On April 16th, 2024, as part of her usual penchant for easter eggs, Taylor Swift placed 13 QR codes in major cities around the world from Sao Paolo to Toronto. Each QR code linked to a unlisted youtube short teasing Fortnight. This was done through the use of a redirect domain, tsyt.ink (Taylor Swift YouTube.ink, presumably). You might have even gotten to this page by scanning one of those QR codes, in fact.



As you can now see, this domain is mine now. Every single one of these QR codes leads to this very page. So who messed up to let little old me get this domain?

Bit.ly did. Or at least, the person working with Bit.ly on behalf of Taylor Swift did. It turns out that Bit.ly was responsible for the QR code campaign, and only registered the use of this domain for one year. How do I know Bit.ly was the platform behind this? Because their CMO bragged about how “reliable” their services were on linkedIn. Now, I'm no expert at how link shortners should work, but I think a basic feature is that their links are somewhat permanent. Evidently, that did not occur here. I mean, I own the domain now, don't I? After websites expire, it's a free-for-all for the next person to register it, and it appears I won the race on that one. Sorry to disappoint anyone who wanted a more exciting answer to the clickbait title.

So what have I done with this domain? Since Bit.ly, or the person working with Bit.ly on behalf of Taylor Swift, can't be bothered to run a proper link shortener, I have made my own link shortner for Taylor Swift. Now, going to tsyt.ink/[name of song or commonly used acronym] such as tsyt.ink/blankspace will lead to the relevant video on Taylor Swift's Youtube Channel. Using the name of an album followed by the characters pl, like tsyt.ink/loverpl, will lead to a playlist of that album. So the next time you want to share a link to a Taylor Swift song, you don't need to go to youtube and copy paste the link from there, you can do it with a quick and easy link shortner.

What did we learn from this experience? Well, first of all, scanning random QR codes in public places continues to be a risky idea if you don't know where it could lead. Link shorteners in particular can go anywhere. Secondly, major public figures should do a better job of holding domains they use for commercial purposes for at least the medium term. Despite the QR codes being taken down shortly after the release of TTPD, images of the QR codes and links to the website remain on the internet forever. A malicious actor could have easily hijacked the domains and used it to create phishing sites or worse, spread false easter eggs relating to TS12. One can easily imagine the very real risk of a bad actor creating a false “sign up page for exclusive rewards” relating to TS12 in order to collect personal information, or creating a page with malicious downloads.

As a side note, I do find it odd that despite being so cheap as to not register this domain for more than a year, tsyt.link (with an l) was about a third of the price of tsyt.ink, and they went for the more expensive option. I guess they really wanted to use .ink.

Unlike the original link shortener, I'll actually keep this page up for as long as I can. Because surely that's the least you can expect a link shortner to do. I hope swifties will find this little utility useful for sharing Taylor's music.

If you want to contact me about bugs and improvements to this utility, you can do so at contact@tsyt.ink.