A team at BuzzFeed, the news and entertainment site, knew it had struck gold when it came across a decades-old photo of Dwayne Johnson, the musclebound wrestler and film star known as The Rock, wearing a fanny pack and dated bluejeans.
To drum up more attention, the team changed the picture’s background to a holiday theme and added “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree” in big lettering. But then, instead of posting the image to BuzzFeed, the team uploaded it to Instagram, the hugely popular photo-sharing service.
The image then took on a life of its own. Mr. Johnson quickly embraced the joke, reposting the picture to his own Instagram account. Nearly 390,000 people indicated they liked the post, and the image became the top topic of conversation on the message board site Reddit.
“We didn’t pour gas on it. We didn’t post it to the home page,” said Summer Anne Burton, editorial director of the 10-person BFF team at BuzzFeed that is dedicated to posting photos and videos to photo and messaging apps. “We just stuck it on Instagram and it took off all over the place. That’s the dream.”
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“They’re aggregating people’s attention and linking it to other forms of commerce,” said Mitch Lasky, a partner at the venture capital firm Benchmark and a Snapchat board member.
Ted Livingston, the chief executive of the messaging app Kik, based in Canada, has argued that younger users are coming of age in a world where their portal to the Internet has been the smartphone, and they are more willing to try new forms of commerce and discovery.
“We view this as being a race to be the WeChat of the West,” Mr. Livingston, whose app is predominantly popular with young North American audiences, said in November. “For us, it’s a once-in-humanity great opportunity.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Apps for Messaging Are Trending. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
