told-you.so Exploded in Popularity

by Jeff on February 10, 2022

At the end of January, I got an email asking how to delete a message from told-you.so. By design, no one can delete a message. That email got me wondering, though, how did anyone find the website? I didn't advertise it at all, and it seems unlikely that someone would have stumbled across it.

I connected to the API and checked the logs. For reference, these message IDs are sequential, so you can imagine my shock when I saw the last log had ID 4378. My first thought was that someone was just flooding the DB with random messages, so I thought I'd at least check what was filling the database. (There is an option to encrypt the message client-side, so there's not really a point in checking the encrypted messages.)

SELECT * FROM messages WHERE NOT encrypted ORDER BY id DESC;

The few messages I combed through seemed to be legitimate users. In fact, to my surprise, they were all fairly light-hearted and it seemed that the users were using the service as intended.

Obviously, the next step was to check Reddit, Google Trends, TikTok, and more for references to told-you.so. Even though Google kept interpreting the domain name as the phrase "told you so", the searches all turned up negative.

Alright, fine. If I can't figure out where the users are coming from, I can at least figure out when they started appearing. At the time, you could put in your email to receive a link to your message, and I was using Mailgun to send the emails. Thankfully, Mailgun has a beautiful and informative dashboard.

The screenshot doesn't show it, but that first data point is 68. That means we went from storing 0 messages a day to 68 messages a day. Oh, and that happened overnight.

Obviously, 68 messages doesn't guarantee 68 users. One user may have stored 3 messages, meaning only 65 users storing 68 messages. But still, that is remarkable growth to be happening overnight.

I whipped up a small Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to cover me on the off-chance that someone put a bomb threat or whatever on my server. There's no endpoint for uploading images (by design), so I wasn't worried about users uploading images and videos that I could actually get in trouble for hosting. Again, the messages I saw in the DB were fairly tame, but you never know what the end user is going to do.

While I was poking around the DB, I found references to BoredButton, and I realized that was where all the traffic was coming from. I had forgotten I applied to put my website on BoredButton a few weeks before, and it looks like they accepted it.

The next step was to figure out what was going on while the users were on the page. I wasn't keen on the idea of using Google Analytics, but I figured Google Analytics could give me good information about visitors, and then my analytics platform could give me individual user information.

I got to work building an analytics platform. The goal was to make something versatile that I could reuse for other projects, and I think it came out really good. Obviously there's no documentation for how to use it, but there is a public stats page at queue.bot/stats/toldyouso.

You'll notice there's a pie graph showing how many users run adblockers. Any guesses why I'm collecting that metric? If you said "to run ads," you'd be correct.

Vercel is an amazing host with incredibly generous limits to get new projects going. Those free limits come at a price: you have to pay $20/mo for "commercial" pages, which include pages that run ads. The price is not unreasonable, and it's a flat rate for any number of commercial pages. I needed to figure out if I could serve enough ads to clear the $20/mo, hence the reason I started collecting the statistic. It turns out 1,800 daily visitors storing almost 400 messages a day would, in fact, pay for a $20/mo hosting plan, even if about 25% of them run adblockers.

I applied for Google AdSense 4 times, and was denied all 4 times. The first 2 times were my fault, because they said their crawler couldn't reach my website, so it was considered "offline". I ended up adding a robots.txt and explicitly allowing all crawlers, and that fixed the issue. However, I was still denied due to "low-value content," and while that's probably a fair assessment, the website is getting a lot of traffic. Hopefully I can get it approved soon, but until then, I'll be using Vercel's free plan and not hosting ads.

Overall, the project has been really fun, even if it hasn't been profitable. I'm paying about $3/mo for the API host, and I use the API for other things besides told-you.so, so I'm fine losing that money for the next few months. My plan is to make more stupid websites like this, get a cumulative 300,000 pageviews a month, then earn the right to talk with a Google ad specialist (i.e. a real person) so I can convince them to let me serve ads. told-you.so's numbers indicate I should only need 2 more websites, because told-you.so is getting 100,000 pageviews a month. That's an awesome feeling.

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