On November 15, 2015, Matt Nelson, a 19-year-old golf management major at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, launched the @dog_rates Twitter account5. Nelson had been inspired by Weird Twitter and noticed that any joke involving dogs on his personal account (which had around 10,000 followers) performed way better than his other content6. He was sitting at an Applebee's with friends when he set up a Twitter poll asking if he should create a dog rating account. The response was positive, so he posted his first rating right there at the restaurant, featuring the dog of the friend he was having dinner with3. That first post pulled 534 retweets and over 2,500 likes4.

"I got addicted to trying to make people laugh in that constrained character space," Nelson later told CNBC. "Every time I would post a picture of my dog or any content that had to do with dogs, it would do much better than my other content. That signaled that the internet loves dogs just as much as I did"3.

By that night, Nelson was flooded with "hundreds" of messages from dog owners asking for their pups to be featured3. He promoted the account from his personal Twitter, and within a week, @dog_rates had surpassed his personal follower count3. Three weeks after launch, New York Magazine ran a feature calling it a "weird dog-rating Twitter account" that scored a "10/10"10.

We Rate Dogs crossed from internet joke to mainstream media fixture faster than most social media accounts. Coverage in New York Magazine, Esquire, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Complex, and HuffPost treated it as a new model for internet comedy and entrepreneurship10133.

The account popularized DoggoLingo, the cutesy internet dialect full of words like "doggo," "pupper," "floofer," and "puppo," which spread beyond Twitter into everyday speech5. A 2017 Esquire profile described Nelson as "the figurehead of a very 2017 breed of humor that seamlessly blends two distinct fixtures of the internet: relentlessly irreverent snark and genuine appreciation of adorable animals"13.

We Rate Dogs' fundraising work gave the account real-world impact beyond laughs. The $1.3 million raised in 2020 alone for over 170 dogs in need demonstrated the power of a trusted social media following when pointed at a cause3.

Nelson's business model, built on merchandise, branded content, and genuine audience love rather than shock value or controversy, showed a viable path for creator-driven social media businesses. Brand partnerships with Disney, Netflix, and Budweiser proved the account's mainstream commercial appeal3.

The account also inadvertently became a case study in DMCA abuse when it was twice suspended due to fake copyright claims, drawing Washington Post coverage of the broader vulnerability in Twitter's content moderation systems5.

Nelson's path from college student tweeting dog jokes to running a legitimate media business is one of the more unusual entrepreneurship stories of the social media era. Born in October 1996 in northern Virginia, Nelson underwent open-heart surgery three days after birth to repair a congenital defect13. His family later moved to West Virginia. He was intensely competitive from childhood, and that drive carried into his approach to Twitter, which he treated "as a game to be won"13.

By 2016, Nelson was already fielding offers to buy the @dog_rates handle, some for "tens of thousands of dollars"3. Instead of selling, he dropped out of college before his junior year and moved in with his parents in West Virginia to work on We Rate Dogs full-time. His father, an executive director at a law firm in Charleston, helped manage the business as it grew3.

Nelson built out a small team: part-time animators, designers, photographers, and videographers handling the merch operation, plus full-time employees including a business manager to sort through the 800 to 1,000 daily submissions5. The account generates six figures in annual revenue, split roughly 50-50 between merchandise and brand partnerships3. We Rate Dogs has done branded content deals with Disney (creating "Lady and the Tramp"-themed posts), Netflix, and Budweiser3.

The account's language played a significant role in popularizing DoggoLingo, the internet dialect that refers to dogs as "doggos" and "puppers"5. Esquire noted that Nelson had "helped popularize" this vocabulary, which spread from Twitter into physical-world usage13. Nelson's rating tiers also developed their own lore: 11 through 13 were "really arbitrary," but 14/10 was a prestigious category reserved for dogs the community held "in high regard," typically heroic dogs. He even created a Twitter Moment collecting all the 14/10 ratings6. The first 15/10 was given to a dog named Todd who saved his owner from a rattlesnake8.

The account wasn't without controversy. In May 2017, after President Trump's "covfefe" tweet, Nelson joked about it by rating a dog "named Dewey (pronounced 'covfefe')" and then created a "Covfefe AF" hat to sell on his website4. He announced he'd donate half the proceeds to Planned Parenthood14. This angered followers who supported the account but not the organization. Nelson apologized, which then angered left-leaning followers who saw it as caving to the right14. He ultimately did donate to Planned Parenthood11. The Daily Dot covered the ordeal, noting the absurdity of a 20-year-old who posts dog pictures becoming a political lightning rod14.

A second controversy hit in June 2018 when Twitter user @marybwagner revealed that a dog named Kanan, which is of Arabic origin, had been renamed "George" in its We Rate Dogs post4. Wagner accused Nelson of "white-washing" the name to improve engagement. Nelson defended himself by saying "the name plays a massive role in how well the post does" and that he "always checks with the owner," pointing out he'd also changed a dog named "Pablo" to "Pipsy" in a popular post11. After significant backlash, he declared he would no longer change any dog names4. The incident was covered by Slate and the Daily Dot11.

Beyond entertainment, We Rate Dogs became a genuine force for animal welfare. Nelson began sharing GoFundMe campaigns for dogs in need every Friday. In 2020 alone, the account helped raise $1.3 million through over 170 fundraisers3. One case involved Paulina Tomlinson, who owed nearly $20,000 in medical bills after her rescue Pitbull Chico was hit by a car. After Nelson posted the campaign, it raised $18,840 in just 30 minutes3.

Nelson expanded across platforms: an Instagram account with nearly 2 million followers, a Facebook page with over half a million, and a TikTok account3. He launched a second Twitter account called Thoughts of Dog, parodying "dog feelings," which attracted 3.5 million followers and spawned its own book published in October 20203. The original We Rate Dogs account also produced a book in fall 2017, titled *#WeRateDogs: The Most Hilarious and Adorable Pups You've Ever Seen*5. A card game followed in 2019, released by Chronicle Books for $25, letting players rate dogs on characteristics like "floof," "boopability," and "zoom"9.

The account brought unexpected media attention to copyright abuse on Twitter when it was suspended twice due to fraudulent DMCA complaints filed by competitors and unknown accounts6. The Washington Post reported that the incidents "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"5.

As of December 2020, the Twitter account had nearly 9 million followers5. By 2021, the combined social media following across platforms was close to 12 million3. Nelson, who adopted a 10-year-old German Shepherd named Doug, kept the account running with a small but dedicated team3. His most viral single post was a dog marching in the 2017 Women's March with a sign reading "I march for my mom," which was retweeted more than 50,000 times and favorited 134,000 times5.