Bit.ly Raises $10 Million Series B, Still Growing Like Crazy
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Sample of 1,000,000 requests from the service:
bit.ly 612,170
tinyurl.com 55,091
goo.gl 41,812
ow.ly 35,531
is.gd 29,533
t.co 26,043
j.mp 21,172
other 178,648Given that the big value add (beyond white labeling) that is being provided by these services is analytics tracking I'd be deeply concerned about a new URL shortener run by the same company with the dominant web analytics package.
It's only a matter of time until goo.gl stats are displayed within Google analytics and when that hits I wonder how many will stay with the current shortener services.
(The site is on http://therealurl.appspot.com/ )
Its first source of revenues comes from Bit.ly Pro accounts, which are used by 3,000 companies and another individual 1,000 power users.
and
The bigger opportunity for bit.ly is in all the data it is harvesting about which links people are sharing in realtime... If you think about it, bit.ly knows what news is breaking because everybody is sharing it.
Interesting to think about moneytising the links in this way :-)
Most of them don't work, because people forget that not all data is valuable.
I think that anybody who says "URL popularity data mining is valuable" is just repeating what somebody else said. There are probably 100 services right now that could tell you the hottest 1,000 URLs. Delicious, Google/Yahoo Buzz, any of the dozens of popular bookmarking and social media sites, AddThis.com and their ilk, Quantcast and their ilk, Twitter, any URL shortening service, your ISP, etc. URLs have been currency for a long time now.
I hear about this information being valuable all the time, yet I've never once read about any of these companies profiting from knowing the popularity of URLs. I might just be ignorant, so please HN, tell me who is paying for a list of popular URLs?
The hosting costs for high levels of redirection are obviously quite light overall.
TinyArrows was more of a silly/fun project to see what we could do with unicode-based URLs. But we figured we might as well let people run their own domains off of it since we already supported so many domains.
We've also discussed with some marketing firms the idea of getting into meat-space advertisement. Basically where having a tiny URL people can visit with a smartphone (to see videos, etc) could over time become a great backup for stores with reduced retail salepeople or for home virtual tours, etc. QR codes aren't as universal as URLs are, so there's some mild opportunity here.
We built one as a proof-of-concept around our post-modern database engine. It costs orders of magnitude less than $ 10,000,000. I don't understand why they need that much money.
We could probably monetize it (advertisement on the main page) to the point of not having it costs us money to run it, but since it's more a promotional platform than a business...
(if you're curious: http://wrp.me/).
How realistic it is that that will be a home run for them, I'm not sure.
But at some level of complexity in functionality, reporting, etc it'd have to be attractive to people to just make use of another service. e.g., we can build a newsletter system that is OK, but the bang for buck that MailChimp provides is greater and so we often recommend that to clients.
If AOL, Microsoft, etc wanted to set up a url shortener, it might be worth their while simply obtaining the technical infrastructure, domain knowledge of the staff, business deals and of course all the existing links + data then to just start their own from scratch.
(Mind you having taken $14m-$15m that does now make it an expensive aquisition. I'd have thought it a no brainer for the AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo's to pick up bit.ly for $20-$40m)
This use/misuse of ccTLDs for commercial purposes (e.g. .tv, .ly, .it, .co, .to, etc.) is a relatively recent practice, there hasn't been enough time to decide if it's a safe practice or not. It'll likely take only one "disaster" to wake people up to the idea that there is indeed risk to basing your business on the cooperation of a country chosen solely because it has a catchy TLD abbreviation.
Given he was having his investors sign contracts on a $10m Series B investment the same day, I'm not surprised John Borthwick said 'it was just noise' -- I'd have done the exact thing myself. It's what you do as an entrepreneur to get shit done.
Doesn't mean it is just noise for them.
The peanut gallery have gone to great lengths to tell us Libya is in its right to set whatever rules it likes about domains (and even content of sites), that it is reasonable for Libya to change those rules at any time and that it is even ok for Libya to interpret those laws differently on a case-by-case basis. (wow).
So with that in mind, I'd be fairly concerned.
Given the way things seem to be going over at NIC.ly I'd be interested to see what kind of arrangement NIC.ly propositions to Bit.ly if/when they decide they no longer like bit.ly linking to depictions of the prophet Mohammed (PBUH) or hardcore pornography. I'm sure they won't simply can the domain but come to some other arrangement (ie financial) to resolve this.
And if I was bit.ly, with everything I have in play now, I'd accept rather than have my domain taken away from me and a significant part of my business shut down. It's just business (Internet = Serious Business)