The loft was multilevel, with stairs next to the living room going up to the bedrooms above. Hegstad had the room at the top of the stairs, “like he was king of the jungle.” Lilley decorated his room with a wall decal of Notorious B.I.G.’s head and a Tupac Shakur lyric: “You know my momma used to tell me / if you can’t find something to live for / then you best find something to die for.” Lilley and Hegstad both loved rap, and they played it all day long, so loud it echoed through the walls. “They were like my little brother’s age,” Hegstad later told me. “They were cool. Semi-introverted, but fun.”

At 19, neither Lilley nor Greenfield were old enough to drink; they couldn’t enjoy the free beer on tap at the WeWork office they rented, much less get into clubs. Instead they spent their off-hours playing video games and ordering Chinese food. There were parties at the loft, on the rooftop, but the guest list was selective—either people they worked with or could possibly work with, because Hegstad, Greenfield recalled, didn’t “associate with the plebes.” Lilley discovered Hegstad had a talent for networking, a lot of people did in L.A. There were friendly people in the city, for sure, but when Lilley met other people in his business, like the people at the roof parties, they always seemed to want something. One guest was a British YouTube star who Lilley and Greenfield found repellent.

Greenfield: He was like, “Wow, this is such a great view. I want to come and fuck a girl up here. I want to set up a screen.” Lilley: He was like, “I’d smash every night on this roof.” Greenfield: And then someone was like, “But all those neighbors can see you.” Because if you’re on our roof, there’s at any given time hundreds of people that can see you. And he’s like, “I don’t care. I’d set up a screen and broadcast it.” Lilley: And not to mention the police in their helicopters. That’s a crime. Exposure.

So-Relatable and its associated blogs had a good summer, and in September they made $24,296.26 with Google AdSense. With traffic on the rise, Hegstad suggested they move to DoubleClick, Google’s premium ad network, and the move made October their biggest monthly payout to date: $54,269.33. Lilley and Greenfield’s tax returns showed they made $249,000 that year. The three of them started to think about building a company that would connect brands to Tumblr blogs and cut out the middleman—or better yet, become the middleman and take a cut. (“Everyone who’s been a publisher has had that thought,” said Lilley.) It would be a platform on which social media accounts could find advertising campaigns to post on their site, and they would charge a portion of the revenue for the convenience. They’d call the company Exposely.

But at the end of 2013, disaster: AdSense banned Lilley and Greenfield just as they were due a large check—Greenfield estimated it was $50,000. Months later, an anonymous person claiming to be a Google employee would post a supposed tell-all on Pastebin, a text-sharing site used primarily by coders, claiming that AdSense intentionally bans people just before big checks are due. (Many tech blogs suspect the confession is a fake.) A class action lawsuit was filed against Google in 2014, and Business Insider noted, “Google often behaves so mysteriously that many advertisers and publishers will actually welcome the suit: It may finally shed some light on exactly how and why Google kicks web sites out of its vast, $60 billion-a-year advertising system.” The class action case was dismissed in early 2015, as was a similar suit, in which Google canceled a site’s account when it allegedly owed $535,000, then later reinstated it, but didn’t pay the money. “It was a huge wake-up call,” Lilley said. “It felt like working somewhere, putting in a lot of work, and you show up one day and they throw all your shit in a box and they’re like ‘get the fuck out’ and they won’t even say why you were fired.”

Still, they continued with Exposely, sometimes working 60 hours a week. The pair hardly ventured outside the loft. Hegstad hired a developer, Greenfield worked on support, while Lilley recruited bloggers from Tumblr, focusing on users with the biggest accounts. Through So-Relatable they’d met many users with high follower counts—the same kids who were trading promotional links in the Facebook groups. Lilley would eventually recruit a few hundred kids, mostly teen humor blogs, whose combined Tumblrs would total an estimated 35 million followers. His recruits included the biggest teen comedy blog of all: Pizza.

Jess Miller was 16 in the spring of 2014. She had just weathered the racism controversy and now had more than half a million followers. David Karp had been following her for a year. Her boyfriend started a Tumblr with the user name Moistbottom, and while they didn’t really write about their relationship, they were the subject of intense fan interest. (When an anonymous user asked Moistbottom, “how far have you and Jess gone?” he responded, “TO THE BEACH.”)

Lilley and Greenfield were unabashed fans of Miller; they respected her social strategy and were quick to recall her best posts. Lilley sent her a Facebook message the day he arrived on the West Coast: “i’m in LA!” Even before Exposely, they’d had a business relationship: Lilley and Greenfield paid her $10 to reblog three posts to her huge audience. Miller was “very fair with her prices,” Lilley said. “It was like buying popularity, but it was real.” When Miller had started making money off of her Tumblr, her mother had to create the PayPal account for her because she was under 18, but the bank account was solely Miller’s. Her mother told me at her peak her daughter was making $2,800 to $8,400 a week in U.S. dollars—more than she herself earned as a Melbourne-area real estate agent.

In Facebook messages, Lilley congratulated Miller on reaching new milestones. When she hit 800,000 followers, he wrote, “i’m just waiting for you to hit a million, not if but when. just keep doing your thing you obvi don’t need me to say that to you I just am sometimes blown away like woah so yeah.” Miller was always gracious: “thank you!! hahaha i rly hope i get 1 mill cos that’d be crazy wow.” In April 2014, Lilley messaged Miller about a new way to make money: “I’m signing up people, would love for you to be one of our first publishers on exposely!”

