Makeitstranger.com by the numbers

Caution: graphs & “butt stuff” ahead

The other week, the creative team at Nelson Cash hacked together the Stranger Things type generator makeitstranger.com you may have seen overwhelm your Twitter feed or Facebook Timeline. The idea for the site sprouted from an article penned by one of our designers that helped propel Stranger Things into TV’s most talked about title font. It’s clear we’re big fans of the show, but at Nelson Cash we’re even bigger fans of experimenting & hacking together quick prototypes.

Given two input boxes and a spooky type treatment, what will people enter?

You naughty, naughty kids

A bubble chart of the most submitted words, generated using Google Analytics API & d3.js.

It turns out people entered “butt stuff” and “manda nudes”. There were also quite a few references to Harambe, Donald Trump, Pokemon Go, and of course RIP Barb.

This graph shows the most popular words entered at the peak of the site’s popularity.

For those inquiring minds: “Manda Nudes” means “Send Nudes” in Portuguese. After a little research, it turns out many Brazilians love Netflix over regular cable. The site was also posted on a Brazilian ‘Stranger Things’ fan site, which helped “manda nudes” rise to the top. Over time, the graphs balance out, and “fuck you” and “star wars” were the most popular entries overall.

Interesting stats

“Things” was entered over 50,000 times
“Fuck” was entered over 26,700 times
“Dick” was entered over 11,900 times
“Butt” was entered over 9,500 times
“Harambe” was entered over 9,300 times
“Nudes” was entered over 4,800 times
“Trump” was entered over 3,500 times
“Clinton” was only entered 523 times
People loved typing in their own name
Facebook was the #1 referral, responsible for 12% of total sessions, followed by Twitter (10%) and The Verge (5%)
The most shared pages were your mom doesn’t love you, deep thoughts, stranger things, and bye felicia.

It’s fun to see the range between serious entries like “Adult Videos”, which plays on the style of type referencing neon signs, versus “Titty Sprinkles” which is closer to just, ‘What’s the funniest thing I can enter?’ There were, of course, plenty of references to the show itself, including Demogorgon (along with a bunch of misspelled versions like ‘Demagargon’ and ‘Dermagergens’.) Barb & Winona were popular entries, as well.

Now, let’s take at how this thing rolled out.

The snowball

A visualization of referrals over time.

On Wednesday, August 16th, 2016, we posted our announcement to Instagram, Twitter, /r/webdev, /r/strangerthings, sidebar.io, Hacker News, and Designer News. Within minutes, we had a few hundred people interacting with the site, and a small snowball rolled into a very big one.

Muzli was the first big organic referral. After that, people started tweeting their images and posting to their Facebook. Then The Verge posted it. Then The Next Web posted it. Then Product Hunt changed their Twitter header image. Then Adweek called us for an interview. Hoefler&Co even tweeted it #socialgoals.

It went viral overnight, and 24 hours after launch we were running our $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet at over 135% CPU.

Can you tell when we scaled the droplet?

A quick 2 minutes of downtime, and we killed that spike right at 1:00 pm and balanced out to a much more reasonable CPU usage. At the peak of its popularity, there were over 5,000 people using the site at a time — just 26 hours after launch.

The most shared pages at the peak of the site’s popularity.

Most of these page views came from Facebook and Twitter, as media sites like The Verge and Product Hunt simply linked to the base URL.

Snapshot of overall sessions. Wednesday, August 17th, 2016 just after lunchtime CST was the peak.

Makeitstranger.com was a passion project and team collaborative effort between the super smart and talented people at Nelson Cash.

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