When Matthew Nelson began rating dogs on Twitter under the handle @dog_rates, he didn’t set out to make a living on it.
But since starting the account as a college freshman in 2015, Nelson has made WeRateDogs his full-time job. He dropped out of school last year and brings in a six-figure salary for himself rating dogs on the internet and selling merchandise.
‘I was trying to make a few more people smile’
“Cute animal accounts have existed on the internet forever, but no one was really taking advantage of the character space above those cute photos,” Nelson told Yahoo Finance’s Midday Movers.
After gaining about 100,000 followers in the first month, Nelson knew he was on to something.
“I was trying to make a few more people smile,” he said. “And then it just turned into a lot more.”
Nelson’s account now has more than 7.2 million followers and receives about 800 submissions per day. For the Dogfather, which is what Dog Rates’ loyalists affectionately call Nelson, the crowdsourced content fuels an operation dedicated to highlighting the wonderfulness of dogs.
WeRateDogs adopts a very specific vernacular that has recently filtered into other corners of the internet. NPR last year coined the term “DoggoLingo” to refer to the phrases that have become popular among cute animal accounts such as WeRateDogs and the Facebook group Dogspotting.
“Some dogs are doggos, some are puppers, and others may even be pupperinos. There are corgos and clouds, fluffers and floofs, woofers and boofers. The chunky ones are thicc, and the thin ones are long bois,” NPR explained.
‘It would have been pretty dumb not to try to monetize it’
Around this time last year, Nelson made the decision to withdraw from Campbell University in North Carolina and fully commit to the account. Nelson has scored partnership deals with big brands such as Cottonelle and Disney in addition to opening a webstore with WeRateDogs-branded merchandise.
Nelson explained that his initial goal “wasn’t to monetize this. But … once I saw that we were building a following, it would have been pretty dumb not to try to monetize it. So we started with an e-commerce store, and my base was very receptive to that idea.”
Nelson credits the success of the account to the fans, especially how committed they are to the Dog Rates brand. “We just took some of the phrases that my audience had shown us that they’d enjoyed,” he said, “and we put them on hats and shirts.”