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Introduction

I have spent countless hours wasting away on Sporcle, a website where users can create quizzes that anybody can play to test their knowledge on a variety of niche topics. Finding quizzes that are fun and challenging can sometimes be a struggle. One place I like to look for good quizzes is the “Editor Picks” tab on their website that shows some of the favorite quizzes of Sporcle’s editors.

Questions I Intend To Answer

After scraping the data from the Editor’s Picks table, I want to explore what kinds of quizzes that the editors like to include in their picks. How much variety is there in their picks? Do they favor any categories? Is there anything new creators can do to get picked by the editors? I will explore these inquieries by wrangling the data I have scraped and making visualizations to fuel my analysis.

Initial Analysis

The editors pick quizzes from a wide variety of categories, but some categories get picked from more than others. The holiday, religion, science, and television categories are picked the least, and the movies, sports, history, and music categories are picked the most. This is surface level, so to narrow it down, I will filter the dataset to only include quizzes that were made by creators who were picked to be on the editors picks list more than 3 times.

Looking at the quizzes made by creators picked more than 3 times, there seems to be a large favoring towards the movie category. This means that out of the creators on the editor’s picks list, those that were picked the most tend to make quizzes about movies more than the creators that weren’t picked as often. Out of all the quizzes picked, 47 of them were in the movies category. But 35 of those were made by creators who were picked the most. This tells me that the market for quizzes about movies is saturated by a handful of creators.

Number of Plays

The quizzes selected by Sporcle’s editors range from just 100 plays, to nearly 45,000 plays. Which categories tend to get not as many plays? Which get a lot of plays? The median number of plays for quizzes in the list is 1086, so quizzes with less plays than that will be in the small number of plays category, while those with more than 1086 plays will be in the large number of plays category.

Of the quizzes with a small number of plays, the movies category has the most, followed by just for fun, entertainment, and history. Of the quizzes with a large numer of plays, sports has the most, followed by music, geography, and movies. This shows which categories are most popular out of the quizzes in the editor’s picks. Sports is a very popular category, so it’s no surprise that out of all the sports quizzes, almost all of them have a large number of plays.

The category that has by far the most average plays is geography with over 11,000 plays on average. It’s not the most picked category, but the geography quizzes that do get chosen receive a lot of plays. This must mean that in order for the editors to select a geography quiz, it has to be very popular. Sporcle is great for quizzing yourself on geography, and it’s one of my most played categories.

Letters in Quiz Title

The first thing I look at before choosing a quiz to waste my time on is the title of that quiz. Here I just want to explore if super long titles have any effect on the number of plays a quiz gets.

## `geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'

The quizzes that get the most plays have titles about 15 to 30 characters long. The smooth fitted line shows that around 26 characters would be the ideal length of a title, but this graph doesn’t really say all that much, as there are many other factors that play into users choosing quizzes, some beyond the control of the creator.

Conclusion

To determine what new creators could do to get picked by the editors, I will first look for categories that have a low average number of plays and also look for categories that the editors tend to choose the most. I noticed that the entertainment category has one of the lowest average number of plays, and it has a large number of selections with a small number of plays. A new Sporcle creator probably won’t get that many people who play their quizzes right away, so making quizzes in categories that aren’t played as much as the more popular categories could improve chances of being selected by the editors. So creating quizzes in the entertainment category might be the best option. At the end of the day, Sporcle is about having a way to kill time in a fun and engaging way, so making quizzes should be about having fun, and spreading knowledge.