“What 80s TV star are you?  What Golden Girl are you?”  Have you seen these quizzes in your Facebook feed?  Hard to miss them really, they are all over the place.  What are they all about and why are we seeing so many of these?  Do your Facebook really give a hoot what Disney character you are most like?  Or what Happy Days character you most closely resemble.

For example “What city should you actually live in” or “What age are you really”  People quickly self-identify, especially those who are most like you because they are suddenly curious in the results.  They want to see how accurate the magic internet can be.

Well, let’s think about this for a moment.  You see the results of a quiz that your friend posted, so what is your next step?  Oh, you better take the quiz yourself, you know you’re the Fonz!  So what do you do?  You click on it and it takes you to another website, right?

I’ll say it again…it TAKES you to ANOTHER website.  Are you getting the idea?  The whole idea here is to get you to head over to another website and click on their other quizzes and most importantly…their ads.  Oh, no you get it?  I guess there had to be a hidden agenda somewhere, right?  Absolutely right.  It’s really nothing more than a big marketing scheme.

Is there anything wrong with that?  Not at all, if you are finding some entertainment value in it, then the marketing geniuses are doing what they were hired to do…re-route you to their website. Pretty harmless, quiz away if you like and I will continue to scroll past them, thank you very much.

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