Ask HN: Our site went viral in latin america and we're not sure what to do | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Our site went viral in latin america and we're not sure what to do

11 pointserikrothoff8 comments

Our site (https://www.kickassapp.com) has gone viral in Latin America. Normally we see ~1000 unique visitors per day but yesterday we got 140 000, and today 50 000. Mostly from Mexico, Colombia, etc etc. Google Analytics really doesn't show a definitive "referrer zero", and can't find any publications online mentioning it. So we have no idea what happened. Our best guess is radio, tv or just word of mouth.

We don't have any ads, we do have an iOS app that is paid and also just launched a venture into a "SaaS" model.

However: we have received absolutely zero extra revenue from this event. Also the buzz on our Facebook page is pretty much none-existent. Usually when the site gets attention we at least get some e-mails from users about how cool it was etc. I have received nothing. And if it weren't for pingdom saying that we're intermittently down, I would not have noticed myself.

I'm having a hard time figuring out if it's due to the traffic being bogus or just simply cultural differences. I have no idea how to approach this. I don't speak Spanish and don't know where everyone is coming from and where they are.

Also in terms of revenue it feels a bit sad to not receive anything for this. We used to have Google AdSense, but due to some poor decisions and later some fairly dubious warnings we got permanently banned from the network. And as ad networks go it seems to be the only one that isn't 100% a scam and people actually use. The appeal process has so far not yielded anything so I've given up that.

The SaaS offering is new and only has one customer (basically it came to existence because someone asked for it). The iOS app is fairly old and not had enough love for it to thrive I think.

In any case, I would love to come in contact with the users that are enjoying the bookmarklet currently, but I can't really find the forum to do this.

What would you HN'ers do, and what have you done in similar scenarios?

Hi form Argentina!

[The country is Colombia, not Columbia]

I made a fast search in Google and I got:

https://dante021blog.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/kick-ass-app/ [This is a nice blog post about your app. I have no idea if this is a popular page or not. I guess no.]

https://www.itzlambo.com/2016/05/top-10-sitios-web-mas-asomb... [This is a listicle that include your app. I have no idea if this is a popular page or not. I guess no.]

https://boards.las.leagueoflegends.com/es/c/off-topic-y-tema... [This is a post in a forum about your app. It has only 5 upvotes, so it's definitively not popular.]

I hope you can read some of this and get some ideas to improve your search.

Can you see if the visitors use iOS or Android?

Most people here use Android or Windows, and very few buy apps.

Hi there! Thanks for the correction. It basically only works on desktop, but looking at Google Analytics I can see mostly Android. Is Windows Phone fairly widespread?

The whole iOS app endeavour is an interesting story on it's own, but I just want to clarify that I'm not hoping for gold and riches from that (I initially thought it would, but that was almost 6 years ago and I didn't know how business worked :).

Windows Phone penetration on Mexico is quite low, but maybe it is popular on another latin american countries.

Honestly I can tell you that for technology comparing different latin american countries is quite apples and oranges. The countries might seen similar but they are really not.

I am based on Mexico and never heard of your site before this. If they are real visits, one possible explanation that comes to mind is that it's holidays (Semana santa) here which also applies to other latin american countries so maybe just people just want to play.

As an extra thought, maybe it became viral by sharing over Whatsapp, so I am pretty sure seeing referrals if you didn't make a campaign it will be pretty hard to pinpoint.

You can try looking at your web server logs, we started using https://goaccess.io/ a while back and has given us great insights of our actual traffic and sudden spikes.

"due to some poor decisions and later some fairly dubious warnings we got permanently banned"

Do you mind elaborating???

That's super vague language - There's a whole book in there!

It takes A LOT to get permanently banned. How many warning did you get? How serious were the warnings?

Absolutely :D

Initially we had AdSense on the page itself, kickassapp.com. A banner on the startpage and some sub-pages. This went well, we made maybe 100 USD a month on the traffic we got. Then one day I decided to add ads within the game. (The menu you see is an iframe to our site. So it is on our domain)

It being a bookmarklet you can play it on any page. This worked fairly well and we didn't get warnings for a while. Then when people decided to shoot up porn sites we got a warning saying you are not allowed to show ads on explicit content. I did nothing and the warning went away, presumably because nobody played on a porn site again for a while. Then we got another warning when this happened. After that I decided to remove the in-game ads because it wasn't worth the trouble.

I thought that would solve the issue. I'm not sure if we were under the microscope after that or it's just something that AdSense is fairly strict towards but: We have a highscore list on the front page that links to pages people played on. This was not filtered, so if someone played on a porn site (or torrent site) we would then have an outbound link towards explicit content. This we got a warning for. I kinda panicked and removed the links on the highscore widget on the frontpage. (The warning did say something to the tune of "You have outbound links to banned content"). However I totally forgot that we also list on the profile page of a player the sites they play on. So we had outbound links there as well to explicit content. Before I realized that we got a permanent ban from AdSense saying that we did not listen to their warnings.

The appeal process has so far not gotten us in touch with a human to explain that we do never intend to this again and that we're sorry and super willing to fix any issues. I assume we're not worth the trouble :) Also I think "ass" in the name is hinder here :)

Us putting ads when playing on other pages was a bad decision on our end I agree. The outbound links were dubious in my opinion since we have a lot of user generated content and policing that was just hard. I'm not sure if putting a "rel=nofollow" would be better... Never did get an answer to that one.

In terms of other ad networks we tried I can just say it's a shady world.

Fishy. Check your logs and a/b test to see if these are human users.

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