Nelson, a golf management major at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, was inspired by Weird Twitter and had amassed a 10,000-person following on his personal Twitter account. In 2015, he and a friend were at an Applebee's, when he set up a Twitter poll from his personal account asking if he should create a dog rating account; the positive response led him to create the account, which combines cute animals with irreverent snark. WeRateDogs asks people to send photos of their dogs, then tweets selected photos rating and a humorous comment. Dogs are rated on a scale of one to ten, but are invariably given ratings in excess of the maximum, such as "13/10". Popular posts are re-posted on Instagram and Facebook. In 2017, Nelson started a spin-off Twitter account, Thoughts of Dog. The account also has a branded game, a popular online store, and a book that was published in Fall, 2017. Nelson and his team of four receive 800 to 1,000 submissions daily and work to narrow them down to about one high-quality piece of dog content per day. A standout product from Nelson is the WeRateDogs Calendar, available in standard and desk sizes. Each day of the desk calendar features a different dog and a rating above 10.
Impact
As of December 2018, the Twitter account has nearly 7.6 million followers, and Nelson sees 30,000 likes on a post as being viral. His most popular post was of a dog marching in the 2017 Women's March, which was retweeted more than 50,000 times and favorited 134,000 times. The account's language has spawned an Internet language about "doggos" and "puppers". A 2016 interaction with another Twitter user, when Nelson purposefully misnamed him "Brent" as is common in Weird Twitter, spawned the catchphrase "They're good dogs, Brent", which became one of the biggest memes of 2016. In 2017, the account was endorsed by J.K. Rowling. WeRateDogs has successfully used the account to raise money for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as well as individual GoFundMe campaigns. In October 2017, Nelson released a book based on the Twitter account, #WeRateDogs: The Most Hilarious and Adorable Pups You’ve Ever Seen.
Copyright issues
WeRateDogs brought media attention to copyright and suspension policies on Twitter when the popular account was closed twice because of spurious Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints brought by competitors and unknown accounts. "For Nelson and many of his fans," wrote The Washington Post, "the whole ordeal has raised some serious questions about whether it’s simply too easy for pranksters to successfully remove content from the Internet by abusing the copyright claim process, particularly on Twitter."
