have you listened to these 100 best songs of all time?’ or ‘Which bucket list items have you done yet?”.
Really well done – and the checklist quiz can be surprisingly viral, since people love to show off what they’ve done with their friends.
You can also see a checklist quiz over on their competitor Qzzr.
Buzzfeed poll – 4/10
Ah, the opinion poll – it’s a classic format for almost every quiz maker except one (we’re looking at you Involve.me!).
It’s easy to understand why – online polls are easy to create, and everyone loves to give their opinion on topics from the serious to the silly.
Being Star Wars geeks, we couldn’t help but return to asking questions about some of our favorite movies when demonstrating Buzzfeed’s online poll maker.
Just like many of its other modules, Buzzfeed’s poll is effective – but fairly simple.
You are limited to asking a single question in each poll – and users can pick only one option.
So it’s great for our Star Wars question – but you couldn’t ask your audience to select multiple choices, like this question series:
- “Pick your top 3 city breaks”
- “What’s most important to you when choosing a vacation?”
- And even – “Rank your favorite destinations”.
The most flexible online poll tools that we’ve seen include Riddle – their multi-poll includes multiple question formats and lots of options around engaging your audience.
Here’s a quick summary of what you can (and can’t) do:
- Single VOTE – YES
- PIck more than choice – NO
- Multiple poll questions – NO
- Add images – YES
- Add GIFs, videos, audio – NO
In terms of poll analytics, you pretty much just get a breakdown of votes for each option. However, you won’t be able see statistics broken down by date or demographic range (i.e. “How many 18-34 year olds picked option A?”) – that would be more useful for any sort of serious market research.
List – 5/10
Buzzfeed made its name with its list (often called ‘listicle’) format. Designed to quickly summarize and present information, lists are powerful tools for busy editorial teams.
Instead of a simple long-form article around, say, “10 things you didn’t know about health insurance”, you can quickly summarize each point with an image and a short text snippet.
(Or, you can use it to present useful product ideas – like this clever “36 Useful Things To Help You Get Through Your To-Do List In A Flash” list created by Buzzfeed’s staff, with affiliate links to each product on Amazon.)
Scale quiz – 2/10
Okay – we’re not going to lie here. This ‘scale quiz’ by Buzzfeed seems like a great idea – but only half-executed.
We were initially confused, but after many trial and error attempts with their extremely confusing user interface, we figured it out.
Buzzfeed wanted to let you ask your audience to answer questions based on a scale. For example, your audience would have to guess, “How much did this dog earn on Instagram for this picture?”.
But this tool, frankly, is pretty disappointing – it’s not fun for the user to take.
Equally important, Buzzfeed did a seriously bad job with the user interface – it’s very frustrating.
Avoid the Buzzfeed scale quiz – trust us on this one.
Buzzfeed’s ‘Tap the image’ – 6/10
We really liked this format – Buzzfeed cleverly gets rid of answer buttons in their ‘Tap the image’ quiz. Instead, it’s pretty similar to Riddle’s ‘Tap and Find’ – where the answers are hot spots IN the image.
Buzzfeed did a nice job with this module – it was intuitive to create and set up, and it’s a clever variant on the standard quiz maker format.
Buzzfeed – lead generation
Well, this is easy to sum up – Buzzfeed does not offer any lead generation or data capture with its quiz maker.
This makes sense – because it’s a consumer-focused quiz tool.
However, for marketers, you can’t add a form to collect the email and other information from quiz takers. So Buzzfeed is not suitable for any quiz lead generation campaigns – you can’t use Buzzfeed quizzes to qualify, segment, and follow up with interested leads through your email marketing software like MailChimp or Hubspot.
(If you’re interested in this element, give Try Interact or Riddle a shot – both excel at letting you create and use lead forms in your quizzes.)
Buzzfeed – platform features
Okay – now that we’ve covered all the different types of Buzzfeed quiz and poll formats, let’s crack on and sink our teeth into how they stack up in terms of back-end features:
- User interface and ease of use
- Styling
- Sharing
- Publishing
- Data privacy and GDPR-compliance
Buzzfeed – user interface and ease of use
Buzzfeed has done a great job of making quiz creation simple for its audience of consumer creators.
Their quiz builder user interface is clean, intuitive, and has virtually no learning curve. It’s a big reason why Buzzfeed quizzes have proved so popular. Literally, anyone can start creating – with zero learning curve.
However, this comes at a price. Buzzfeed has dramatically limited the scope and flexibility for each of its quiz formats.
If you’re a 17-year-old wanting to create a quirky quiz for your friends, go for it.
But if you’re a marketer or content team looking to support your business, we can’t recommend Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed – social sharing
Buzzfeed does a good job here – every quiz format features built-in social sharing with Facebook and Twitter, to help your quiz go viral.
They do not support WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or Facebook Messenger, however.
Plus (and we know we’re sounding a bit like a broken record by now) Buzzfeed doesn’t let you customize this feature either.
You can’t add your share messages, hash tags, or other information to support your quiz marketing campaigns.
Publishing your quiz
This is another brief – and easy one to sum up.
You can only display your quiz on Buzzfeed – they don’t give you any options to embed your quiz on your site.
Along with that, you can’t white-label or custom brand your quiz – so it will look and feel entirely like Buzzfeed’s own content.
Buzzfeed – data privacy and GDPR-compliance
Buzzfeed is a bit different from the other quiz makers we review here – in that they do not allow you to embed their quizzes into your website. Instead, your quiz will only be accessible on their own site.
Because of that, you have very little control over the privacy of your Buzzfeed quiz.
There is a wide range of troubling issues:
- When opening a quiz, the visitor is not presented with any kind of cookie banner or cookie warning.
- The site tries to load 5 trackers which we blocked on the initial page load.
- However, Buzzfeed still loads 13 other cookies without the user’s consent.
- After they allow these trackers to load, a cookie banner is presented after the fact – so it’s a moot point, since they’ve already loaded.
- Even if you only agree to the required ‘necessary’ cookies, a total of 29 cookies are loaded, including advertising cookies from Google and Doubleclick.
Now, as we’ve already covered, Buzzfeed does not support any lead generation – so you wouldn’t creating forms that collect and store personal information (names, emails, and the like) with Buzzfeed.
But don’t get cocky – they still track and store IP addresses from your audience; EU courts class them as personal data.
The bottom line about data privacy?
Buzzfeed quizzes are not GDPR-compliant – the use of these trackers before the user’s consent is a big no-no, plus their data servers are U.S.-based which is illegal after the recent cancellation of the EU/US Privacy Shield.
Summary
Buzzfeed has done a brilliant job creating a simple, easy to use quiz maker that’s accessible for everyone from teenagers to computer newbies.
However, the lack of lead generation and customization options and means Buzzfeed is not suitable for marketers, especially since you can’t embed and publish your quiz on your site.
Quiz Maker Review’s rating for Buzzfeed:
- Range of quiz formats: ★★★☆☆☆
- Customization options: ★☆☆☆☆
- Lead generation: ☆☆☆☆☆ (No lead generation options)
- Data privacy: ★☆☆☆☆
- Pricing: N/A
- Overall: ★☆☆☆☆
