BuzzFeed just launched a Tinder for pets. Here's why that's a shrewd move.
BuzzFeed, purveyor of all things shareable, has released a new app and it is as simplistic and entertainment-driven as "Which Teletubby Are You?"—a real quiz you can take right now on the site. Straightforwardly titled "Cute or Not," the brightly colored app is best described as Tinder for pets. Users swipe right (for "Cute") or left (for "Not Cute"), earning badges along the way and uploading pictures of their own pets. And at this juncture, that's about all the app does.
"We wanted to keep the interaction pretty light," says Chris Johanesen, BuzzFeed's vice president of product and an eight-year veteran of the media company. "It was this idea running in the back of our head—especially in the last year or two as apps are more and more important—that this would make just a really fun, amazing app."
Born from an eponymous feature on the main site, Cute or Not is BuzzFeed's second app in its nearly 10-year history and the beginning of what, according to Johaneson, will be a "year of apps" for the viral content creator.
"What makes this experiment exciting is that most of our experiments are about creating pieces of shareable media," says Johanesen. "Whereas apps really are going to be about word-of-mouth and the people who get excited, download it, and evangelize it. So, the dynamics are definitely a little different than what we're used to. But this definitely won't be the last app.""
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