Exposely had a major selling point for kids in a similar position to So-Relatable: Its Google AdSense account would be a way for teens who’d been banned to still make money from ads. Exposely offered its publishers both pay per click and pay per conversion. The pay-per-click scheme worked like this: Exposely set up three garbage content sites with mindless slide shows—14 Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses—called Trending.ly, Styles.ly, and Eats.ly. There were ads on each page of the slide show, and the kids would post a couple slides from the site on their Tumblrs, with the right headline and text along the lines of omg this is so funny. The ads tracked which Tumblr sent the traffic, and the teens were paid 75 percent of the ad revenue for each click.

The pay-per-conversion program could make more money, but it cost its users something else entirely. Hegstad got an account at a health affiliate network—a snake-oil sales depot. The idea was to create an advertisement mimicking a Tumblr post, and the ad would include a link to a diet pill site. If a person clicked on the ad, went to the site, and bought a bottle of pills containing synthetic raspberry ketone, the Tumblr user who reblogged the ad would get $18—after Exposely took a $20 cut.

Raspberry ketone is a compound that gives raspberries their distinctive smell and taste. In its natural form it is very expensive, and is often used by the perfume industry. Synthetic raspberry ketone, however, is cheaper to produce, and when Dr. Oz hailed the substance as a miracle fat-burner in 2012, he began a raspberry ketone media frenzy. One study indicated mice fed a super high dosage while on a high-fat diet did not gain as much fat in the liver, but there’s no evidence it makes humans thin. In 2013, a 24-year-old woman fatally overdosed on a version made by Forza—the pills also have a ton of caffeine.

Hegstad figured out a way to make a landing page for the diet pills by looking at what his competitors did. (“I would hate to say clone and modify,” he said, “but that’s kind of a good place to start.”) It resulted in a huge conversion rate—as high as 10 percent—by featuring before-and-after photos claiming people had lost weight with the pills, and a video of Dr. Oz claiming they burn fat. (The celebrity doctor was berated at a 2014 Senate hearing for misleading his audience about the efficacy of “miracle” weight-loss supplements.)

“The whole point of the video was to reinforce that this is a real thing, this has been on television even,” Lilley said. “It was just crazy how much it worked,” he said, not of the pills, but of the landing page.

So in between Tumblr posts about life’s daily tragedies, like someone stepping on the back of your shoe, there appeared these diet pill posts. A Tumblr user explained to me that So-Relatable had an advantage by posting these ads, because their blog had a theme of relatable quotes and life hacks. The fit was natural. “Life Hack: You can lose 20 pounds per month with this magic pill.”

Lilley wrote the diet pill ads, and as with all his work on Tumblr, he did it very well. He began by reading up on David Ogilvy, “the father of advertising,” and he learned the best ad is often the one that doesn’t seem like an ad. “The idea was to make an ad that looks like word of mouth from a fellow user,” he said. It’s easy to ignore a TV spot by a stranger, “but if it’s presented to you in a way that she’s your peer, she’s a similar person to you, you don’t even know her in the same way, but it feels different. It’s like it seems more genuine.” You know, more relatable.

“Hi I’m Brittany and this is my weight loss story!” Lilley crafted his testimonials from a girl’s perspective, honing the copy, making sure the line breaks were just right. The posts showed the familiar diptych of a woman looking self-conscious and curvy on the left and happy and thin on the right, and underneath, a testimony about pounds melting off without pain and suffering.

“‘My best friend recommended it’ was one of my more major contributions,” Lilley said. He read from the post: “‘I lost 24 pounds in four weeks with minor exercise and no change in diet. Here’s how I did it: with this organic supplement’—that doesn’t sound good.” But “ ‘Here’s how I did it: with this organic supplement my best friend recommended’—just seemed to me more real-sounding and … just makes it seem like in the back of someone’s mind they could think, well, my best friend could have recommended this to me.”

Exposely’s diet pill scheme got going in April 2014, and it worked—it worked like crazy. Trending.ly got almost 7 million views that month, and with the diet pill ads, they sometimes achieved a conversion rate near 10 percent. Once, across all their blogs, Exposely made $24,000 in a single day.

The Tumblr teens loved it. Lilley showed me messages asking when they’d get their money—pay-for-click was monthly, pay-for-conversion was weekly—often doing the math to make sure they were paid for all conversions. One kid messaged Lilley, “i’m so proud of you and all your hard work.” Lilley had to explain to Miller she had to fill out a tax form—“we need to have everyone fill one out like to run our business legitimately and stuff.” But he had good news: “check your balance tho :)” She replied, “YOURE THE BEST PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD TJANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU :))))))”

Then in June 2014, Pizza reached an unheard of milestone for a Tumblr teen: “pizza hit 1 million followers today. I am small and weak,” one Tumblr user wrote. “everyone buy pizza today to celebrate jess pizza hitting 1 million followers!” another said. “HEY BIG CONGRATS!! I KNEW YOU’D DO IT J OMG A MILLION HOW’S IT FEEL,” Lilley told her. Miller replied: “THANKS!! AND IT FEELS SO GOOD LIKE WOW 1 MILLION PEOPLE?!?! J” Lilley wrote back, “YEAH THATS AMAZING … HERES TO THE NEXT MILLION … YOU DESERVE IT ALL … Btw wanna get another reblog deal going?”

That same month, Lilley wrote another Tumblr user, “in a few months I bet we’ll be doing milli’s. We got our biggest check ever from Adsense coming for Exposely, 160k coming. That’s for everyone that posted rev-share including us but still.” For Lilley, the “milli’s” didn’t come. In July 2014, Exposely was banned from AdSense too.

It was the next month that it happened. On August 19, just days before his twentieth birthday, Lilley tried to log in to So-Relatable but couldn’t. Greenfield checked the site, which redirected to an error page: “There’s nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesn’t currently exist at this address.” They’d been terminated, their blogs revoked by Tumblr for violating its terms of service.