thetroll
Newbie
- Sep 3, 2015
- 33
- 22
So, I stumbled upon what appears to be a stupid simple social media method for generating traffic, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's been extensively discussed here before, but I have no idea what to call it. The reason I'm posting, as the title suggests, is that I'm confused on how exactly the person responsible for this is pulling this off.
As you can see in the picture above, it's quite simple: share an image that tells users to add '/yourname' to the end of a domain name in the comments, to find out something about themselves. And as you can see, it clearly works, with over 200 comments on this particular post, on this particular group (50k+ members in total).
Then, user clicks on the link that's generated in the comments, and they are greeted with something like this:
(Note: my ad-blocker was on, but on the page itself, there's at least 3 ads on the page [to the left, top, and right of the main image on the page] as well as pop-ups)
However, this is part of what's confusing me. When you reload the page (with the same URL), you're greeted with a different picture, like such:
I figure this is probably something simple, but seeing as I've never run a website outside of a shitty Wix site years ago, I can't - for the life of me - figure out what's going on here. I've even tried downloading the page and analyzing the source code. It appears to be server-side, as refreshing the picture in the static copy of the page I saved results in the same image over and over again.
Now, there's one other thing that's bothering me: the trailing url (the /yourname bit). You can literally type in anything in place of 'yourname', including 'yourname', and it takes that string and inserts it into the webpage. Here's an example:
As you can see, it doesn't matter what 'yourname' is, barring special characters, which just seem to be returned as blank.
Another thing that MIGHT be of notability: underneath the picture and the ads, is a random article about cloud-computing. Just from a quick glance, the article doesn't appear to be spun, and no external links are contained within it. The page that loads from the 'Continue' button is just more of these quizzes, so it doesn't appear to be related to anything on this website at all.
There also doesn't seem to be any ads contained in the area the article is in, and it appears on every iteration of the page that I've tried (including other similar sites, set up exactly like this but with a different name/skin). And before you ask, yes, I've checked without my adblocker being on, I just didn't feel like turning it off when I took the screenshots. Would this be to add a buffer of "legitimacy" for facebook or something (if that even makes a lick of sense)? Surely, this isn't a Google friendly method, so I don't understand what the point of the added article is, considering it has nothing to do with the original content (in this case, "measuring your level of craziness").
How do you do this? It seems simple enough, the page layout, advertising, etc., and I can think of a couple different twists to this that could add more value to it, but how would you go about creating a simple webpage like this?
Any help would greatly be appreciated
As you can see in the picture above, it's quite simple: share an image that tells users to add '/yourname' to the end of a domain name in the comments, to find out something about themselves. And as you can see, it clearly works, with over 200 comments on this particular post, on this particular group (50k+ members in total).
Then, user clicks on the link that's generated in the comments, and they are greeted with something like this:
(Note: my ad-blocker was on, but on the page itself, there's at least 3 ads on the page [to the left, top, and right of the main image on the page] as well as pop-ups)
However, this is part of what's confusing me. When you reload the page (with the same URL), you're greeted with a different picture, like such:
I figure this is probably something simple, but seeing as I've never run a website outside of a shitty Wix site years ago, I can't - for the life of me - figure out what's going on here. I've even tried downloading the page and analyzing the source code. It appears to be server-side, as refreshing the picture in the static copy of the page I saved results in the same image over and over again.
Now, there's one other thing that's bothering me: the trailing url (the /yourname bit). You can literally type in anything in place of 'yourname', including 'yourname', and it takes that string and inserts it into the webpage. Here's an example:
As you can see, it doesn't matter what 'yourname' is, barring special characters, which just seem to be returned as blank.
Another thing that MIGHT be of notability: underneath the picture and the ads, is a random article about cloud-computing. Just from a quick glance, the article doesn't appear to be spun, and no external links are contained within it. The page that loads from the 'Continue' button is just more of these quizzes, so it doesn't appear to be related to anything on this website at all.
There also doesn't seem to be any ads contained in the area the article is in, and it appears on every iteration of the page that I've tried (including other similar sites, set up exactly like this but with a different name/skin). And before you ask, yes, I've checked without my adblocker being on, I just didn't feel like turning it off when I took the screenshots. Would this be to add a buffer of "legitimacy" for facebook or something (if that even makes a lick of sense)? Surely, this isn't a Google friendly method, so I don't understand what the point of the added article is, considering it has nothing to do with the original content (in this case, "measuring your level of craziness").
How do you do this? It seems simple enough, the page layout, advertising, etc., and I can think of a couple different twists to this that could add more value to it, but how would you go about creating a simple webpage like this?
Any help would greatly be appreciated
