A Michigan teenager who was recently identified as a top internet traffic generator for BuzzFeed due to her addictive online quizzes has stopped contributing to the website after learning about the company’s mass layoffs. Rachel McMahon, 19, created nearly 700 quizzes for BuzzFeed free of charge, becoming the site’s fifth biggest contributor. McMahon said Wednesday she won’t be making any more of her popular quizzes after learning of the more than 200 recent staff layoffs at the outlet—including BuzzFeed’s now-former director of Quizzes and Games, Matthew Perpetua.
In a blog post titled “How Laid Off Are You,” Perpetua wrote that quizzes are a significant driver of web traffic and revenue for BuzzFeed, and that a large portion of them are created by unpaid non-staff members such as McMahon, known as “community volunteers.” McMahon says she never knew her quizzes, some of which garnered more than 800,000 page views, were so wildly popular. “If I would have known that BuzzFeed was going to lay all these workers off who really helped me and all the other community users, I definitely wouldn’t have continued posting as crazy as I did,” she said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to hurt them.”
Read it at Detroit Free Press
